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The Warsaw Ghetto was established by the German Governor-General Hans Frank on October 16, 1940. At this time, the population of the Ghetto was estimated to be 440,000 people, about 38% of the population of Warsaw. However, the size of the Ghetto was about 4.5% of the size of Warsaw. Nazis then closed off the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world on November 16, 1940, building a wall with armed guards.
After the seizure by Hamas militias of the Gaza Strip on 14 June 2007, all contact between the outside world and the Strip has been severed. The only goods permitted into the Strip through the land crossings are goods of a humanitarian nature.
Unemployment was a major problem in the ghetto. Illegal workshops were created to manufacture goods to be sold illegally on the outside and raw goods were smuggled in often by children. Hundreds of four to five year old Jewish children went across en masse to the "Aryan side", sometimes several times a day, smuggling food into the ghettos, returning with goods that often weighed more than they did. Smuggling was often the only source of subsistence for Ghetto inhabitants, who would otherwise have died of starvation.
As of December 2006, unemployment has risen from 23% in 2005[1] to over 50%. Two-thirds of Palestinians are living below the poverty line. For the past nine months, the 160,000 civil service workers, who are the primary breadwinners for a third of households, have not received their full salaries due to the cuts in foreign aid. As a result of the Israeli blockade on the territory, 85 percent of factories are shut or operating at less than 20 percent capacity. Israel estimates that its own businesses are losing $2 million a day from the closing, but Gaza is losing $1 million a day, an amount it is less able to afford.
On January 18, 1943, the first instance of armed resistance occurred when the Germans started the final expulsion of the remaining Jews. The Jewish fighters had some success: the expulsion stopped after four days and the ŻOB and ŻZW resistance organizations took control of the Ghetto, building shelters and fighting posts and operating against Jewish collaborators. During the next three months, all inhabitants of the Ghetto prepared for what they realized would be a final struggle.
The final battle started on the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943, when the large Nazi force entered the ghetto. After initial setbacks, the Germans under the field command of Jürgen Stroop systematically burned and blew up the ghetto buildings, block by block, rounding up or murdering anybody they could capture. Significant resistance ended on April 23, 1943, and the Nazi operation officially ended in mid-May, symbolically culminated with the demolition of the Great Synagogue of Warsaw on May 16, 1943. According to the official report, at least 56,065 people were killed on the spot or deported to German Nazi concentration and death camps, most to Treblinka.
After months of cutting off aid to Gaza, and the people inside starving to death, Hamas launched a string of intense rocket barrages against Israel. (Starving the inhabitants out any different to "expelling" them?). In return Israel began an intense tactic of bombing against Gaza, and has now moved their military in to invade the strip wholesale.
Originally posted by KilgoreTrout
In 1937 Heydrich entered into negotiations with members of the Haganah Defense Organisation via Fiefel Polkes. Haganah were effectively acting as security against Arab attacks on Jewish Settlers which were precipitated by illegal land purchases and the failure of the settlers to understand the system whereby you could purchase land but not own the Olive groves planted on the land. Naturally, by denying access to crops and therefore livelihood tensions were inevitable.
Heydrich sent his “Jewish Expert” Adolf Eichmann to meet with Polkes in Palestine to discuss ways in which the illegal immigration of Jews could be increased.
The results was that Pino Ginzburg and Moshe Auerbach (who would both later become members of the newly formed Mossad) went to Berlin. There in conjunction with Heydrich’s SD and the Gestapo, Haganah set up a training camp and ‘recruited’, forceably and voluntarily young men to join in the defence of Jewish settlements in Palestine. On average 400 men were rounded up, trained and then smuggled into Palestine on a WEEKLY basis.
By late 1939, Heydrich had developed a route in conjuction with his former mentor, Admiral Canaris, Head of the Abwehr (German SIS) to take an even greater number of ‘emigrants’ directly via Hamburg and Emden under German Naval protection. This plan was cut short however with the invasion of Poland and the declaration of war from Britain. Heydrich had more pressing problems and the training camp, and emigrations petered out. 70,000 German, Czechoslovakian and Austrian Jews though had made it safely to Palestine, many of those young males, trained by the Haganah aided by Reinhard Heydrich.