In the archives of the Holocaust museum there are lots of volumes with information about the theme of emigration and what happened in Europe to Jews during the war 1939-1945.

Diary entries and letters shed light on the hopes and often thwarted plans of individual Jews concerning the possibility of emigration to other countries in continental Europe, to Britain, the USA, to Palestine, and further afield.

The volumes document Jewish community efforts to prepare young Jews for emigration and the efforts made by Jewish aid organizations abroad to support immigrants in the countries in which they had taken refuge, as my father did when arriving in Holland in 1939 when he was allowed to leave Buchenwald.

The archives also highlight the practical obstacles to Jewish emigration put in place by the Nazi regime: the regime’s efforts to deprive Jews of their property before they emigrated, and the pursuit of a policy of forced emigration that would be paid for by the Jews themselves.

But this is different to the situation in Gaza today, where the Israeli army is asking the residents to take to the south of the strip as they pursue the Hamas terror network.

Egypt denying the request of these people to emigrate into that country tells us the story of the Palestinian people, in not being absorbed by their Muslim brothers, and the precarious situation that unfortunately unfolded after 1948 when they were offered the partition and instead wedged a war and were forced then to be displaced and placed into refugee camps in Jordan, later Lebanon, this is very much the root of what we are living today.

The consequences the hate against Israel who in its co existence has tried to come to terms with the Palestinian people, a very different thing to the acceptance of the regime of terror Hamas has been waging and which simply follows the same logic of erasing Israel from the face of the world we have been living since Amalek, and cowardly as well by Iran.