A person I know to be intelligent, educated and serious, even though he's of the looniest of our loony left, writes to tell me the images coming out of Gaza remind him of Dresden, "and what do they remind you of, Yaacov?"
Not of Dresden.
In the late 1930s, while preparing themselves for an aggressive war against everyone in their way, the German Wehrmacht developed the doctrine of destroying cities from the air as an essential element in demoralizing enemies. They experimented in the Spanish civil war, the most famous case being Guernica in 1937, a village of 5,000 where they killed at least 250 people on one day. In 1939 they applied the doctrine to the cities of Poland. In 1940 they destroyed the center of Rotterdam in neutral Netherlands, killing 800 civilians and destroying the homes of 80,000 in one day. Then they turned to the British Isles and launched the Battle of Britian, which was based almost entirely on bombing civilian populations.
The British, joined later by the Americans, bombed back. In 1943 the British accidentally invented the firestorm: on a bombing attack on Hamburg they dropped so many incendiary bombs that the conflagration took on a power of its own, and the resulting inferno was far more destructive than anything the RAF had planned on. No-one had known such a thing was even possible; now they knew. The Germans had, quite literally, sown the wind and reaped the firestorm.
In February 1945 British and American planes quite purposefully created a firestorm in Dresden. In two days much of the city was destroyed, and a minimum of 24,000 people were killed, but perhaps as many as 40,000. Since many of the bodies were totally incinerated, there was no way to count.
The only way to see a resemblance between Dresden and Gaza is by being willfully and maliciously blind to common sense.
taken from : Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
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