http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/307082.html

LONDON - Two lawmakers who recently returned from
Israel compared Palestinian living conditions in
the Gaza Strip to those of Jews in the Warsaw
ghetto during World War II.


Legislator Oona King of the
governing Labor Party said
Thursday that the Gaza
conditions are "the same in
nature but not extent" as the
notorious walled ghetto in
Poland's capital, where Jews
were corralled and oppressed by
Adolf Hitler's Nazis.

"No government should be behaving like that -
least of all a Jewish government," said King,
who represents the east London district of
Bethnal Green and Bow and is herself Jewish.

King, who traveled to Israel with Jenny Tonge of
the Liberal Democrat party, stressed the "very,
very big difference" between Gaza and the
Warsaw ghetto is that "Palestinians are not
being rounded up and put in gas chambers.

"What makes it similar is what happened to the
Jewish people in that time which was the
seizing of land, being forced from property,
torture and bureaucracy - control used in a
demeaning way over the smallest task," she told
a news conference.

"On top of that building a wall around them, and
that is precisely what the Israeli government
is doing," King said. "In doing so it is
building a political ghetto. I don't think it
can escape that conclusion."

Tonge said Palestinians in Gaza could get in or
out without scrutiny and "they can't work, they
can't sell anything. There is this gradual
squeeze."

"I feel it was an apartheid system and it is
certainly getting worse - the area where the
Palestinians live is getting smaller," she
said.

During their visit, King and Tonge said they
were caught up in the aftermath of an Israeli
assassination attack on a leading Palestinian
militant. A building they had been in minutes
earlier was attacked by retaliating
Palestinians.

The women said they had also been confronted by
an Israeli soldier wielding a grenade as they
tried to leave the Gaza Strip.

King, who is a member of the Jewish Council for
Racial Equality, said she recognized "the
terror many Israelis live with as a matter of
their daily lives.

"I was more surprised perhaps by the everyday
terror that Palestinians live, the detail and
nature of which I had not understood," she
said.

"We must support the moderate voices as opposed
to strengthening extremists."

Officials at the Israeli Embassy in London
declined to comment on the legislators' claims,
which they made shortly before Prime Minister
Tony Blair held previously scheduled talks with
Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.