KING, Oona. UK MP comparing 1.5 million inmate Israeli Gaza Concentration Camp with Nazi Warsaw Ghetto

Oona King was the Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow from 1997 until 2005 when she was defeated by former Labour MPand RESPECT candidate George Galloway. Oona Kingwas born in 1967 to a Jewish mother mother committed to justice issues, Murreil Hazels Stern, and an Africna-American father, political theorist Preston King. She is the niece of the medical doctor Dr Miriam Stoppard (her mother's sister) and her playwright husband Tom Stoppard and is a member of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oona_King ).

Ms Oona King MP on comparing the Israeli Gaza Concentration Camp with the Nazi Warsaw Ghetto (2003): " The same in nature … No government should be behaving like that - least of all a Jewish government…I recognise 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. We must support the moderate voices as opposed to strengthening extremists…. It is the same in nature but not extent [as the Warsaw Ghetto] …[although a ] very, very big difference... 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. On top of that building a wall around them - and that is precisely what the Israeli government is doing. In doing so it is building a political ghetto. I don't think it can escape that conclusion…As a Jewish person, I hoped I would never live to see the day I was ashamed of the actions of the Jewish state." [1].

[1]. Oona King MP, quoted in “MPs compare Gaza to Warsaw Ghetto”, Guardian, 19 June 2003: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/jun/19/foreignpolicy.israel .