Veteran Australian journalist and current mainstream columnist Phillip Adams, now 86 and a lifetime left winger, wrote on X today about the post-Trump ceasefire situation in Gaza. He said:

7000 Jews died in the Warsaw ghetto. 68,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza.

That was it. All knew what he meant though. He was saying that Israel is a greater war criminal than Nazi Germany. Well, he’d plucked that figure wrongly and I had to tell him so. This is my reply and a personal story I subsequently added to it.

My first reply

Phillip I’ve been reading you since way back but it’s 7,000 Jews for the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It’s 3,000,000 jews dead in Poland for WW2. Source: Report by the German Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Operation, SS Brigadier General Stroop. Here are some reliable sources:

1. French Maclean, in “Ghetto Men” p. 173, translates the Stroop report as follows. “Of the 56,065 Jews caught altogether, about 7,000 were destroyed in the former Ghetto in the operation. A further 6,929 Jews were destroyed by transporting them to T. II (my note: he’s referring to the death camp Treblinka). The sum total destroyed is therefore 13,929. Beyond the number of 56,065 is an estimated number of 5,000 to 6,000 Jews destroyed by demolition of the bunkers (Jewish defensive positions) or by perishing in the flames.”

2. David Cesarani, in “The Final Solution” p. 616, writes “at least 7,000” with “over 8,000 (Jews) enduring on the Aryan side (of the Ghetto wall).”

3. Sir Martin Gilbert, in his epic “The Holocaust” p. 565, writes “7,000 Jews had been killed in the fighting”. He takes this from the Stroop report too but says that, “five to six hundred were destroyed by being blown up or by perishing in the flames.” It’s likely that Maclean above has mistranslated.

4. I’ve added Gilbert’s map from his “Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust” p. 244, for the total Polish Holocaust death toll.

Phillip, too many lies have been plied since 1964 in the pursuit of a Palestinian State that was offered in 1947 and forever then denied by the Arabs who, rather, wanted that land for themselves and Israel gone.

For the sake of peace, please use your legacy of decades in print to drop the Gaza “genocide” claim. It demeans the term. You know the difference between war casualties and propaganda. Genocide has never been established in law in Gaza. Acknowledging this is the difference between people of peace building peace, and those on the streets looking for personal enrichment and social media fame calling for continued war.

We buy and study these books to learn the story of our planet, to understand the warning signs of excess when they arise. For there has never been a century since Christ where a war of extermination somewhere hasn’t been waged, and its proponents then fall with the dust of time.

The streets are alive with antisemitic hate at present but let’s ask the real question here: Is this for Palestine or the overthrow of Capitalism? Because mate, a Palestine still doesn’t exist and Communism has fallen.

Cheers.

And a personal tale

A story. I came across Martin Gilbert’s “The Holocaust” in the early 1990s while looking in my local bookstore for William Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”. They’d sold out of Shirer, both books were around 1,000 pages and well, I thought, the subjects are the same and I had a couple of weeks off.

Gilbert started with a chilling personal anecdote post-war. The history he then told ran roughly chronologically. He chronicled it meticulously.

As a reader, what started with the shock of a few deaths of Jews, morphed into thousands in the killing pits, ghettos and the death factories, page after page. I became numb.

Indeed, his reviewers were unanimous: this book can’t be read without nausea or blood in your eyes. The story of the children was unshakable. But it was the story of what came after WW2 when ages old antisemitism, especially Polish, hit the survivors as they struggled to find their old homes across Europe. This after the near devastation of Poland by the Germans?

That is why today, we capitalise “Holocaust” and we created the word “genocide”. It didn’t exist pre-WW2. To throw that word around now for political gain is inhuman.

I implore everyone who wishes to know why we are where we are today, and why the creation of a true Palestinian State can be a gift to humanity if deradicalised—to pick up a copy of Gilbert’s book and read it cover to cover. You will be a different person at the end.

© 2025 Adam Parker.

Picture credits: Some of the author’s Holocaust book collection including Martin Gilbert’s “The Holocaust”, and “The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust” also by Martin Gilbert, page 244. © 2025 Adam Parker.