Haaretz
Shvat 2, 5767
The head of Israel's central Holocaust
memorial on Saturday assailed Jewish settlers who harass Palestinians in a
tinderbox West Bank city, saying the abuse recalled the anti-Semitism of
pre-World War Two Europe.
Yad Vashem chairman Yosef Lapid's
unusually fierce and public attack was prompted by Israeli television
footage showing a Hebron settler woman hissing "whore" at her Palestinian
neighbour and settler children lobbing rocks at Arab homes.
The
spectacle stirred outrage in the Jewish state, where many view the
settlers as a movement opposed to coexistence with a future Palestinian
state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Lapid, a Holocaust survivor
who lost his father to the Nazi genocide, said in a weekly commentary on
Israel Radio that the acts of some Hebron settlers reminded him of
persecution endured by Jews in his native Yugoslavia on the eve of World
War Two.
"It was not crematoria or pogroms that made our life in
the diaspora bitter before they began to kill us, but persecution,
harassment, stone-throwing, damage to livelihood, intimidation, spitting
and scorn," Lapid said.
"I was afraid to go to school, because of
the little anti-Semites who used to lay in ambush on the way and beat us
up. How is that different from a Palestinian child in
Hebron?"
Hebron has been a frequent flashpoint of more than six
years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. Some 400 settlers live there, under
heavy Israeli military guard, among 150,000 Palestinians.
Hebron
settlers were not immediately available to respond to Lapid's criticism,
but Israel Radio broadcast earlier comments by the community's spokesman,
Noam Arnon, in which he played down the televised harassments as "fringe
incidents."
"In six years, 37 Jews have been murdered in Hebron,
and now they're preoccupied with curses?" Arnon said.
Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert ordered a cabinet-level probe last week into
Palestinian allegations that abuse by Hebron settlers is commonplace and
routinely ignored by Israel.
Deputy Defence Minister Ephraim Sneh
said he hoped for an Israeli crackdown against the settler "provocateurs",
but Palestinian officials called for comprehensive action.
"If they
are serious about coexistence, the Israelis must take practical steps on
the hundreds of daily violations against Palestinians in the old city,"
Hebron Governor Arif Jabari said.
Jabari's apparent pessimism was
shared by Lapid, a former justice minister.
"We Jewish citizens of
Israel wave a reprimanding finger at most," he said. "Worse still, I
tolerated this silently as justice minister too."
The World Court
has branded the settlements illegal but many Jews claim a biblical
birthright to the West Bank, which Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967
Middle East war.
Israel withdrew settlers and soldiers from Gaza
in 2005, a move billed as breaking the diplomatic deadlock with the
Palestinians. The rise since of Hamas, a Palestinian Islamist group whose
charter calls for the Jewish state's destruction, has hardened settler
resolve not to leave the West Bank.
Lapid said while there was no
comparing the Holocaust with Palestinian suffering from Israel's policies,
this did not mean Israelis could not be culpable.
"It is
inconceivable for the memory of Auschwitz to warrant ignoring the fact
that there are Jews among us who behave today towards Palestinians just
like German, Hungarian, Polish and other anti-Semites behaved towards
Jews," he said.