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The head of the council 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.

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"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?"

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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.

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Originally posted by Coyote:
Haaretz:

I am glad that he was wise enough to state that he was NOT equating the Holocaust with the occupation and settler abuses of Palestinians - which is obvious hyperbole and a morally disgusting equation. But he is also right to draw the equation between how a racist ideology such as that perpetrated by the settler movement is not alone in isolation, but rather a manifestion of hate and dominance that runs through human history and culture, and must be opposed at every turn.

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Bravo! It's too bad failed to include the IDF and their checkpoints, etc. But it's a start.

This is a serious ethical position as it calls on our shared humanity - what is The Same in us. I oppose this to the false ethics of many in the "two-state solution" camp which are often based in the incommensurability of Arab and Jewish being, and on the incomparability of their experience of suffering.

[ 20 January 2007: Message edited by: B.L. Zeebub LLD ]

[ 20 January 2007: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

Tommy Lapid in the Jeruslalem Post.

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That woman, the one who it turns out is named Yifat Alkobi, the Jewish woman that confronted, cursed, spat on and threatened her Arab neighbor in Hebron, she who is imprisoned in her own home, seemed somehow familiar to me.

Gradually, from the cobwebs of my childhood memories, I dredged up the image of a Hungarian neighbor in Novi Sad, who used to stand at the entrance to her home and curse us every time we went into the street - just like Yifat Alkobi.

When we decide, and rightly so, to never under any circumstances compare the behavior of Jews to that of Nazis, we are forgetting that anti-Semitism only reached its height at Auschwitz. It had existed, was active, frightening, harmful and disgusting - exactly like Alkobi's image - in the years that preceded Auschwitz too. And behind shuttered windows hid terrified Jewish women, exactly like the Arab woman of the Abu-Isha family in Hebron.

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Originally posted by Coyote:
Now, Lapid's no lefty - former leader of Shinui, and a cabinet minister under Sharon - but he is at least honest.

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[ 23 January 2007: Message edited by: Peech ]