A recent TV footage of an Israeli settler harassing her Palestinian neighbor in the West Bank city of Hebron sparked heated controversy in Israel after Yosef Lapid, a Holocaust of survivor and Chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Authority, harshly criticized "the Jewish barbarians in Hebron" and compared the treatment of the city's Palestinian population to that of Jews in pre-Holocaust Europe:
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.
It is unthinkable that the memory of Auschwitz should serve as a pretext to ignore the fact that living here among us are Jews that behave toward Palestinians exactly the way that German, Hungarian, Polish and other anti-Semites behaved toward Jews."
Jewish settlement in Hebron started in 1979. About 500 settlers live in the city today among more than 130,000 Palestinians. The city remained under Israeli military occupation until 1997, when Israel handed a large part of it over to the Palestinian Authority, but continued to occupy the the old city center, where 500 settlers and 30,000 Palestinians lived. 1500 Israeli soldiers were stationed there to protect the settlers (a ratio of 3 soldiers for each settler). The continuous harassment of the Arab population by the settlers and the army alike have forced 20,000 people to leave the occupied part of the city. Only 10,000 remain there today. The settlers' notorious history of hate crimes against the Arabs of Hebron include the 1994 massacre of 29 people inside Al-Haram Al-Ibrahimi Mosque at the hands of a Jewish settler, whose grave has become a pilgrimage site for Israeli fanatics since then.
Lapid, of course, came under fierce criticism in Israel for committing the unforgivable sin of comparing Israelis to Nazis. But I wonder if anyone can challenge this comparison after seeing the TV footage or pictures like this, this, this and that?
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