19 January 2006
Yosef ("Tommy") Lapid, a former Israeli cabinet minister and chairman of the national Holocaust memorial institution Yad Vashem, has criticized Jewish settlers in the West Bank town of Hebron who abuse their Palestinian neighbors. Lapid, a Holocaust survivor and former justice minister, wrote in a newspaper column that TV footage showing Hebron settlers harassing their Arab neighbors reminded him of the anti-Semites he encountered in pre-war Europe. Last week, a video was widely broadcast showing a female settler swearing and attacking an Arab family in Hebron's Tel Rumeida neighborhood. Palestinian residents said attacks by this woman and other settlers had been going on for a long time. The woman, Yifat Alkobi, was questioned by police on suspicion of several violent attacks on Palestinians, including the attack on the house of the Abu Aisha family that was broadcast on television last week. Alkobi was released under restrictions after questioning and police said they would consider whether to press charges against her.
"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," Lapid wrote in the "Jerusalem Post". He added: "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."
Prime minister Ehud Olmert has set up a cabinet committee to look into ways of stepping up law-enforcement among Hebron's 500 settlers, who live ensconced in an overwhelmingly hostile Palestinian population of some 35,000. Lapid hinted at past dereliction on the issue by Israeli authorities. "I tolerated this silently as justice minister too," he wrote. He called the settlement of Jews in Hebron "the original sin". At a visit to the West Bank town, deputy defense minister Ephraim Sneh said that laws were not being enforced sufficiently and promptly in Hebron, especially with regard to Israeli settlers.