Yosef Lapid, the head of Israel’s largest Holocaust memorial, has justly criticized Jewish settlers who’ve been harassing Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron. Lapid, a Holocaust survivor himself, said on Saturday that the abuse reminded him of the anti-Semitism he and other Jews endured prior to World War II. Many Israelis view the existence of such illegal Jewish settlements to be counter-productive to the creation of a Palestinian state, and peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews.

Lapid’s criticism was prompted by recent footage on Israeli television showing a Hebron settler woman hissing “whore” at her Palestinian neighbor and settler children throwing rocks at Arab homes. “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,” he 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?”

Lapid, who was also a former Israeli justice minister, continued, “We Jewish citizens of Israel wave a reprimanding finger at most [and] worse still, I tolerated this silently as justice minister too.” Around 400 Jewish settlers live in Hebron alone and are heavily guarded by the Israeli military. “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.

Obviously, not everyone agreed with Lapid’s sobering observation. David Wilder, a spokesman for the settlers in Hebron who is not a Holocaust survivor like Mr. Lapid, said, “The man is obviously a very, very sick person, to compare the Jews in Hebron to barbarians and compare us to the Nazis.” Amid allegations that abuse by Hebron settlers is commonplace and routinely ignored, PM Olmert ordered a cabinet-level probe to look into the matter.

The World Court has declared that all Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem - home to about 430,000 Jews - are illegal. Nonetheless, many Jews still claim a biblical birthright to the West Bank which they think supersedes international law. And though the state of Israel also disputes the validity of international law, nearly 40% of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank are built on privately owned Palestinian land, making them illegal under Israeli law as well.

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