WEST BANK/ISRAEL: Holocaust survivor and former MP says West Bank settlers discriminate against Palestinians

It's an image that has been playing repeatedly on Israeli television in recent weeks - amateur video of a Jewish woman in Hebron taunting a Palestinian woman on the other side of a fence that separates the Jewish settlement from the Palestinian city. The settler repeats the same word over and over again toward her Muslim neighbour: "Sharmuta." An Arabic word for "whore." Children inside the settlement are seen in the video throwing stones towards those on the other side of the fence. The video was shot by a Palestinian youth, a member of the harassed family with a camera given to her by B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation. It's not clear what might have sparked the incident, or if there was history between the women, but the video has raised new concerns in Israel over the way settlers in the West Bank conduct themselves. One man is comparing the behaviour of some of the settlers to the anti-Semitism he and his family experienced in Europe before the Holocaust. Yosef Lapid is a Holocaust survivor, a former member of Israel's Knesset (parliament), and a former Minister of Justice in Israel. He's also the chairman of an advisory council for Yad Vashem, Israel 's Holocaust memorial. "The spark for this whole story was a Jewish woman in Hebron which spit on an Arab woman for no good reason at all, calling her a whore. Well this is the sort of thing that I remember was happening to my mother when I was a child - that we had an anti-Semitic neighbour who was calling us all kinds of names. I don't want to see this in Israel," Lapid told Reuters Television. But while Lapid says he deplores incidents such as the one in Hebron, and another in Nablus where Palestinians have accused settlers there of vandalising a cemetery, he stops short of comparing the settlers to Nazis. "I am not comparing the settlers with Nazis. There are no concentration camps in Hebron. There is no Auschwitz - not Nazis. What I compare them with is the old-time anti-Semites who were before the Nazis, who harassed me when I was a child, and who made miserable the life of Jews in many, many places in Europe - without really hurting them or killing them. And this is what the settlers are doing in Hebron and I must disapprove of it," Lapid said. Occasionally, Israeli authorities do intervene when there are incidents between West Bank settlers and Palestinians. But Palestinians say these types of incidents are commonplace, and all too often Israeli military guards at the settlements do nothing to intervene. "If the things that they do to Arabs they would do to Jews, they would go to jail. And in a free country, in a liberal country, there should be no difference between people because of their faith, nationality or race," Lapid, the former Israeli Justice Minister said. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reportedly said he, "was ashamed" after viewing the Hebron video. Israeli authorities have ordered an investigation into the incident. Guarded by Israeli soldiers, around 600 hardline Jewish settlers live in a small enclave in the heart of Hebron, which is home to around 150,000 Palestinians. Hebron, along with the rest of the West Bank, was occupied by Israel in 1967. Before that, it was under Jordanian rule.

ITN Source | February 2, 2007

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