JERUSALEM — Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat's on-again, off-again, on-again invitation to Washington's Holocaust Memorial Museum has ignited a firestorm of debate in Israel, as might be expected in a Jewish state where 20% of the people are Holocaust survivors or their offspring.
Israelis, like American Jews, have divided into two main camps: those who hoped that a tour of the memorial would teach Arafat about Jewish suffering and let him acknowledge it to Palestinians who see the Holocaust as Zionist propaganda, and those who view Arafat as an unrepentant killer of Jews whose presence in the museum would make a mockery of the worst chapter in Jewish history.
For the Record
Los Angeles Times Friday January 30, 1998 Home Edition Part A Page 3 Metro Desk 1 inches; 34 words Type of Material: Correction
Concentration camps--A Jan. 24 report in The Times on the politicization of the Holocaust included a reference to Nazi concentration camps that may have been misleading. The camps were set up by the German occupiers of Poland during World War II.
But across the divide, Israelis have united in charging that the Shoah, as the Nazis' attempt to annihilate European Jewry is called in Hebrew, is being exploited for political gain.
"The Americans who started this wanted to use it. Arafat said yes because he wanted to use it. And the American Jews who said no wanted to use it too," John Lemberger, director of Amcha, a center for Holocaust survivors, said of the planned visit. In the end, Arafat said his tight schedule this week did not leave him time to tour the museum but that he will do so the next time he comes to Washington.
"It was a kidnapping of the the Shoah for political ends," Lemberger said.
In fact, using the Holocaust is nothing new in Israel's polarized national politics and feverish public discourse. Activists on the left and right, as well as secular and religious militants, frequently invoke the language of the Nazis to attack their political enemies. Holocaust memories--and the fears they awaken in Jews--are evoked to sway public opinion in the Jewish state.
Israeli leaders going back to Menachem Begin have called Arafat a "Hitler" and compared the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Nazi SS. Various Likud Party leaders have referred to Israel's 1967 borders as the borders of Auschwitz.
On the left, a prominent physics professor and political commentator named Yeshayahu Liebowitz once said that Israeli soldiers putting down the intifada, or Palestinian rebellion, in the occupied territories were "Judeo-Nazis."
More recently, ultra-Orthodox demonstrators trying to close Jerusalem's Bar Ilan Street on the Jewish Sabbath by throwing rocks at motorists called the intervening Israeli police "Nazis." And after a wave of suicide bombings by Islamic extremists in 1996, opponents of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process said the Labor Party government that signed the agreements was leading Israelis "to slaughter like sheep."
