Israelis Remember Holocaust : Shamir Compares Arafat to Nazis, Criticizes France

As Israel on Tuesday mourned the 6 million Jews killed during World War II, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir compared PLO leader Yasser Arafat to the Nazis, and Israeli officials denounced France for receiving Arafat in Paris.

The prime minister’s linking of Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization he heads to the most deadly enemies of the Jews comes at a time when the Shamir government is ardently seeking a negotiating partner other than the PLO for eventual peace talks. Arafat’s trip to France is seen as undermining the government’s insistence that there exist independent Palestinian partners willing to talk.

“We see in this visit (to France) a new push of prestige and importance for Arafat. He’s following the same tradition of the Nazis. But we don’t need this symbol for being opposed to this visit,” Shamir said.

Foreign Minister Moshe Arens seconded the comparison: “The timing is unfortunate but so is the timing of any Arafat visit. We are speaking of a man who heads a terror organization responsible for the worst horrors the world has known since World War II.”

Some observers criticized Shamir’s comments because they view the tone as an effort to preclude open discussion on a key political issue: whether or not to talk to the PLO.

“The question is whether we can talk to Arafat, knowing that he is an enemy of the Jews and has done terrible things to us. To demonize him with comparisons to the most horrible page in our history is to preclude debate, to make rational consideration impossible,” said David Hartman, head of the Shalom Hartman Institute, which is dedicated to religious tolerance.

“I don’t think it’s politically useful to categorize him according to the criteria of the Holocaust. His own merits are plenty damning so one doesn’t have to add the sins of Adolf Hitler,” said Elly Dlin, a seminar director at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

“If you make him into Hitler, then you characterize him as a particular kind of enemy with which there is no contact, no dialogue,” Dlin said.

Dlin nonetheless termed France’s reception of Arafat as “insensitive” because it fell on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

All of Israel came to a halt Tuesday morning as a siren wailed and the population observed two minutes of silence in memory of the Holocaust victims. The annual Holocaust observance falls on a date recalling the 1943 resistance by Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto against the Nazis.

For the first time, names of the Holocaust dead were read at ceremonies across the country. In Israel’s Parliament, Shamir read the names of his parents and sisters, killed by the Nazis in Poland.