By David K. Shipler
As if the
Palestinians hadn’t done enough to Israelis, Prime Minister Netanyahu now
blames them for the Holocaust by fabricating a tale that Hitler had not planned
to exterminate the Jews of Europe until the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, suggested it
in 1941. Netanyahu thus lends his office to the sordid practice of manipulating
and distorting the Holocaust, a timeworn occupation in the Middle East.
When
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979,
posters appeared in Jerusalem depicting the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat,
wearing a tie covered with swastikas, doctored from the backwards swastika
pattern on the tie he inexplicably wore when he addressed Israel’s parliament
in 1977. Begin was shown as the obsequious Jew with a yellow Star of David on
his lapel, the label the Nazis had required. Pedestrians walked past the
posters unfazed, accustomed as they were to such smears.
If Begin
ever saw those caricatures, he must have been stung. He himself had survived
the Holocaust by fleeing Warsaw for Lithuania, where he was arrested by the
Russians, spent a year in Soviet prisons, and was released to join the Polish army.
In 1982, I happened to interview him in his office soon after he had been
called by President Ronald Reagan, who had likened the carnage during Israeli’s
bombardment of West Beirut during the war in Lebanon to “a holocaust.”
“He hurt me
very deeply,” Begin told me, “and I said to him, ‘Mr. President, I know what is
a holocaust.’”
