Madam, - I write in response to Kevin Myers's Irishman's Diary of February 22nd. Palestinians do not deny, and have never denied the Holocaust. Nor did they participate in the Holocaust. The attempted annihilation of Jews was a European design. In contrast, in the early 1940s, Muslims, Christians and Jews were living in co-existence in Palestine.
While I agree with Mr Myers that the Holocaust is the most inhumane crime committed by human hands, I feel uneasy about the linking of the Holocaust and the situation in Palestine. This linkage makes me feel that we the Palestinians have dearly and unfairly paid for this crime. I accordingly believe the Holocaust and the question of Palestine should always be kept separate in debates.
The Holocaust must be allowed to stand for what it is - a shameful chapter in the history of Europe, an incredible loss of life, and an unimaginable horror.
Equally, the question of Palestine deserves attention as a specific situation.
Whilst many Jews fled the Holocaust to Palestine, the great majority migrated with the zeal to establish a Jewish State in Palestine. The establishment of the Jewish state has proven that the Zionist movement was like any other colonial movement that preceded it. It violently displaced the native Palestinian population through terror. It usurped land and homes, and set in motion a cycle of violence that continues to the present day. Palestinians were displaced, dispossessed, occupied, denied their dignity and basic human rights.
The Holocaust is a gross chapter in human history, but it should not be used to overshadow or even disguise what happened in Palestine, or what continues to happen.
Mr Myers claims to be an assertive and knowledgeable reader, when in fact his knowledge of the Middle East, if academically and objectively judged, shows nothing more than a fanciful gullibility to well-proven lies. The enemy of knowledge truly is the illusion of knowledge. Mr. Myers alleges the Palestinian Authority is a prolific source of anti-Semitic literature, which is a gross lie. The European Union funds many of the textbooks used by our schoolchildren, and much of our broadcast and print media rely heavily on imports of material and equipment from Israel.
I will not deny that Israel's brutal occupation has resulted in many forms of hatred. When confronted with the irrationality of occupation, sometimes hate becomes irrational. This is not an attempt to justify anti-Semitism, because we Palestinians, after all, are Semites, but it is important to identify the source of the phenomenon. Hatred in precisely this form is not exclusive to Palestinians. I think it is important that we do not fall into a trap of seeing it, when it exists, as a one-sided affair.
In April 2001, for instance, the highly prominent Israeli Rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, called for the annihilation of Palestinians. In his Shabbat prayers, he used to call the Palestinians snakes and cockroaches.
Ovadia Yousef is a central figure of what was Israel's third largest political party, Shas (before the emergence of Sharon's Kadima party). He is documented by the BBC saying (of Palestinians): "It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable."
At the time when he was saying this, his party held five seats in Ariel Sharon's cabinet. This is the same cabinet which oversaw Israel's killing of 3,814 Palestinians, 22 per cent of them children, in less than five years.
Many supporters of Israel rely on the power of the term "anti-Semitic" to quell and quiet criticism of Israel. The term is now part of an anti-intellectual propaganda movement which seeks to disguise inhumanity and brutality by creating a firewall around an unjustifiable occupation. - Yours, etc,
Dr HIKMAT AJJURI, Ambassador General, Delegation of Palestine, Dublin.