イスラエル／パレスチナ和平

Jews died in the Ghetto by the thousands from disease, starvation and capricious Nazi murder. Beginning in July 1942 they were rounded up and shipped to the Treblinka death camp to perish by the hundreds of thousands. Only 50,000 remained in early 1943, when organized Jewish resistance grew, culminating with the April 19 uprising against Nazi forces sent to eradicate the few still alive. One survivor described Germans shooting "like ducks" Jews who leapt out of high buildings set on fire by Nazi flame-throwers. The evil inherent in any and every such detail of the genocidal onslaught is comprehensible to most people.

Yet the St. Petersburg Times editors and their correspondent failed to distinguish between such barbarism and Israel's construction of a protective wall that entails at worst expropriating land, uprooting trees in some places (60,000 of which have been replanted by Israel for the owners), severing certain Palestinian towns and villages from commercial activity and inconveniencing family members and friends who want to see one another.

The Florida newspaper ran five letters responding to the offensive Martin column. One writer wondered why commentators on Israel's constructing a wall would not lament the tragedy - and outrage - that Jews remain mortally besieged scores of years after the Nazi genocide. But that line of thought is evidently not as titillating to certain journalists as comparisons, however false, between Jews and Nazis.

The Irish statesman and writer Conor Cruise O'Brien once observed that a signal of anti-Jewish bigotry in comments on Israel is "if your interlocutor can't keep Hitler out of the conversation... feverishly turning Jews into Nazis and Arabs into Jews."

It is an insight many European journalists, and some Americans, would do well to ponder.