Israeli oppression doesn't equate to Nazi-like extermination

Eric Bahrt clearly has a reading-comprehension problem. He alleges that I did not write one word of complaint about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that Palestinians were responsible for the Holocaust. But my letter (“Israeli-Nazi comparison a slanderous distortion”, November 4) clearly called Netanyahu a liar and acknowledged more than once that Israel is oppressing Palestinians.

Bahrt did not refute a single fact in my letter or its central argument: that his comparison of Israel with Nazi Germany is a libellous distortion. He wrote that he “believe[s] that some (not all) Israelis would go along with exterminating all Palestinians”. That may be his belief, but Israel has never carried out any action or policy to exterminate all Palestinians. Nazi Germany did carry out a policy to exterminate all Jews and killed six million of them.

Instead, he raises, as he often does, the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Lebanese Christian militias in 1982, a crime for which Israel does share responsibility and shame – just as Thailand bears responsibility for the murders at Tak Bai, the United States bears responsibility for My Lai and Wounded Knee, Britain for the Amritsar Massacre, and Japan for the Rape of Nanking. In fact, also in 1982, Hafez al-Assad of Syria slaughtered as many as 40,000 of his own unarmed and defenceless citizens at Hama, more than 10 times the highest estimate of fatalities at Sabra and Shatila.

But Bahrt reserves the Nazi slur only for Israel. Only the most odious individual would equate the two, considering the many Holocaust survivors and their children still with us today. 

Isaac Stone