Israeli settlers liken Gaza withdrawal to Holocaust

Igniting a public uproar, some Jewish settlers are to start wearing orange stars in a provocative campaign comparing the government’s Gaza withdrawal plan to the Nazi Holocaust.

The announcement was the latest escalation in the settlers’ drive to block the pullout. On Monday, settler leaders called for mass resistance against the withdrawal – even if it means going to jail.

Settler activists in Gaza said they would distribute the orange stars - reminiscent of the yellow stars that Jews living under Nazi rule were forced to wear – this weekend.

“I want to raise my voice to show that this is illegitimate, to shake the people of Israel to their core,” said settler Arieh Tzur, the son of a Holocaust survivor.

He said survivors who live in the Gaza settlements support the effort.

Even so, the campaign touched a raw nerve in Israel, which gained independence in 1948 in the wake of the Nazi genocide that killed six million Jews. An estimated 250,000 survivors live in Israel, and any mention of the Holocaust in a public forum remains an extremely sensitive subject.

The comparison dominated public debate today. Images of a Gaza woman wearing the star on her lapel ran on the front page of one Israeli newspaper, and Israeli radio shows discussed the settler campaign nonstop.

“This is a very troubling comparison,” said Shevah Weiss, a Holocaust survivor and former parliament speaker.

The Nazis put Jews “into gas chambers, killing them, crushing their bones, spreading the remains in great piles all over Europe. What is going on here?”

The settler campaign was condemned by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a human rights group that focuses on Holocaust issues, and the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial centre.

“The plan to wear orange stars perverts the historical facts and damages the memory of the Shoah,” said Yad Vashem’s director Avner Shalev, using the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. He urged the settlers to refrain from using the stars.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon plans to withdraw from Gaza and small parts of the West Bank next year. After spearheading the settlement movement for decades, Sharon says the continued occupation of Gaza, where 8,000 settlers live amid 1.3 million Palestinians, is untenable.