jerusalem | Yad Vashem and leading American Jewish organizations this week condemned a plan by some settlers to wear orange stars in protest of the planned evacuation of the Gaza Strip.
“The plan to wear orange stars perverts the historical facts and damages the memory of the Shoah,” said Avner Shalev, the chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate.
“It is important that the memory of the Shoah remain a unifying factor in Israeli society, [and] not the opposite,” he added.
Some Jewish residents of the Gaza Strip said that the distribution of the orange stars — reminiscent of the yellow stars that Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis during the Holocaust — would begin this weekend.
The initiator of the campaign, Gaza resident Roni Bakshi, 40, conceded that the plan was “scandalous” but added that that was the point. “This is exactly what I want to do — to shock. I would not dare to do such a thing if I did not take so seriously this plan to expel Jews from their homes,” he said.
The main settlers’ lobby for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank passed a measure on Wednesday, Dec. 22, opposing the tactic. Yehoshua Mor-Yosef, secretary-general of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, called the use of the stars “craziness.”
It was unclear at press time how many settlers still intended to don the Holocaust symbol.
Holocaust survivors in Israel said that the campaign, which dominated Israeli news this week, had clearly crossed the line.
“This is a very troubling comparison,” Shevah Weiss, a Holocaust survivor and former parliament speaker, told Israel’s Army Radio.
The Nazis put Jews “into gas chambers, killing them, crushing their bones, spreading the remains in great piles all over Europe,” he said.
“What is going on here?” he asked. “There is a limit, and Gaza residents who wear an orange star have crossed that limit,” Holocaust survivor Noah Klieger wrote on the front page of Israel’s mass circulation Yediot Achronot daily.
“The Holocaust … cannot be used to support a certain position, certainly not in Israel, which was built out of the ashes of European Jewry,” he wrote.
About 250,000 survivors live in Israel, and the ever-increasing usage of the Holocaust in contemporary political debates in the country touches a raw nerve.
“To use such a symbol is to negate the entire history of the state of Israel because if there is anything the history of Israel proves it is that we are no longer powerless Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe,” said Efraim Zuroff, the head of the Israel office of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Calling the orange star campaign a “horrific distortion of events of the Holocaust and current Israeli realities,” Zuroff said that people who take part in such a protest are in essence accusing the Israeli government of acting like the Nazis, and in so doing are joining forces with the Jewish people’s worst enemies.
Nearly 9,000 Israelis live in the 21 Gaza settlements and the four small northern West Bank settlements slated to be evacuated starting in July 2005.