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December 24, 2004/Tevet 12 5765, Vol. 57, No. 17
Call to wear stars stirs protest
DAN BARON
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - Sometimes silent protest gets more attention than violence, a group of Gaza Strip settlers has discovered.
Reports that surfaced Dec. 21 of a plan by some of the 8,000 Gaza settlers slated for evacuation to wear orange, Nazi-style Star of David badges has stirred fierce controversy in the Jewish state.
It was not clear how many settlers would take part in the protest.
But the idea of invoking the Holocaust fueled already raging fears that the removal of 21 settlements from Gaza and another four from the West Bank next year under Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's "disengagement" plan could lead to major civil strife.
"It is important that the memory of the Shoah remain a unifying factor in Israeli society - not the opposite," Yad Vashem director Avner Shalev said.
"The residents of Gush Katif," a Gaza settlement bloc, "are sending an appalling and misguided message to the people of Israel," said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who was visiting Israel.
"While the settlers have every right to peacefully and democratically protest this plan, likening the Holocaust to this political process, no matter how painful, has the effect of fueling Holocaust denial by delegitimizing the unprecedented horror of the Shoah."
Allusions to Nazi persecution have crept steadily into the rhetoric of many Israeli right-wingers. Some likened the disengagement plan to deportation notices served to European Jews destined for the death camps.
And there is at least one precedent for linking the star idea to violence: Baruch Goldstein, the settler who carried out the 1994 massacre of Palestinians in a Hebron mosque, was known to wear a yellow Star of David in protest against the 1993 Oslo peace accords.
JTA Correspondent Dina Kraft in Tel Aviv contributed to this story.
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