Israeli leader criticizes Jewish settlers in Hebron

Suppose a leader of a major Jewish organization in the United States said this:

The head of Israel's central Holocaust memorial has criticised Jewish settlers who harass Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron.

Yosef Lapid, the chairman ofYad Vashem, Israel's largest Holocaust memorial said on Saturday that the abuse recalled the anti-Semitism present in Europe prior to the second world war.

Lapid's unusually fierce and public attack was prompted by Israeli television footage showing a Hebron settler woman hissing "whore" at her Palestinian neighbour and settler children lobbing rocks at Arab homes.

The spectacle stirred outrage in the Jewish state, where many view the settlers as a movement opposed to co-existence between Jews and Arabs, and hostile to the creation of a future Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Lapid, a Holocaust survivor who lost his father to the Nazi genocide, said in a weekly commentary on Israel Radio that the acts of some Hebron settlers reminded him of persecution endured by Jews in his native Yugoslavia on the eve of the second world war.

You can bet he wouldn't be a leader for very long.