The invitation said the General Assembly resolution was issued with the agreement of member states and unreservedly condemned all types of religious intolerance and incitement to hatred, harassment and violence against individuals on the basis of ethnicity or religion, wherever they take place.
The letter ended with an invitation to join Delanoe and Veil on a visit to the Nazi concentration camp to commemorate the horror that was committed 60 years ago.
The invitation was in French, with an English translation provided by the Embassy. I asked my daughter to respond, in French, that I would decline the invitation because of the events taking place. I sent it straight to Paris, along with a copy to the French Embassy in London.
Frankly, I do not know much about the mayor of Paris; what I know is limited to the election campaign that ended in his victory, and some personal information. For her part, Veil is a person who needs no introduction. She is a veteran French politician and minister who was the first head of the European Parliament in 1984. She is from a French Jewish family that was sent to the concentration camps, where her mother died. She lost her father and brother as well; her sister survived, even though she was arrested for belonging to the French resistance.
If I had received the invitation in the 1990s, I might have gone and seen for myself this part of the Nazis' black history, about which I have read much. However, hopes for an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict evaporated during this decade. The crimes of the Israeli government and its army against women and children leave no room for reconciliation.
I have no problem with the Nazi Holocaust. I have always written in this column that six million Jews were actually killed in the Nazi concentration camps. I criticized the French writer David Irving and his defenders; I chastised Arab and Muslim writers who deny the Holocaust, as if we were the ones who killed the Jews, while it was the Christian West which committed two crimes. First it killed them; then, it could not stomach seeing the survivors, who would remind it of the crime it had committed against them. Thus, it sent them to an inhabited place with an Arab and Islamic demographic depth; the locals rejected them and wars took place. Today, the Jews, along with us, continue to pay the price of the European crime.
Something I consider very strange, and for which I have no explanation, was how survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants established the only Nazi state in the world today. A recent public opinion survey in Israel indicated high support for the campaign against Gaza, despite its cost in innocent blood, on the pretext of Hamas' rockets.
These Israelis saw rockets that did not kill and were blind to the 41-year-old occupation that produced Hamas and its rockets. The original occupation of Palestine launched secular resistance groups, some of them leftist, while the occupation of 1967 continued for two decades before Hamas appeared on the scene.
Nevertheless, I have never lost hope for peace one day between the Palestinians and Israel. Some of the best defenders of Palestinian rights around the world are Jews, of whom some wrote about the tragedy of Gaza better than we did. I received a video email of a demonstration in London in support of Gaza's people produced by J. Shamal, an independent filmmaker of Afghan origin who resides in London. On the 10th of this month, he gathered the testimonies of 80 demonstrators on a video you can see on YouTube. One was an elderly man who said he was Jewish and embarrassed about being Jewish because of what the Israeli government was doing in Gaza. This is a man with whom I can live in peace.
*Published in the London-based AL-HAYAT on Jan. 26. |
