“Remove My Grandfather’s Name from Yad Vashem!”

The leading French daily Le Monde today has a striking editorial, in the form of an open letter to Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, from the French writer Jean-Moïse Braitberg. That double first-name amounts to what in English would be “John-Moses,” so this is someone of the Jewish faith, in fact someone whose grandfather died in the gas chambers of Treblinka and of whom other relatives also perished during World War II in various other Nazi camps. The name of his late grandfather, Moshe Brajtberg, is even enshrined at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, but now M. Braitberg is publicly writing the Israeli president to have it removed. “I ask you to accede to my request, Mr. President, because what has happened in Gaza, and more generally the fate given to the Arab people of Palestine for sixty years, disqualifies Israel in my eyes as a center for the memory of the evil done to Jews and thereby to all of humanity.”

He goes on:

You see, since my childhood I have lived within an entourage of survivors from the death-camps. . . . It was necessary, they taught me, that these crimes never resume again; that never again could a man, due to his belonging to an ethnic group or religion despised by others, be scoffed at while trying to assert the most elementary rights such as a dignified life in safety, without being shackled but with the light, however distant, of a future of serenity and prosperity.

Nonetheless, all that M. Braitberg writes that he has seen from Israel over decades towards the Palestinians has been “violence, spilled blood, confinement, incessant controls, colonization, despoiling.” But what about the rockets that Hamas incessantly launches at Israel? What about the suicide bombers? “What I will say to you is that my feelings of humanity do not vary according to the citizenship of the victims.”

continue reading: http://www.eurosavant.com/2009/01/29/remove-my-grandfathers-name-from-yad-vashem/

Do you have a link to the Le Monde letter that "Mao" is referencing? The link doesn't work.

http://www.lemonde.fr/opinions/article/2009/01/28/effacez-le-nom-de-mon-grand-pere-a-yad-vashem_1147635_3232.html

in french.

thats about as far as my french goes!

about this?

I do not support this latest incursion into Gaza, but I think what this man is requesting is inappropriate. He is exploiting his murdered grandfather for his own political statement, and I find that wrong.

No, I don't think I should.

Who the fuck do you think you are, lecturing this person about how or how-not his grandfather's life and death should be "exploited".

n/a

Nada! Zilch! To confuse the horrors of the Shoah, which involved the systematic liquidation of an entire nation and people, with the greed and violence of those pushing for a Greater Israel is a serious error in judgment.

That, I think, is a meaningful connection between the two.

It is used as one of the justifications for Israel's existence, yes. But no one to my knowledge uses it as a justification for the Occupation, the war in Gaza, or other specific Israeli policies.

N.T.

They are not that unusual either, more than 15 countries have right of return laws for kin-groups.

What Israel has, incidentally, is not a right of return - the word "return" means "come back to somewhere you were before". It has a right of settlement.

It would not surprise me if other countries have similar or worse laws (I'm ashamed to say it's not something I've heard anything about either way before). Israel is nowhere near the worst-governed or worst offending country in the world, just the most vigourously defended badly behaving country.

even to their former homes and land (which were stolen by the Arabs),

No right of return for these countries, or right of visit!

Are you screaming about their racist immigration tactics?

(Of course, not many people would choose to live in those theocratic dictatorships with horrible human and civil rights, poor economies, and generally miserable people).

As I explicitly pointed out in the post you are replying to, Israel is nowhere near the worst-governed country out there.

However, there is no country out there behaving as badly as Israel which enjoys such vigorous support in the West.

When asked "does the government of Iran/North Korea/Zimbabwe etc behave worse than the government of Israel?", it is clearly silly to say "no". However, it is a better use of time and ink in the West to point out "Israel is behaving badly" than "Iran/North Korea/Zimbabwe" is behaving badly, because everyone already agrees with the latter, whereas the former is still vigorously, falsely and harmfully denied by a great many people.

When relevant, one should of course condemn those countries more strongly. But one should condemn Israel more often.

but most of the condemnation suggests that it IS the worst-governed, most violent, murderous country in the world, with the world's worst human rights (so syas the UNSC).

But the truth is, there are dozens of murderous, theocratic, abusive countries that get a pass.

And those people would far prefer to live in the democracy (imperfect that it is) of Israel.

At least people have the right of free speech, free press, freedom of religion.

At least they won't be killed for being seen with a man other than their husband,

Or hung for being gay.

Or shot in the knees or killed for having a different political POV.

Israel is not perfect, and gets PLENTY of condemnation, day after day, in every MSM from every country, including Israel herself.

By "most", do you really mean "more than half"? Or just "more than I would like"?

But most countries that behave worse than Israel are not bankrolled by the US, or defended by DUers, to nearly the same extent.

To change Iran's or North Korea's policies, the US has to act, and it would almost inevitably do more harm than good (acting in Zimbabwe might conceivably be worth it, but would have high costs). To influence Israel, all the US would have to do is to threaten to do less. That makes it somewhere where the cost/benefit ratio of applying pressure works out more favourably than anywhere else in the world, I think.

many of which have second or third generations living in them.

N.T.

The latter is misleading in all kinds of ways, but it's the term commonly used.

'In what way is giving preference to one race over another in immigration rights not racist?'

It may be racist, but it's virtually universal, in one form or other. Most countries give preference to some ethnic groups over others; in most cases this trumps genuine need for asylum. And some of the countries concerned have immigration quotas, which makes these rules far more discriminatory in their effect.

of repatriation. The principle stems from the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination adopted by the GA in 1965.

A 2001 report from the "Venice Commission" recognized the relationship between ethnic-cultural minorities and their kin-states as legitimate and even desirable.

Laws of Repatriation are often applied to members of diaspora communities that have lived outside their homelands for generations - Ireland, Finland, Greece and Poland are good examples of democratic nations with these types of immigration policies.

Jewish people from a variety of different racial backgrounds have made alliyah.

Frankly, I don't see what is wrong with allowing a place of potential refuge to Jews (and it's not just due to the Holocaust, it's due to centuries of antisemitism and pogroms)?

People who are not Jews CAN emigrate to Israel.

Do you not think that our own country's disgraceful record of discrimination against non-white asylum-seekers, and the tabloids' whipping up of mob-spirit, is far worse than if our immigration system included a fast-track for people of (say) Scottish descent? Allowing fast-track asylum-seeker status for those of a background seen as particularly vulnerable, or particularly linked to that of that of the home-country, is racist *if* there is a quota on number of immigrants accepted, so that these are displacing others. But that's not the case in Israel; there is no immigration quota.

It could be argued that it's discriminatory to refuse 'right of return' to Palestinians, but that is in fact not based on the Holocaust, but on the current and historical state of war between Arabs and Israeli Jews.

A policy in Israel discriminating in favour of those with ancestors who used to live there would not be comparable to its current policy of discriminating in favour of Jews against non-Jews, on grounds of race alone.

"There has to be a Jewish state to prevent another holocaust, and so we must discriminate on grounds of race in our immigration laws" *is* a commonly-advanced argument, I'm afraid. Look through http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22jewish+state%22+prevent+holocaust&meta= if you really need convincing. Obviously, it's by no means the only argument advanced in favour of Israel's race laws, but it's among them.

I don't see how it's any better to discriminate in favour of people with ancestors from the region than people who are seen as needing protection from antisemitic violence. And while the Holocaust was the most extreme example of antisemitic violence, it was hardly the only one. Jews were killed in pogroms, and expelled from cities and countries, for many centuries before the Holocaust.

Jews are of course not the only group that may be seen as needing a refuge from racist violence. Perhaps what we need is more countries that provide refuge for endangered minority groups, not fewer.

Never mind Israel/Palestine, look at India/Pakistan, where a million people died, or at the Balkans, or (I seem to recall, although I may be wrong) Poland and that area as Russia got bigger and smaller, or (again, I think but I may be wrong) the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire. The nearest I can think of to a success story is Northand Ireland, where the decades of sectarian violence may finally be ending....

Leave borders where they are, let people move across them, and always, always try to avoid and oppose strong links between ethnicity and nationality.

I was proposing that more countries should base their asylum policies on which groups need asylum, rather than on their wealth, connections or ethnic similarity to existing residents - that is all.

N.T.

Hi, I totally disagree with my brother's open letter requiring to remove our grandfather's name from Yad Vashem and I am sure that nearly the whole family shares my opinion.

I have gathered my opinion and Shimon Peres answer on my blog here : http://fr.blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-QnEH6bQ5fqdUnjwwQpY-?cq=1&p=586
If you cannot read French, I'll try to summarize.

You should know that Jean-Moïse Braitberg is not a simple writer but an activist in UJFP, a French association supporting Palestinians in the name of French Jews. My brother's letter rezflect the exact position of this group.

I want also to underline that the documents Shimon Peres show in his answer are genuine. I own the same. His allegations regarding JM involvement in the family story are authentic, even more than Peres knows.

I am not fighting my brother but I totally disagree with his positions and I think he has no right to capture our grandfather memory to assert his own personal opinion.

I'm afraid my French isn't nearly up to the job.

But will provide fine fodder for the anti-Israel brigade.