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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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As for me, a few days before the Arab summit meeting
in Rabat I decide to try to go there and make a public protest against the Arab
policy against Israel, and to speak some truths I feel need to be spoken. Of
course I know in advance that the Moroccans will not read what I write, but I
know the international press will broadcast my protest and my message if I get
a chance to give it. Moreover, it would be a witness of solidarity that would
bolster the morale of the Israelis in these difficult times of isolation. All
summer the Israelis have seen me among them with my family and they know I am
not a fanatic with a martyr complex, but a normal woman deeply aware of the
exceptional situation of Israel and of the special responsibility the Germans
have toward the Jewish people.
Serge and I draft a statement:
I have come to Rabat because there must be
at least one voice to protest here, at the summit of the Arab countries,
against a policy whose goal is the destruction of the State of Israel.
Thirty years ago, Hitler's Germany exterminated six million Jews amid
general indifference.
As a German woman, it is my duty to tell the Arab
people not to take as their example the crime of which my country is guilty.
Let the Jewish state live in peace: a country and a refuge for the
survivors of Nazi extermination, for Jews expelled by Communist states and
oppressed in the Soviet Union, and for the Jews who have been obliged to leave
the Arab countries in greater numbers than the Palestinians who were exiled in
1948.
Israel is also the land of Jews who never left the country of
their ancestors and who have maintained the age-old and inviolable rights of
the Jewish people throughout various invasions.
Thanks to an
anti-Semitism that has been transformed into anti-Zionism and thanks to oil,
you have in the West and the East allies and clients. You and they pretend that
Israel is an imperialist state: this is not true! From 1944 to 1948 it was the
Jewish people who dared liberate Palestine from colonial British power. Since
then the Jews have asked only to live in peace, which you persist in denying
them.
You pretend that Israel is not a Socialist state: this is not
true! Moreover, it is among your states that one can find feudal structures
antithetical to any person of the left. Such a one is Jordan, which is, as much
as Israel and Cisjordan, part – and the biggest part – of Palestine.
More Palestinian blood has been shed by the weapons of Hussein than by those of
the Israelis.
In the Palestine of the Balfour Declaration, approving a
national territory for the Jewish people, there is room for the State of Israel
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Page 323 |
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