| Re: Finkelstein accuses Israel of exploiting Holocaust, by Amy Steele, News, April 8 — April 14, 2004.
Usually, showing how something happens rather than merely telling that it happens can prove to be a lot more effective. A case in point:
When the South African prime minister John Vorster made a state visit to Israel in April 1976, it began with a tour of Yad Vashem, Israel's great Holocaust memorial, where the late Yitzhak Rabin invited the onetime Nazi collaborator, unabashed racist and white supremacist to pay homage to Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
As an old Nazi collaborator, Vorster should, of course, have been put on trial the minute he set foot on Israeli soil; instead, he was graciously welcomed by his Jewish hosts.
Compared, say, to routine outcries from organized Jewry over often even mild whiffs of Holocaust controversy, no less remarkable was the bland equanimity both Israeli and diaspora Jews also displayed toward the Vorster visit.
Author Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi recalls in his book The Israeli Connection, "For most Israelis, the Vorster visit was just another state visit by a foreign leader. It did not draw much attention. Most Israelis did not even remember his name, and did not see anything unusual, much less surreal in the scene (a Nazi diehard invited to debauch the memory of the victims at a Holocaust memorial): Vorster was just another visiting dignitary being treated to the usual routine."
The South African leader left Israel four days later; after signing several friendship treaties between the Jewish state and South Africa's racist apartheid regime. A denouement Leslie and Andrew Cockburn describe in Dangerous Liaison: "The old Nazi sympathizer came away with bilateral agreements for commercial, military, and nuclear cooperation that would become the basis for future relations between the two countries."
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