This morning Israel published the first few names of those we will release as part of the next round of failed peace talks.
It made me sick
The Israel Prisons Service publicized early Monday the list of the first 26 convicted terrorists who will be released as part of Israel’s confidence-building measures to help the restart of peace talks with the Palestinian Authority.
The list included 17 names of prisoners who had murdered Israelis, including Abu-Musa Salam Ali Atia of Fatah, who murdered Holocaust survivor Isaac Rotenberg in a Petah Tikvah construction site in 1994.
According to Almagor, an organization of terror victims’ families that has campaigned against the prisoner release, Rotenberg’s family perished in the Sobibor extermination camp during World War II. Rotenberg escaped and joined the partisans fighting the Nazis in the forests of Eastern Europe. He arrived in Israel in 1947, joined the IDF and fought in Israel’s Independence War on the Lebanese front.
A plasterer by trade, Rotenberg was attacked by Abu Musa and an accomplice at a construction site where all three men worked in March 1994. He sustained repeated blows to the neck with axes. His wounds induced a coma, and he died two days after the attack. He was survived by his brother and sister, who were also survivors of Sobibor, and by a wife and two children. Rotenberg was 67 when he died.
Rotenberg wasn’t the oldest victim of the prisoners who made it onto the list Sunday. Fatah member Ra’ai Ibrahim Salam Ali was jailed in 1994 for the murder of 79-year-old Moris Eisenstatt. Eisenstatt was killed with ax blows to the head while he sat on a public Kfar Saba bench reading a book.
I responded at the Times of Israel
Has the world had peace with Germany since the end of WWII?
When we finished WWII and the Germans were defeated did they remain proud of their Nazi “achievements”?
Did they hold true to their Nazi ideology, teach it to their children and harbour dreams of it one day rising to conquer the world?
Were Nazi camp guards who pushed Jews onto trains and into ovens held up in society as heroes?
Have Germans continued to teach their kids that one day Germany will be reunited and reclaim its sovereignty over the Sudetenland? Will all the descendants of the 500,000 Germans who were expelled from the Sudetenland by the Beneš decrees (many who had lived there for generations) expect to return to their “homes”?
I illustrated my piece with a simple word in Hebrew: ??. Two letters: Daled – Yud.
It’s a short word that means enough or stop. It can be said in a pleading way: if you tickle a child too much he may say it to you. If a baby is crying you might calm the baby and say it in a soothing voice.
Trouble is it sounds just like “die”. Which was amusing when my mother-in-law sat in Brent Cross shopping centre in London soothing my new born child by saying “die-die-die” over and over to him. People stared.
I am, of course, not playing on this dual meaning at all here. Obviously. Never crossed my mind.
