West Bank Settlers to Wear Orange Stars

And DovBear also comments on the story about the WEST BANK SETTLERS TO WEAR ORANGE STARS. On this point, Ha'aretz points out that this particular tactic seems to have backfired.

In Israel, home to the world's largest number of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, opposition to the orange patch was fierce, cutting with ease across ideological lines.

Perhaps the clearest, most potent voice in opposition came from a most unexpected source, the army's highest-ranking religiously observant officer, a major general who is himself the child of Holocaust survivors."They belong to Holocaust deniers, those settlers who wear the star," IDF Personnel Branch commander Elazar Stern said. "This truly plays into the hands of those who say that the Holocaust was just some legitimate phenomenon that happened in history, the result of a people taking a democratic decision," Stern said. "If what was done during the Holocaust resembles what we are doing to them, then apparently the Holocaust was not all that bad, not all that unique, especially in our own history."

Stern spoke poignantly over the weekend of his parents' experiences in the death camps, where his mother lost her twin sisters, mother and grandmother at the whim of Nazi death camp doctor Joseph Mengele, and his father was forced to eat horse carcasses to survive.

Appearing on Channel Two television's highly-rated "Meet the Press," he quoted his parents as having called the idea of the orange patch "madness." Asked what he himself thought of the idea, he replied, "I think that it is madness."

I have a hard time feeling sorry for Gaza settlers who will receive many thousands of dollars when they leave Gaza, while hundreds of thousands of Israelis don't have enough to eat EVERY DAY. And those same poor Israelis within the Green Line will be paying for the ample compensation for Gaza settlers. There was a harrowing article in the most recent Jerusalem Report about poor elderly people in Israel - the most horrifying example was a 105-year old woman who is fed every day by other (slightly less) elderly people from Ezrat Avot, since the maximum old-age pension one gets from the National Insurance Institute is about 1400 NIS per month.