Prime minister tells Germany's Steinmeier West Bank cannot be 'Judenrein'

Reuters
07.09.09
Ynet/Israel News

Hosting the German foreign minister this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used an especially tainted term to condemn the Palestinian demand that Israel's settlements in the occupied West Bank be removed.

(While Judenfrei merely refers to "freeing" an area of all of its Jewish citizens, the term Judenrein (literally "clean of Jews") was also used. This had the stronger connotation that any trace of Jewish blood had been removed as an impurity. Perhaps the PM should have used Judenfrei.)

"Judea and Samaria cannot be Judenrein," a Netanyahu confidant quoted him as telling Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Asked how Germany's top diplomat responded to hearing the Nazi Holocaust term for areas "cleansed of Jews", the confidant said, "What could he do? He basically just nodded."

Protocol might have indicated that a representative of the country that carried out the World War II genocide, and which has since made much effort to atone, be spared such invocations.

(Actually protocol might indicate that this nation and it's representitives, responsible for the mass murder and torture of our people, current business partners to Iran, have nothing to say, period. Thus, the nod of the head.)

Meanwhile, the confidant said Netanyahu had encouraged cabinet colleagues to deploy the term Judenrein in their defense of the settlements and of Israel's insistence that Palestinians recognize it as a Jewish state.

(What's your problem, if the shoe fits, wear it.)

Briefing foreign reporters last week, Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, a stalwart of Netanyahu's Likud party, urged them to ask whether "Palestinians would accept that Jews will live among them, or whether it is going to be totally not allowed."

"'Judenrein' is the term that was once used in other countries," Meridor said darkly, in remarks echoed the next day by another Likud minister who briefed journalists and diplomats.

(Dan, they prefer Judenfrei. It's more delicate)


Some diplomats have quietly questioned the propriety of applying such comparisons to a Middle East conflict which is a unique mix of race and religion, conquest and coexistence.

(O.K., we give up. Intead we'll use "Free of Jews". Sounds better in English.)

German officials made no comment on the terminology. (Good move)