Lapid likens zionists to nazis...again

Yosef "Tommy" Lapid has likened the behaviour of Jewish settlers to the nazis according to Ha'aretz:

The head of Israel's central Holocaust memorial on Saturday assailed Jewish settlers who harass Palestinians in a tinderbox West Bank city, saying the abuse recalled the anti-Semitism of pre-World War Two Europe.

Yad Vashem chairman Yosef Lapid's unusually fierce and public attack was prompted by Israeli television footage showing a Hebron settler woman hissing "whore" at her Palestinian neighbour and settler children lobbing rocks at Arab homes.

The spectacle stirred outrage in Israel, where many view the settlers as a movement opposed to coexistence with a future Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Lapid, a Holocaust survivor who lost his father to the Nazi genocide, said in a weekly commentary on Israel Radio that the acts of some Hebron settlers reminded him of persecution endured by Jews in his native Yugoslavia on the eve of World War Two.

"It was not crematoria or pogroms that made our life in the diaspora bitter before they began to kill us, but persecution, harassment, stone-throwing, damage to livelihood, intimidation, spitting and scorn," Lapid said.

This isn't the first time that Lapid has likened zionists to nazis. Here's a Guardian report from May 2004:

Israel's justice minister, Tommy Lapid, told a weekly cabinet meeting that the house demolitions were inhumane. The minister, the only Holocaust survivor in the government, said television images of an old woman picking through rubble for medicine had reminded him of his grandmother, who was killed by the Nazis.

Lapid's not my cup of tea but it is refreshing when a first hand witness to WWII or to the holocaust itself is so up front about his instinctive view of zionist conduct towards the Palestinians.