The spiritual leader of the influential Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas party has branded the Palestinians as "snakes" and said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak had lost all sense by trying to make peace with them.
"He runs after the Palestinians like one possessed, just to make peace," Rabbi Ovadia Yosef charged during a weekly sermon at a Jerusalem synagogue on Saturday.
"He is bringing snakes near us. What kind of peace do you want to make with a snake?," Yosef said in remarks rebroadcast by Israeli radio on Sunday.
"Barak is going to give them half of the Old City, so they can succeed once again in killing us," he said in reference to apparent concessions made by the prime minister over Jerusalem at last month's Camp David peace summit.
"The Ishmaelites are all accursed evil people. They are all haters of Israel and God regrets having created them," he said.
Shas, the third largest party in parliament with 17 seats, quit Barak's coalition in protest at his peace policies on the eve of the Camp David talks, which ended in failure over the fate of Jerusalem, the Holy City claimed by both Israel and the Palestinians as their capital.
Barak, abandoned by 11 ministers and without a parliamentary majority, is however, holding talks with Shas in a bid to persuade them to return to his coalition.
But Shas political leader Eli Yishai accused Barak of having yielded at Camp David without obtaining anything in return, adding: "At the moment we have no intention of returning to the coalition."
Yosef has for many years projected an image of a moderate after he gave tentative support during the 1980s to the idea of land for peace. But Shas has always abstained or voted against various accords with the Palestinians that were put to parliament.
Arab Israeli MP Ahmed Tibi said Yosef's remarks "gave off a racist stench."
Justice Minister Yossi Beilin said the remarks were "not very intelligent" but nevertheless backed Shas's return to the coalition rather than a national unity government with Ariel Sharon's right-wing Likud party.
"Yasser Arafat is not the best partner for peace and Shas is not the best possible partner to form a coalition, but it is with them we must make arrangements, agreements and peace," he said.
Beilin warned that joining forces with Likud would "mean the end of the peace process and that would mean an explosion of violence."
‘HOLOCAUST VICTIMES ARE SINNERS’
In an astonishing tirade striking at the very heart of the Jewish identity, Yosef has described the victims of the Holocaust as "reincarnated sinners," triggering a storm of protest.
"The murdered were reincarnations of the souls of sinners," he said in the same sermon.
"All those from the Holocaust, six million poor Jews, whom the Nazis -- may their name be obliterated -- killed, did they die for nothing? No. These are reincarnations of those who had sinned and made others sin ... They were reincarnated to make amends," he said.
His diatribe, which was rebroadcast on public radio on Sunday, set off shockwaves in Israel, whose creation in 1948 was a result of the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews.
"These comments could harm the memory of the victims of the Shoah (Holocaust) the feelings of their families and the entire Jewish people," Prime Minister Ehud Barak said during a meeting of the Israeli cabinet, public radio reported.
"These vile statements will delight the remaining Nazis in the world," said Tommy Lapid, the leader of the avowedly secular Shinui party who dodged the Nazis in a ghetto in Hungary during World War II.
"Either they are the ramblings of a senile old man and should be treated as such to prevent them from causing further harm to the Jewish people, or they represent the opinion of the entire (Sephardic) community and that's cause for despair," Lapid told Israeli radio – OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
