| Yehuda Bauer: Equal rights for non-Jews |
| The scholar discusses Jewish identity, Jewish extremism and how to navigate between conservative Jews and Palestinians. Talk to Al Jazeera Last Modified: 07 Jan 2012 14:03 |
As ultra-Orthodox Jewish protesters clashed with Israel government officials over gender segregation in public places, many of the demonstrators were playing on a link between Israel and the former Nazi regime in Germany.
Such clashes have become more frequent in Israel in recent years, as ultra-Orthodox Jews, who make up 10 percent of Israel's population, are said to have become increasingly aggressive in trying to impose their conservative ways of living on others. Is the religious divide in Israel growing? And is there a link between the Holocaust and the existence of the state of Israel?
| "The establishment of the state of Israel is not the result of the Holocaust. It is almost a result of the the fact that the Holocaust was not totally successful." - Yehuda Bauer |
Earlier last year before the recent demonstrations, Talk to Al Jazeera met Yehuda Bauer, a prominent Holocaust scholar at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who says that the foundation of the state of Israel and its link to the Holocaust is weak. He claims that that the Holocaust almost prevented the establishment of the state by destroying much of the population that the Zionist movement had expected to come to Israel.
He also believes that the Palestinians should be given equal rights to the Israelis as well as all other minorities living on Israeli soil, because a national state "should grant absolutely equal rights, not just formal rights, to the minorities that are within it."
Yehuda Bauer talks to Al Jazeera's Teymoor Nabili about Jewish identity, Jewish extremism and how to navigate between conservative Jews and Palestinians.
"There is a certain closeness in attitudes, in outlooks in social psychology... We are cousins. Cousins very often quarrel in a very unpleasant way, but I think that we could arrive at an arrangement where live and let live could become a viable option - it is not now, obviously, but it could become that. There is a danger of a violent Jewish radical, genocidal, nationalism with a minority of Israeli Jews. There is such a minority, it's very dangerous, I think we have to exert great pressure on these people to limit that, and finally to conquer it. This group of radical Jewish nationalists, genocidal radical Jewish nationalists, are a mirror image of radical Islam that wants to annihilate all the Jews in the world. But on both sides there is a danger. Here it is a minority, but that could change..."
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