German Bishops See Racist Israel First Hand

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"Bishops Cannot be Silent About Conditions in Palestine"
German bishops compare Israel to the Nazis
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March 8, 2007

By Genevieve Cora Fraser

After visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem recently, a group of German bishops crossed over into Occupied Palestine and compared Israeli treatment of Palestinians to Nazis treatment of the Jews during the Holocaust.

Bishop Gregor Hanke of Eichstaett reported, “This morning we saw pictures of the bestial Warsaw Ghetto at Yad Vashem, and in the evening we were in the ghetto of Ramallah. It gives one the creeps,” he said.

Cardinal Joachim Meisner, who served as bishop of Berlin when it was divided by the Communist-built Berlin Wall, commented when crossing a checkpoint into eastern Jerusalem, “This is something that is done to animals, not people.” He later explained to reporters, “I never thought I would see something like this again in my life.”

Walter Mixa, the bishop of Augsburg spoke of Palestinians facing "ghettoization with almost racist characteristics.” When asked to clarify his comment he replied, “I wanted to say that building the wall between Israel and the Palestinian autonomous areas, as well as the many Israeli settlements, amounts to a degree of provocation from the point of view of the Palestinian population.”

As might be expected, the bishop’s statements have been condemned as anti-Semitic, just as President Jimmy Carter has been accused of anti-Semitism for daring to tell the truth about Israeli-American policies in his best seller, “Palestine - Peace Not Apartheid.”

Israel’s killing, maiming, imprisonment, torture and abuse of Palestinian men, women, children and elders is supported by Congress with US tax dollars.

Genevieve Cora Fraser was born in Massachusetts in 1945 and moved to a small farming community in New Hampshire as a child. She is a playwright, director, poet, historian and journalist and attended the University of New Hampshire (UNH) in the late 1960s where she met Salim Tamari director of the Institute for Jerusalem Studies (an institution affiliated with the Institute for Palestine Studies), and an associate professor of sociology at Birzeit University. It was through her friendship with Tamari that she first was drawn to the Palestinian issue.

Fraser left college during the height of the Viet-Nam War to work at the local Public Broadcasting System NHN-TV and later served as editor of the Today Paper of Greater Lawrence (MA). She returned to UNH, graduating in Theater and Communications in 1979 and received an MFA in Theater Playwriting in 1981 from Brandeis University. She has been a long-standing environmental and human rights activist. In the 1970s she was active with the NAACP, helping to organize inner city black youth coalitions. In the 1980s she received an Environmental Commendation as an activist and organizer of the Massachusetts Acid Rain Awareness Weeks, wrote the Literacy Study for Northern Worcester County, and developed a major exhibit, "Native Americans in Harmony with Nature." In the 1990s, she served as coordinator of the Northern Tier Transportation Initiative which resulted in the development of a public bus system spanning two counties in rural Massachusetts. Fraser is also politically active and served as an aide for a state senator for five years and is currently the artistic director of the Drama Circle, a venue for original works for the stage and screen. Submissions of plays, poems, short stories and screenplays involving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict are welcome. Readings will be televised and shown locally.

Her website is here