Bishop Tutu is not the only Nobel Prize winner who has gone to the Occupied Territories and spoken out against the Israeli occupation and usurpation of the Palestinian Authority in the past 18 months.

Jose Saramago, the Portugese Nobelist of 1998 also recently travelled to Palestine to see the effects of the Israeli invasion first hand. Here is a excerpt of a recent article on ZNet, mentioning his visit:

http://www.zmag.org/content/Mideast/barghoutijenin.cfm

This April 9th, Palestinians everywhere commemorated the 54th anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre, when Zionist terror groups murdered 254 innocent Palestinian Arabs in cold blood, as documented by several historians, including some of the "new historians" in Israel. In an authoritative account of the massacre, the British interrogating officer then, Assistant Inspector-General Richard Catling, confirmed that: "Many young school girls were raped and later slaughtered … Many infants were also butchered and killed."3 Deir Yassin was meant to set an example, a particularly shocking precedent, to terrorize the Palestinians off their lands and into exile. It was no accident, no aberration, no extreme vengeance, simply a calculated act of terror in a well-thought-out plan to depopulate Palestine, and create in the resulting space a Jewish homeland for the victims of the Nazi genocide. Those victims also observed "Holocaust Day" this April 9th.

This coincidence stirs up a bitter irony: the victims of one of history's worst crimes against humanity are increasingly resorting to some of the same tools of racist hatred and collective punishment to complete the job that the founders of Zionism had envisioned: a "pure" Jewish state.

Last month, during a visit by a delegation from the International Parliament of Writers, the famous Portuguese Nobel Prize winner, Jose Saramago, dreaded the "spirit of Auschwitz" in Ramallah and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories. Many Israeli intellectuals hypocritically condemned the remark, some implicitly accusing Saramago of anti-Semitism. Ironically, just this past January, Ha'aretz reported that "one of the Israeli officers in the [occupied] territories" found it justified to "internalize the lessons of earlier battles even, however shocking it may sound, even how the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto."4

Indeed, several Israeli policies have evoked analogies with the Nazis, despite the unquestionable disparity in the magnitude of criminality between the two cases. Some of the wicked practices of the Nazis in concentration camps were even imported unabashedly by Israeli army officers. During the last army incursion into Palestinian towns and refugee camps towards the end of February of this year, the Washington Post reported: "The [Israeli] army's mass roundups of Palestinian refugees has been a public relations disaster for Israel, as images have been broadcast and printed around the world of blindfolded captives including teenage boys and graying middle-aged-men held at gunpoint. Some Israelis were also incensed that [Israeli] troops were writing [identification] numbers on some of the prisoners' arms and foreheads …."5 One of those who expressed "outrage" over this practice was the right-wing Israeli lawmaker, Tommy Lapid, who declared in the Knesset, "As a refugee from the Holocaust I find such an act insufferable."6

In the current Israeli offensive against the Palestinians under its occupation, implementing Sharon's promise to "batter them into submission," the Israeli army has systematically committed several serious violations of international humanitarian law and the Fourth Geneva Convention which amounted to war crimes, as described by UN agencies, Israeli human rights organizations and by Israel's best friend in the region, the Turkish Prime Minister, Bulent Ecevit7.