The initiators of this brainstorm -- Dennis Ross and Aaron Miller -- are both high-ranking U.S. State Department staffers who have spent much of the last decade pressuring Israeli governments into concessions. They are also Jewish, and due to their prominent Washington positions have earned seats on the board of the Holocaust Museum, which is federally funded institution.

Ross, Miller and the rest of the Clinton administration have been frustrated by the refusal of the Israeli government to agree to the U.S. interpretation of the Oslo agreements. They want Israel to give up more territory and make more concessions in return for the same broken promises that Israel received before such as Palestinian pledges to restrain terrorism and amend their "death to Israel" Covenant. You may recall that the PA was obligated to do these things by previous agreements, but that is a detail our State Department is uninterested in.

The purpose is to pressure Israel. Not content with mere diplomatic pressure, the Americans have done all they could in the past year to blacken Netanyahu's name by unjustly blaming him for the stalled peace process and openly snubbing him in favor of the Israelis whom he bested in democratic elections. Clinton has been aided and abetted in this nefarious policy by various factions of left-wing American Jews who share the State Department's disdain for the prime minister. Some of these so-called American Jewish "leaders" openly called for U.S. pressure on Netanyahu at an infamous White House dinner last year.

Not content with stunts such as these, Miller and Ross cooked up something even more flamboyant. Why not boost Arafat's prestige and popularity (especially with U.S. Jews whose support is vital for any Israeli government) by inviting him to tour the Holocaust Museum during his visit to the U.S. Surely a photo opportunity such as this would upstage Bibi and place him even more on the defensive.

Though the Holocaust Museum leadership initially rejected the idea of allowing their museum to be exploited for the purpose of pressuring Israel, they were soon worn down by media and governmental pressure.

Is this the place to invite a killer of Jews? The only problem with this brilliant idea is that there are many American Jews who are not so easily fooled by the Ross-Miller public relations plan for Arafat.

While it is true that Arafat is Israel's peace partner, and has shaken the hands of three Israeli prime ministers, including the incumbent, that doesn't give him the right to use a Jewish memorial in his campaign to weaken American public support for Israel. It is bad enough when Jews and Israelis use the memory of the six million for political purposes, but when a man who threatened Israel with violence just last week does so, is when I say --enough is enough.

When remorse for the Holocaust is coupled with indifference to the lives of Jews, such sentiments must be labeled as fraudulent. Whether you like Bibi Netanyahu or not, the idea of allowing Arafat to use the Museum as a prop is in such bad taste -- even by contemporary Washington's admittedly debased standards -- as to take one's breath away.

Is the Holocaust Museum an appropriate stage for a man who spent a career killing the descendants of those Jews who escaped the Holocaust? Surely not.

Are Ross and Miller ignorant of the fact that the Palestinian Authority has itself been the source of Holocaust denial in articles and speeches by prominent PA and PLO figures in recent years? Of course not.

Has Arafat, his aides and the official PA organs refrained from denigrating the Holocaust's significance and even asserting that they -- the Palestinians (whose World War II era leaders were enthusiastic supporters of Hitler) are the real victims of the Holocaust? Not in the least. Have they apologized for these statements? You've got to be kidding.

Is the visit an opportunity to educate Arafat about the Holocaust and thus improve Israel-Palestinian relations? In theory, perhaps. But anybody who seriously believes this is so must also believe in the tooth fairy. The idea of an Arafat photo-op at the Holocaust Museum was an atrocity, an obscene use of a sacred spot for an anti-Jewish purpose. Those who plotted the scheme ought to be ashamed, as should those Museum officials who went along with it.

What is the real memorial to the Holocaust? This incident highlights the perils of allowing Jewish memorials to become U.S. government institutions, despite the obvious attraction of the affiliation and the preferred site for the museum on the Washington Mall. Were the Museum an independent institution, it is doubtful officials could have been forced to suffer such an indignity.

It also brings to mind the truth that the only truly meaningful memorial to the six million is not a statues or a magnificent museum, no matter how flattering its existence might be to the vanity of the prominent survivors and other Jews who built them.

The real memorial to the Holocaust is the State of Israel, in which the hopes and dreams of 20 centuries of a persecuted Diaspora Jewry reside. American Jews, who are being asked to disassociate themselves from Israel's democratically elected leader and support U.S. pressure on the Jewish State, should remember that.
# Click for the B'tzedek commentary index.