Date: 23 / 04 / 2009  Time:  16:03
Bethlehem – Ma’an/Agencies –

The Israeli museum Yad Vashem has fired an employee who compared the trauma of Jewish Holocaust survivors to that of Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 from their land in what is now Israel, the newspaper Haaretz reported on Thursday.

Jerusalem resident Itamar Shapira, 29, was relieved of his position as a teacher after a group of Jewish students from the settlement of Efrat made a complaint to the museum.

Shapira told Haaretz that he had spoken to visitors about the 1948 massacre by Jewish militias of Palestinians at in the village Deir Yassin, which is near the present-day site of Yad Vashem. The ruins of the village can be seen as one leaves the museum.

"Yad Vashem talks about the Holocaust survivors' arrival in Israel and about creating a refuge here for the world's Jews. I said there were people who lived on this land and mentioned that there are other traumas that provide other nations with motivation," Shapira said, according to Haaretz.

"The Holocaust moved us to establish a Jewish state and the Palestinian nation's trauma is moving it to seek self-determination, identity, land and dignity, just as Zionism sought these things," he said.

Yad Vashem’s official position, according to the report, is that “the Holocaust cannot be compared to any other event and that every visitor can draw his own political conclusions.”

Shapira said Yad Vashem “is being hypocritical. I only tried to expose the visitors to the facts, not to political conclusions. If Yad Vashem chooses to ignore the facts, for example the massacre at Dair Yassin, or the Nakba ["The Catastrophe," the Palestinians' term the events of 1948], it means that it's afraid of something and that its historic approach is flawed," Shapira said, according to Haaretz.