THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

War II, an estimated half a million Serbs, Gypsies, and Jews perished in Croatia.With the fall of the Berlin Wall, as the Soviet Empire was gasping its last breath, theunsettled accounts came to close, and the ancient enmities erupted like lava from avolcano. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims slaughtered each other. While the Serbs foughtthe Croats and the Bosnians in the early 1990s, a regional peace agreement wassigned in Dayton, Ohio with the purpose of resolving the irresolvable. It was aregional peace agreement. The press covered the event, but people like me lost countin the deluge of names, positions, and nations: Bosnians, Croatians, Albanians,Christians, Muslims . . . Then, less than four years after the signing of the DaytonAccord, Slobodan Milošević, Serbia’s ruler, sent his armed force—army, securityforces, and paramilitary mob—to remove the Muslim Albanian component fromKosovo. The international community failed to stop the massacres. Althoughhumanitarian aid and medical convoys arrived at the province, the mad dogs did notrelent. The massacres and atrocities continued unabated. Consequently almost thewhole world opposed Milošević and his henchmen. Political and economic sanctionswere imposed on the Serbian Republic and on him personally, but to no avail. Jewishorganizations in the world took a clear stand and argued that we cannot stand idly bywhile words such as “ethnic cleansing,” “cattle cars,” “selections” and “concentrationcamps” hang in the air. Jewish and non-Jewish opinion-makers denounced the ethniccleansing without reservations. The whole world took a stand that had its roots in theJewish Holocaust.Whose voice was not heard? Israel’s, and this is not surprising. When the wholeworld tried to stop this outrage, Israel sided with the Serbs. The internationalcommunity did all it could, albeit poorly, to end the roundthe-clock killings whileIsrael the moralist stood by. Furthermore, Israel provided the Serbs more than oncewith moral and political support. Some even say that Israel supplied them with armsand ammunitions from the Israeli Defence Forces emergency stores. Shimon Peres,then foreign minister, exercised his verbal acrobatics in the Knesset as only he knowshow. He denounced “strongly and in no uncertain terms the concentration camps, themurders, the shocking harm done against innocent women and children.” But in thesame breath he evaded, in double talk, answering the simplest of questions: what arethe relations between Israel and Serbia? He gave Knesset members Rafi Elul, DediZucker, Ran Cohen, Yossi Sarid, and speaker Shevah Weiss many empty words, hotparliamentary air, under which Israel continued with its policy toward Serbia. Knesset