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Source: maannews.

On the death of Lapid: An era passes in Israel

By Marian Houk in Jerusalem

Tuesday 3 June 2008

A champion of a secular Israel, who opposed the growing influence of the religious-national in the country, has died Sunday in a Tel Aviv hospital.

Yosef “Tommy” Lapid, who suffered a heart attack a few months ago, was admitted to hospital in critical condition on Friday. He died of cancer, according to news reports today.

He is the man who once said, as Minister of Justice in 2004, that photos of a Palestinian woman trying to salvage something from the ruins of her Rafah home razed by Israeli forces made him think of his own grandmother who suffered under the Nazis.

Born 77 years ago in the former Yugoslavia , Lapid was a prominent journalist who headed the Shinui (Change) party. Israel, Shinui believes, should be a secular Jewish state with freedom of — and from — religion.

Lapid said of the religious-national right: “I don’t mind them carrying on their religion but I do mind when they try to impose their views on the secular majority in this country… I think Israel should be a modern, Western civilisation and not a medieval ghetto."

Shinui was the largest winner in the 2003 general elections, winning nearly as many Knesset seats as the Labour party. Lapid then served as Justice Minister and Deputy Prime Minister. But Shinui left the ruling coalition in December 2004 in a dispute over funding of religious institutions, and then spilt in the run-up to 2006 elections, during major shifts of Israeli political alliances surrounding Israel’s 2005 “disengagement” from Gaza. Shinui is not currently represented in the Knesset.

Lapid resigned from political life after the Shinui split. He then became chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial council. Lapid described himself was a Holocaust survivor who lost a number of family members, including his father and grandmother, in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

As Justice Minister, Lapid made news headlines by opposing, in a May 2004 cabinet meeting, the destruction of Palestinian homes in Rafah during an Israeli military operation in southern Gaza. After the cabinet session, Lapid told Israel Radio that "I did think, when I saw a picture on the TV of an old woman searching in the ruins of her home looking under some floor tiles for her medicines, ’What would I say if it were my grandmother?’"

In the interview with Israel Radio, Lapid said it made him “sick” that the army was considering demolishing as many as 2,000 Palestinian homes in the Rafah refugee camp to expand an Israeli-patrolled zone along the Egyptian border.

Plans to destroy Palestinian homes in Rafah to create a sort of supervisable sterile zone that could more easily be monitored by the Israeli military are still alive, as former military commanders have explained to journalists on several recent occasions. Reserve Major-General Yom-Tov Samia, former commander of the Southern front, who now heads a Tel-Aviv based green energy consultancy, said at a recent briefing to journalists in Jerusalem that he had even been willing to help Palestinian families living in Rafah, which has grown on both sides of the now-walled Egyptian-Gaza border, to move their furniture if they would be willing to move several hundred meters away from the border.

Then, Lapid said in a weekly commentary on Israel Radio in early 2007, after video footage was aired showing a Palestinian woman being viciously verbally attacked through the iron bars on the veranda of her downtown Hebron home by a neighboring Israeli woman settler – who among other things called the Palestinian woman a “Sharmuta” (“whore”) – that what was happening in Hebron reminded him of the persecution endured by Jews in his native Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II. "It was not crematoria or pogroms that made our life in the diaspora bitter before they began to kill us, but persecution, harassment, stone-throwing, damage to livelihood, intimidation, spitting and scorn," Lapid said in his radio commentary.

After the widespread airing of this footage, Israel’s mainstream politicians, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, also chimed in to denounce the Israeli woman settler’s behavior as “shameful” – and she was reportedly briefly detained by the Israeli police.