The Israel That Arabs Don’t Know
When the Israeli Ministry of Exterior invited me to visit Israel as part of a delegation of European-based Arab journalists and media representatives, I accepted without hesitation. The goal of the invitation was to provide us with an opportunity to freely explore the different dimensions to life inside the state of Israel. Located in the heart of the Middle East and one of the region's central and enduring conflicts, Israel receives a large amount of attention from neighboring peoples curious about the state itself and its management. Although major developments in international communication and accessibility of knowledge have transformed the world into a connected community that now sometimes resembles a small village, Arab media coverage of Israel continues to be characterized by a lack of clarity and misrepresentation, making it difficult for Arab citizens to truly understand the country. The persistent and recurring problems in the West Bank and Gaza are of major concern to many Arabs, but media sources often conflate the State's controversial foreign policy with life inside the the country itself and produce dystopian visions of life inside its borders.
While not an article or analysis, the following is an honest testimony of what I saw during my visit, without influence by any person or institution. I hope to present an alternative perspective from other Arab media outlets that I have found to exaggerate and mischaracterize the realities of Israeli life.
Israel ranked 24th in ‘Global Terrorism Index’
Israel has been placed 24th in a new global terrorism index which ranks 162 of the world’s nations from most affected to least affected by terror.
Based on a 5-year average, the index takes into account such criteria as the number of terrorist incidents endured by a country, how many fatalities were suffered in those attacks, how many injuries were caused and the level of damage to property. It also weights the scores for each nation according to the long-term psychological damage of the attacks.
The list is compiled by the Institute for Economics and Peace, using information from a global terrorism database at Maryland University, which includes more than 125,000 terrorist incidents.
Israel received an overall score of 6.03 out of 10. Its “GTI indicators” for 2015 included 260 attacks, 20 fatalities, 115 injuries and 290 instances of damage to property.
The United Kingdom ranked at 28th, and the US at 35th.
Police thwart Jerusalem stabbing attack by teenage girl
Security forces on Friday afternoon thwarted a stabbing attack by a teenage girl in East Jerusalem, a spokesperson for Israel Police said.
The incident occurred at the entrance to the neighborhood of Isawiya, the police said.
The would-be attacker was overpowered and arrested at the scene.
The police said that the girl, coming from the direction of Isawiyah, approached a unit of Border Police officers next to a gas station in the French Hill neighborhood, which abuts Isawiyah. She then pulled out a knife and began to slash at the security forces. The troops overpowered the girl and detained her. There were no injuries.
The incident comes hours after a Palestinian woman was arrested in Hebron on Friday morning when she approached Israeli security forces at a checkpoint near the city’s Tel Rumeida neighborhood carrying a knife.
Sister of Hebron soldier: He’s been stabbed in the back
The sister of an IDF soldier who was arrested this week after being filmed shooting dead an incapacitated Palestinian assailant railed at Israeli leaders in a Facebook post Saturday, saying they had stabbed her brother in the back.Brussels ‘March Against Fear’ canceled… over security fears
“My little brother shot a terrorist who came with a knife to kill IDF soldiers in Hebron, and suddenly my younger brother is suspected of murder in our state of Israel, by our Military Prosecution,” she wrote. She called it “absurd” that her brother was blamed “for killing a terrorist who came to murder.”
She blamed “two senior politicians,” presumably Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, for “hurrying to decide his fate” before investigators had even finished their work in the field. “Those politicians abandoned my little brother,” she charged in her post. “I feel like he was their pawn on the battlefield and the moment something happened they bolted.”
Netanyahu and Ya’alon on Monday joined the Israel Defense Forces in condemning the incident in strong terms, saying that it did not reflect the values if the Jewish state and its military.
“You sent a boy to protect the people of Israel, protect him when something happens,” the sister said. “This didn’t happen on a field trip or during training, it happened at the scene of a terror attack.
The organizers of a “March Against Fear” planned for Sunday to mark the Brussels terror attacks said they had cancelled the event after the authorities asked them to do so because of security fears.Report: Belgian nuclear guard murdered, security access badge stolen
“We understand this request. The security of our citizens is an absolute priority. We join the authorities in proposing a delay and ask people not to come this Sunday,” the organizers said in a statement on Saturday. The organizers of a “March Against Fear” planned for Sunday to mark the Brussels terror attacks said they had cancelled the event after the authorities asked them to do so because of security fears.
The authorities earlier asked for the march to be put off, perhaps for several weeks, to allow the police to concentrate their resources on the investigation into the attacks which left 31 dead and 300 wounded.
Two days after bomb attacks at Brussels airport and on a packed metro killed 31 people and injured hundreds, a security guard who worked at a Belgian nuclear plant was murdered and his pass was stolen, Belgian media reported on Saturday.Brussels attacks: What we know so far
The French language Derniere Heure (DH) newspaper reported the security guard's badge was de-activated as soon as it was discovered he had been shot dead in the Charleroi region of Belgium and his badge stolen.
A police spokeswoman said she could not comment because an investigation was ongoing.
In a nation on high alert following this week's attacks, the report stokes fears about the possibility militants are seeking to get hold of nuclear material or planning to attack a nuclear site.
Belgian police are hunting two suspects in the Brussels bombings as investigators establish more and more links between the bloody events in Europe’s symbolic capital and November’s carnage in Paris.CNN Palestinian Analyst To CIA Analyst: White People Cannot Understand What Motivates Terrorists
Belgian police staged fresh raids late Thursday and Friday, detaining nine people in all, including three linked to the Paris attacks in which 130 people died.
This is what is known so far about Tuesday’s suicide attacks at Brussels airport and a metro station that left 31 people dead and 300 wounded and were claimed by the Islamic State group.
The health ministry said Wednesday 31 people died in the attacks, with 300 wounded, a toll that could rise further with 61 injured in critical condition.
Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said around 40 nationalities were among the dead and wounded but the process of identifying the victims is slow.
Eleven fatalities have so far been identified by their families or governments, including citizens of Britain, China, France, Morocco, Venezuela and the United States, as well as several EU staff.
Discussing how best to counter Islamist terrorism, Rula Jebreal [author of Miral, made into an anti-Israel propaganda film], whom CNN claims is a “foreign policy analyst,” patronized Buck Sexton, a former CIA analyst who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, telling him “white people” cannot understand Islamic culture.
Sexton asked, “Why isn’t their intervention before somebody says, ‘All right, I’ve reached out to ISIS, I’m joining the jihad.’”
After bloviating that the problem derived from the West’s failure to integrate Muslims into their societies, Jebreal condescended, “I don’t know, Buck, if you speak Arabic. And clearly, you talk about terrorists, but you need to understand the culture. You need to understand the language. You need to understand what is appealing — what is the message that ISIS actually is selling in these prison cells. And what they are selling online.”
Sexton responded, “Respectfully, I served in Iraq and Afghanistan targeting people that were doing beheadings, that were building suicide vests. I mean, so I was doing that at a very specific level.”
The two talked over each other for a bit, and then Jebreal raised the race card: “With all due respect, white people like yourself who doesn’t understand the language, doesn’t understand the culture and doesn’t even know the religion —”
Sexton interrupted, “I don’t know what that has to do with trying to prevent people from blowing up buses and trying to annihilate —” Jebreal cut back in, “As I said, respectfully, that’s already too late …” before bloviating further.
BRUTAL Meme Reveals HARD TRUTH About Islam and Refugees
Here’s a short history lesson on Muhammad and his entrance into Islam’s now holy city of Medina as a refugee via Eretz Yisrael:
Although the fact is little publicized, more than one historian has affirmed at the Arab world’s second holiest city, Medina, was one of the allegedly “purely Arab” cities that actually was first settled by Jewish tribes.
And like the 16th Century English Protestants who financed their endeavors through the plunder of Catholic monasteries in England, the roots of Islamic anti-Semitism might be found in the initial plunder of Jewish settlements, and the imposition of a “poll tax” to fund Arab campaigns.
Bernard Lewis writes:
The city of Medina, some 280 miles north of Mecca, had originally been settled by Jewish tribes from the north, especially the Banu Nadir and Banu Quraiza. The comparative richness of the town attracted an infiltration of pagan Arabs who came at first as clients of the Jews and ultimately succeeded in dominating them. Medina, or, as it was known before Islam, Yathrib, had no form of stable government at all. The town was tom by the feuds of the rival Arab tribes of Aus and Khazraj, with the Jews maintaining an uneasy balance of power. The latter, engaged mainly in agriculture and handicrafts, were economically and culturally superior to the Arabs, and were consequently disliked…. as soon as the Arabs had attained unity through the agency of Muhammad they attacked and ultimately eliminated the Jews.
Can Belgium protect its Jews? A community has its doubts
The hundreds of rifle-toting police and soldiers who patrol Isaac Michaeli’s neighborhood have done little to improve his sense of safety.Top Brussels rabbi: Belgian authorities know nothing about security
“When the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, the soldiers might as well be cardboard cutouts,” he said.
A jeweler in his 40s, Michaeli lives with his family in Antwerp’s Jewish quarter, a small neighborhood of 12,000 that is one of the largest haredi communities in Europe.
The troops have been assigned to protect the neighborhood, with its 98 Jewish institutions, since May 2014, after four people were killed in a terrorist shooting at Brussels’ Jewish Museum of Belgium. Since then, their presence has been beefed up at periods of elevated risk — including after Tuesday’s string of terrorist attacks that left at least 31 dead and 300 wounded in Brussels.
Belgian Jewish leaders have praised the patrols and the government allocation of $4.5 million for the community’s protection. But amid reports of repeated failures in Belgian authorities’ counter-terrorist efforts, Michaeli’s dismissive attitude is shared by other Belgian Jews. Many feel that their government is less competent in defending civilians, Jews and otherwise, than its neighbors, including France.
Amid revelations of perceived failures in Belgium’s handling of terror threats, a prominent rabbi from Brussels said Belgian authorities “have no understanding of security issues.”Glasgow Muslim murdered hours after posting Easter wishes
Rabbi Menachem Hadad of Brussels’ Shomre Hadas haredi Orthodox community made the remarks in an interview Thursday with Israel’s Army Radio about concerns that Belgium lacks the counterterrorism capabilities of other Western European countries grappling with home-grown jihadism of the kind on display on Tuesday, when a series of explosions in Brussels killed 32 people.
Hadad said that soldiers who were posted outside a synagogue and the city’s Chabad House following the slaying of four Jews in Brussels’ Jewish Museum of Belgium in 2014 told him that for months, they used to guard the area with no bullets in their rifles. “It was just a show. It’s not normal,” he said.
Hadad’s rebuke follows reports of omissions in how Belgian authorities handled security issues, including a failure to follow up on warnings by Turkey about one of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s attacks.
Muslim shopkeeper was brutally murdered in Glasgow Thursday, hours after wishing his Christian customers a happy Easter on Facebook, in what police are treating as a religiously motivated crime.Civil Rights Activist: Strong Relationship Between U.S., Israel Necessary for Stable Middle East
Police arrested a 32-year-old Muslim suspect in connection with the killing.
“A full investigation is under way to establish the full circumstances surrounding the death which is being treated as religiously prejudiced,” police said.
British media reported that 40-year-old Asad Shah was a soft-spoken, gentle man who was much loved by his community, in Glasgow’s Shawlands district.
On Friday night hundreds of residents held a vigil in Shah’s honor. Tributes to the shopkeeper poured in on social media.
“A strong and impenetrable relationship of strength between America and Israel” is necessary for peace and stability in the Middle East, civil rights activist Ashley Bell told The Tower at the AIPAC Policy Conference earlier this week.UN "Human Rights" Council Adopts "Anti-Terror" Resolution Even Belgium Votes Against
Bell is the co-chairman of the 20/20 Club, a bipartisan group of African-American political leaders who are seeking to change how the political system addresses criminal justice issues that negatively impact that African-American community. In 2008, at the age of 27, Bell became the youngest-ever elected county commissioner of Hall County in Georgia. He participated in a “life-changing” trip to Israel with AIPAC along with a group of elected officials from the Atlanta area, and now serves on AIPAC’s national council.
“To visit Israel helped me understand Israel as a concept, as an ally to my home nation, as an incubator for innovation, as a good kid in a bad neighborhood,” Bell said.
I realized that Israel is surrounded by enemies and those enemies are the same enemies as the United States….I understand how complex the issues are after going to Israel. And now I understand that anything less than a strong and impenetrable relationship between America and Israel is actually a provocation for more violence and more unrest and instability in the Middle East. So I’m doing my part to make sure that relationship stays the same and stays strong.
On March 24, 2016, the UN "Human Rights" Council adopted a resolution supposedly on combating terrorism - over the objections of Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, and other European states victimized by Islamist terror.Lebanon: "UN Watch Can't Call Hezbollah a Terrorist Org"
The resolution, submitted by Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia, has a number of provisions focusing on the media, that Western governments fear will be used as an excuse to justify the absence of freedom of expression.
The resolution provides:
"7. Encourages States to refrain from supporting terrorist groups in establishing propaganda platforms, such as electronic or satellite platforms or any other media on their territory for disseminating hatred or instigation...
UN nuclear chief: Terrorists have means, knowledge to build the bomb
A day before world leaders were set to convene for a summit to discuss the security of nuclear materials, the head of the UN atomic watchdog warned that terrorists possess “the means, the knowledge and the information” to produce or acquire a nuclear bomb.North Korean video shows nuke attack on Washington
“Terrorism is spreading and the possibility of using nuclear material cannot be excluded,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Yukiya Amano told AFP in an interview late Thursday.
“Member states need to have sustained interest in strengthening nuclear security,” he said. “The countries which do not recognize the danger of nuclear terrorism is the biggest problem.”
Amano’s comments came before a summit of around 50 leaders in Washington from March 31 to April 1 on ensuring that nuclear material in the world’s roughly 1,000 atomic facilities are secured.
North Korea released a new propaganda video Saturday showing a nuclear strike on Washington and then threatened South Korea with a “merciless military strike” for slandering leader Kim Jong-Un.Israeli, Jordanian jets teamed up to warn off Russians, king says
Pyongyang has been ramping up the bellicose rhetoric and propaganda for weeks, since the launch of annual South Korea-US war games that it views as provocative rehearsals for invasion.
Seoul and Washington made the already large-scale joint drills bigger than ever this year in response to the North’s nuclear test in January and long-range rocket launch a month later.
Menacingly titled “Last Chance,” the video released on Saturday shows a submarine-launched nuclear missile laying waste to Washington and concludes with the US flag in flames.
Israeli and Jordanian jets together confronted Russian warplanes in January over southern Syria and warned them away from crossing their shared border, King Abdullah of Jordan told American lawmakers.The Lie of Academic Free Speech
The Russian warplanes were attempting to survey Israeli defenses in the Golan Heights, according to a report by the Middle East Eye based on Abdullah’s briefing to members of Congress on January 11.
Abdullah didn’t meet with President Barack Obama during his brief visit to Washington, with the White House citing “scheduling conflicts” as the reason. The key US ally in the fight against the Islamic State met, however, with Vice President Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Secretary of State John Kerry.
“We saw the Russians fly down, but they were met with Israeli and Jordanian F-16s, both together in Israeli and Jordanian airspace. The Russians were shocked and understood they cannot mess with us,” the Hashemite king was quoted saying.
When GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s March 11th rally at the University of Chicago Pavilion was shut down last week by hundreds of leftist protestors, comprised of activists from Moveon.org, Black Lives Matter, Muslim groups, and even unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, the morally indignant protestors had one purpose: to disrupt the event, prevent Trump supporters from hearing the candidate’s speech, and, most importantly, suppress Trump’s ideas and beliefs. Having already decided the Mr. Trump was a veritable racist, Islamophobe, and neo-Nazi, the mob of rioters—inside and outside of the venue—took it upon themselves to decide that Trump, and those who share his vision and ideas, do not even have the right to express their opinions, that their views have been deemed unacceptable by the self-appointed moral arbiters of our day.Georgia legislature passes anti-BDS bill
The disturbing campaign to suppress speech which is purportedly hurtful, unpleasant, or morally-distasteful—a sample of which was evident at the Chicago rally—is, for anyone following what is happening on campuses, a troubling and recurrent pattern of behavior by some of the same ideologues who shut down Trump: “progressive” leftists and “social justice” advocates from Muslim-led pro-Palestinian groups. Coalescing around the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, this unholy alliance has been formed in a libelous and vituperative campaign to demonize Israel, attack pro-Israel individuals, and to promote a relentless campaign against Israel in the form of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. As the ideological assault against Israel and Jews intensified on university campuses, and pro-Israel individuals began answering back to their ideological opponents, the student groups leading the pro-Palestinian charge (including such groups as the radical Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)) decided that their tactic of unrelenting demonization of Israel was insufficient, and the best way to optimize the propaganda effect of their anti-Israel message was also to suppress or obscure opposing views.
The pronouncements of these groups are now frequently defined by the baleful whining of these ideological bullies intent on having only their views aired while suppressing the contradictory views of others. In fact, a leaked memorandum from the Binghamton University Students for Justice in Palestine chapter revealed that members would be required to never even engage in dialogue with pro-Israel groups on their campus, they would be prohibited from “engaging in any form of official collaboration, cooperation, or event co-sponsorship with [pro-Israel] student organizations and groups,” and SJP members “shall in no manner engage in any form of official collaboration with any student group which actively opposes the cause of Palestinian liberation nor with groups which have aided and abetted Zionist student organizations,” meaning, of course, that the so-called intellectual debate that universities purport to promote in exactly this type of discussion will never take place when SJP is involved.
The Georgia General Assembly passed legislation Thursday night that aims to deter corporate entities from partaking in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.World Post Pushes Myth of Moderate Iran
The bill makes Georgia the sixth state in recent months — along with South Carolina, Illinois, Florida, Arizona and Colorado — to advance an anti-BDS measure through its legislature prohibiting state procurement with companies that engage political boycotts of the Jewish state.
Georgia Sen. Judson Hill, who sponsored the bill, said in a statement that the legislation is “a critical step forward in defending Georgia’s state economy and public policy” and referred to it as “taking a stand against the anti-Semitism and discrimination of the BDS movement.”
It will now go to the office of Gov. Nathan Deal, who must decide whether to sign it into law.
The bill was applauded by pro-Israel organizations, including the Israel Alliance Foundation and The Israel Project, which lobbied on its behalf.
As CAMERA reported, many media outlets misapplied the Western label of “moderates” to those who gained parliamentary influence in Iran’s February 2016 “elections” despite evidence that the elections took place as real reformers continue to sit in Iranian jails, many would-be moderate candidates were disqualified and left off the ballot, and that the interests, policies and practices of the Iranian regime remain unchanged.UK teens face theft charges in Poland over Auschwitz items
But The World Post, an affiliate of the Huffington Post, in an article with the headline “Iranian Vote Affirms Obama Administration Nuclear Deal” misrepresents years of Iranian action and American policy. The repressive and violent Iranian regime’s pursuit of nuclear weaponry is rationalized as follows: “Iran cannot be blamed for acting militarily when its neighbors and America do so as well.” The nuclear capability Iran seeks to obliterate Israel and massacre Jews is explained as a defensive action: “Iran retained an obvious incentive to move forward. Israel, already a nuclear power with a sizeable arsenal, threatened to attack Iran. Most of Tehran’s Gulf neighbors were hostile.”
In The World Post, Doug Bandow, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute who used to write for the Web site antiwar.com that describes itself as “devoted to the cause of non-interventionism,” overlooks that Israel’s preparedness “to attack Iran” is actually a measure to defend its citizens, the first responsibility of any nation-state. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a hostile regime that frequently promises to “wipe Israel off of the earth,” even putting those very words on its test missiles -- ballistic missiles that may be in violation of the nuclear deal Bandow praises as having successfully “pushed Tehran back from developing nuclear weapons and triggered a stronger fight for reform in Iran.”
A court in Poland on Monday refused to drop a case against two British teenagers caught stealing from the Nazi Auschwitz death camp and has referred it to a lower court.Why one of the Holocaust’s worst massacres is marked only by charred menorah
Initially, the 17-year-old teenagers from Hertfordshire, in southern England, pleaded guilty to charges of stealing items from the historic site while on a school trip in June and were seeking settlement.
They were allowed to return home. But later their lawyers argued that the case should be thrown out, because the teenagers were not aware that the objects they took from the site of the former camp’s warehouses had special historic value.
The objects included part of an old hair-cutting machine, two pieces of reinforced glass from the warehouses and some buttons.
On a muddy path in Babi Yar Park, Vladimir Proch negotiates deep puddles as he shadows two rabbis and a group of Ukrainian officials.Joseph Sher, Holocaust survivor and tailor to stars, dies at 100
An 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, Proch lives near the Kiev ravine where Nazis and local collaborators murdered more than 50,000 Jews starting in September 1941. He has followed every twist of the 15-year saga to commemorate victims in a manner befitting the tragedy’s scale, which even by Nazi standards was extraordinarily barbaric.
Sensing the clergy and officials were part of the latest effort to memorialize the victims, Proch approached one of the rabbis, Yossi Azman, and asked him incredulously: “Do you really think we’ll finally get a proper monument?”
Proch has good reason to be skeptical. Since 2001, numerous Jewish groups and tycoons have attempted but failed to win municipal support to upgrade a notorious site where Jewish victims are memorialized only by an unfenced 6-foot menorah.
Built near a construction-waste dump roamed by homeless people and packs of stray dogs, the menorah is still charred from a recent torching – the sixth assault by vandals on the monument in the past year alone. Swastikas adorn two entrances to a metro station near the memorial park.
A Holocaust survivor who became a New Orleans tailor with such celebrity clients as Fats Domino and Elvis Presley, has died at 100.A gay Iranian in Tel Aviv
Joseph Sher died Thursday at Lambeth House, a New Orleans retirement community and assisted-living facility, Nola.com reported. He was the oldest Holocaust survivor in New Orleans and the leader of the local survivor community, according to the Crescent City Jewish News.
During the Holocaust, Sher was sent to several Nazi-run slave labor camps, where he was forced to build roads. He was only three of 1,000 men on his detail to survive the experience. Sher, his two brothers and his wife survived the Holocaust, but he lost his parents and three sisters, who died at the Treblinka death camp.
In 1949, Sher, his wife and a child born in a displaced persons camp settled in New Orleans where he found work as a tailor, a trade he had learned from his father in Poland.
"I always thought that the only place in the world where I can live is Israel,” says Payam Feili, 30, a gay Iranian poet seeking asylum in this country.An Israeli moshav fills in the blanks on a WWII rescue
He has been living in Turkey for over a year, having been forced into exile after numerous arrests, threats, heavy censorship of his work and run-ins with Iran’s conservative Revolutionary Guards.
His book I Will Grow, I Will Bear Fruit … Figs, a love story about two Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq War, is popular in Israel and has been adapted for the stage at Tel Aviv’s Tzavta Theater.
He initially came to Israel to launch a Hebrew version of the book and to attend a premier of the play.
In an event on February 29 in its Jerusalem offices, The Israel Project, a pro-Israel advocacy group, hosted Feili to tell all about his life with the help of a Persian translator.
“It wasn’t a hard thing to leave Iran; it would have been much harder to stay. Recently, the Army of [the Guardians of the] Islamic Revolution started publishing a series of articles against me. It created a very difficult situation for me. They were warning me about detention, and warning me that these articles could lead to worse things,” Feili said.
On a recent afternoon in a museum in this moshav community near the port city of Ashdod, Hodaya Gadba held up a black-and-white photograph of a three-story building and pronounced, “This was the site of a thrilling episode of the rescue of Jews.”
Gadba then led visitors on a tour of an exhibition dealing with the subject of the picture: the Glass House, a Budapest factory that housed a remarkable operation credited with saving more than 40,000 of the city’s Jews in 1944 and 1945.
The plan was conceived by Miklos “Moshe” Krausz, who had run the Jewish Agency’s Budapest office to facilitate the immigration of Hungarian Jews to pre-state Israel, and soon after Germany’s invasion of the country on March 19, 1944, shifted to rescue mode.
His partner in the effort was Carl Lutz, Switzerland’s vice consul. Lutz secured 76 buildings as Swiss extraterritorial holdings that functioned as safe houses, and with Krausz produced and issued a Swiss letter of protection known as the “schutzpass.” Those possessing a schutzpass stayed in the safe houses without fear of capture.
By then, more than 440,000 Jews from Hungary’s towns and provinces had been deported to their deaths in Auschwitz from May to July in 1944. But Budapest remained one of the last bastions of normal Jewish life in a German-occupied country.
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