Judenrein! Israel adopts Nazi term to back settlers

By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Hosting the German foreign minister this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used an especially tainted term to condemn the Palestinian demand that Israel's settlements in the occupied West Bank be removed.

"Judea and Samaria cannot be Judenrein," a Netanyahu confidant quoted him as telling Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Asked how Germany's top diplomat responded to hearing the Nazi Holocaust term for areas "cleansed of Jews", the confidant said, "What could he do? He basically just nodded."

Protocol might have indicated that a representative of the country that carried out the World War Two genocide, and which has since made much effort to atone, be spared such invocations.

But these are not normal times for the right-wing Netanyahu coalition. It faces unprecedented U.S. pressure to make way for a Palestinian state on West Bank land that many Jews call Judea and Samaria and consider their eternal, biblical birthright.

Hence the jaw-dropper defiance of "Judenrein", which the confidant said Netanyahu had encouraged cabinet colleagues to deploy in their defence of the settlements and of Israel's insistence that Palestinians recognise it as a Jewish state.

Briefing foreign reporters last week, Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, a stalwart of Netanyahu's Likud party, urged them to ask whether "Palestinians would accept that Jews will live among them, or whether it is going to be totally not allowed".

"'Judenrein' is the term that was once used in other countries," Meridor said darkly, in remarks echoed the next day by another Likud minister who briefed journalists and diplomats.