The Boston Globe’s Berger
For those who remember Alan Berger’s infamous February 18, 1988 comparison of an incident involving the non-lethal injury of four Palestinians — who did not even require hospitalization — to the mass graves at Babi Yar, his distorted commentary on why there have been recent challenges in the Arab-Israeli peace efforts will be no surprise.
He traces the current peace delay to Israel’s prime ministers having to “fear the fury of settler zealots,” and remembering “an Israeli fanatic assassinating Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally in 1995…”
“Fear” of Jewish zealots didn’t seem to affect Ehud Barak or Ariel Sharon or Ehud Olmert who all pursued peace efforts, including in Sharon’s case, withdrawing from Gaza.
Berger’s earlier editorial, denounced as “stunningly stupid” by then New Republic Editor Martin Peretz, lamented the episode of intifada violence by IDF reservists, saying it: “called up the collective memories from the history of the Jewish people…the czarist pogroms, the centuries of homelessness and persecution, the mass graves at Babi Yar, the piled bodies found at Nazi death camps.”
Babi Yar was the site of the slaughter of 35,000 Jews, executed and dumped in a mass grave.
Berger continued at The Globe for decades after his Babi Yar column, its shameful
analogy not, apparently, a concern of the editorial department.
Berger’s Aug. 2, 2013 column puts Hamas and Israel’s government on two opposite poles depicting them as equal obstacles to a peace agreement, an analogy as bereft of reason or balance as his analogizing four Palestinian youths beaten up by Israeli soldiers with the machine-gunning of thousands of Jewish families at the ravine in Babi Yar.
Berger had no shame then. He still has none today.
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