(AP) Aron Heller - On Wednesday, Palestinian student Mujahid Sarsur, 21, led a delegation of 22 Arab students to Israel's official Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. The students, fasting for Ramadan, listened closely to their Arabic-speaking guide's explanations, and were left wide-eyed by the gruesome images of the death camps. Girls in Muslim head scarves turned away in horror at the sight of Jewish corpses being shoveled into pits. They huddled together as they watched film from Auschwitz, where about 1 million Jews were put to death. "The Holocaust is a huge part of Israeli society. We live so close to them and we need to understand them better if we are ever to live in peace," said Sarsur, a junior at Bard College in New York. Noor Amer, 15, a Palestinian who attends high school in Jordan, said that while he still rejects Zionism, the Yad Vashem visit helped him understand that "the Jews had nowhere else to go" after the Holocaust.
2010-08-20 08:55:50Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive