Hello Visitor and Welcome!

My forthcoming novel 'THE CHILDREN OF THE NAKBA' deals with an atrocity. Probably modern Israel's most famous one with; I think: the most interesting players ever in the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict

But still an atrocity. That's plain and simple.

I should say up front that I'm not Jewish and I don't have a dog in the Middle East fight. I'm just a passionate writer with a sense of what I consider fairness. And there is plenty of blame to go around. But there are also many examples of un-self-serving kindness, even heroism related to that part of the world. True, you have to look beyond the propaganda on both sides to verify them, but I have created this blog to highlight those. Let the examples speak for themselves.

Myth: Arabs hate Jews and have done so since the First Aliyah, the 'farmer's settlement' of what was then Turkish Ottoman Palestine, beginning in 1882 and continuing off and on till 1903.

Fact: Israel recently awarded its 'Righteous Among the Nations' honor at its Holocaust memorial 'Yad Vashem', to Egyptian doctor Mohamed Helmy, for hiding a Jew named Anna Boros in Berlin during wartime.  The award is the highest Israel can bestow upon a non-Jew in recognition for helping people to survive the WWII genocide.

Helmy lived in Berlin and hid several Jews during the Holocaust. Born in 1901 in Khartoum to an Egyptian father and a German mother, he went to Berlin in 1922 - 11 years before the Nazis came to power - to study medicine.

In 1938 the Nuremberg Laws, intended to remove Jews from all spheres of public life, were enacted against him when he was banned from his medical practice because racial quacks said he was not considered 'Ayran' - the term Nazis used to denote those they considered unworthy of equal status with Germans.

When the war began the regime started to systematically deport the capital's Jews to destinations in occupied Poland for extermination, including Auschwitz and Treblinka. Dr Helmy hid 21-year-old Boros, a family friend, at a cottage on the outskirts of the city, and provided her relatives with medical care against the strict instructions of the Nazi high command.

After Boros’ relatives admitted to Gestapo interrogators that he was hiding her he arranged for her to hide at an acquaintance’s house. Anna and four family members eventually escaped to Israel.

'The Gestapo knew that Dr Helmy was our family physician, and they knew that he owned a cottage.  He managed to evade all their interrogations,' Boros, later Mrs Gutman, wrote after the war, according to Yad Vashem’s citation. 'Dr Helmy did everything for me out of the generosity of his heart, and I will be grateful to him for eternity.'

And the kicker?

Dr. Helmy's say they want nothing to do with it. 

'If any other country offered to honor Helmy, we would have been happy with it,' said Mervat Hassan, the wife of Helmy’s great-nephew.  'But not from Israel. I do, however, respect Judaism as a religion, and I respect Jews. Islam recognizes Judaism as a heavenly religion.'

Until this kind of resistance to simple acts of kindness among the chaos is broken down, the world will stay a lesser place.

Thanks to the http://www.dailymail.co.uk/online for text for this posting.

David