As Pope John Paul II toured the Holy Land on a long awaited pilgrimage, both Palestinians and Israelis, taking advantage of the presence of international media, rivaled to demonstrate the suffering of their own people. While Palestinian refugee camps, Jewish settlements, and Israeli military coercion were a living testimony of the daily suffering of most Palestinians, Israeli Holocaust museums and memorials were the combating strategy to defer attention from Palestinian suffering. Cleverly, Israel managed, once more, to veil its own crimes through the incorporation of the misleading and greatly irrelevant suffering of the Jews, of which Palestinians can hardly be held responsible.

Denying the savagery of the Holocaust or any of the massacres committed by the Nazis against other partys' innocents is unjustifiable. On the other hand, it is as unjustifiable and even bewildering, for any nation to use its long record of suffering to inflict suffering on other nations.

It's horrid to simply think of committing a similar Holocaust against the German people as an act of retaliation to what their government has done to the Jews, the Poles or the Russians. Yet absurdly enough, the Palestinian people were chosen, from all nations, to pay the price for a crime committed by someone else's hand, with whom Palestinians hadn't the slightest aspect in common. Yet the long episode of absurdity continues, and mysteriously the suffering of the Palestinian people was accepted by the west, which stood afar, and did nothing to bring an end to the tormenting Diaspora.

While western philosophy, like other schools of philosophy, has concerned itself for ages with the solving of moral and ethical dilemmas, most western countries, who were greatly influenced by the modern western philosophy, perceive the Palestinian issue with a radically different perspective. Evidently a bizarre argument was formed. Premise one: millions of Jews were killed during the war; Premise two: Europe has felt guilty for its treatment of the Jews throughout history ending with the Holocaust; conclusion: therefore, it is ethically permissible for Palestinians to suffer, and pay the heavily price through exile, homelessness, and many forms of anguish. While such an argument is the core of invalidity, it has survived, flourished and continues to convert more followers with the airing of every new Holocaust documentary, with the opening of every new Holocaust museum, and with the publishing of every new book concerning the Holocaust.

Most Palestinians starting with their first expulsion in 1948 to the present, strongly believe that one must defend his land and family. They naturally put this belief into action, and tenaciously fought their oppressors. Fighting for one's rights is an act that must be not only accepted, but commended. However, Palestinians quickly gained the reputation of being terrorists. And quickly, the real victim became the accused and the criminal. Concurrently, the aggressor shrewdly concealed his Nazi-like crimes by what the crimes of the Nazi. Again, the west nodded and wholeheartedly agreed with this twisted logic.

For many years, through literature of all types, Palestinians have emphasized that their rejection of Israeli atrocities committed against their people in refugee camps scattered around the world, doesn't' make them responsible for the suffering of the Jews. It is Europe who failed to protect its minorities, so why doesn't Europe courageously redeem its mistake?

Knowing the west's weak points, Israel misused the suffering of the Jews to validate its greed, aggressions and never-ending craving for more land, "security zones", along with billions of dollars in military and non-military aid.

Palestine was promised to the Jews many years before the occurrence of the Holocaust. It is evident thus, that the incorporation of the Holocaust into the establishment of Israel was meant as a distraction of the unquestionably unethical nature of the originating of the state of Israel.

The Holocaust was a human tragedy inflicted on mankind as much as it was inflicted on the Jewish people. The Palestinian people, ironically enough, are able to comprehend the horror of the experience simply because they have been living it for 52 years. While only a few thousand Jewish holocaust survivors are still alive today, millions of Palestinians are still living in concentration camps, enduring a painful fate imposed on them by Israel, the so-called "Victim".