San Diego (special) -- An Israeli screenwriter and lecturer on terrorism, Sabi Shabtai, said Arab
propagandists are trying to persuade the world that there is an analogy between Serbia's treatment of the ethnic Albanians and how Israel might treat the Palestinians if the dispute over proposed Palestinian statehood grows more heated.

While there are some geopolitical similarities between the two regions, Shabtai told an April 18 Israel Bonds gathering at Tifereth Israel Synagogue in San Diego, the overriding difference between the two situations is the fact that Israel is a democracy, while Serbia is a dictatorship.  Based on his knowledge of terrorism as a former intelligence specialist with the Israel Defense Forces and a former member of Israel's Foreign Ministry, Shabtai helped develop the scripts for such thriller movies as The Assignment and Five Minutes to Midnight. He said a superficial similarity between Kosovo and the Palestinian situation is that prior to the current wave of killings and flights by refugees, Serbs represented about one-tenth of the population in Kosovo, while Muslims accounted for 90 percent. That is

Sabi Shabtai

approximately the same ratio of Jews to Muslims in the territories won from Jordan and Egypt by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and now claimed by the Palestinians.

Another similarity is that just as the Serbs consider Kosovo to contain sites holy to their religion, so too do Israelis consider such disputed areas as Jerusalem and Hebron as sacred to Judaism.

And, according to Shabtai, Arab propagandists make much of the fact that some right-wing Israelis have suggested "transferring" the Arab population from Israel -- a proposed policy that some think sounds quite close to "ethnic cleansing". Shabtai said that such right-wing elements are on the fringe of Israeli politics, and do not speak for the government, whereas in Serbia the architect of the campaign against the Muslims is the government of Slobadan Milosevic.

In Israel, he said, "something like that cannot happen, and not only because we are Jewish but primarily because we are a democracy. ...: A democracy would have conflicting opinions.. 

"Sometimes those opinions that are expressed by the other side are not to our liking, and we would like to force the other side to accept our opinions, but in Israel unlike in any of the other countries in the Middle East, and definitely unlike the situation in Serbia, you cannot do it through the use of force, or even through the use of bribery," he said. Following Shabtai's speech, Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal was honored for contributions to Israel and to the Jewish people and was presented by Tifereth Israel Synagogue's  President Joan Greenstone with a framed rendition in caligraphy of Israel's Declaration of  Independence. Israel Bonds new San Diego representative, Dianna Glick, also was introduced at the meeting.

Rabbi Rosenthal and Joan Greenstone