A decision by the US Holocaust Museum in Washington to refuse to receive Mr Yasser Arafat on a VIP visit this week has underlined abiding Jewish scepticism about the Palestinian leader's commitment to genuine reconciliation.
Mr Arafat is due in Washington on Thursday, for talks with President Clinton aimed at reviving Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. US State Department officials suggested that Mr Arafat, while he is visiting Washington, might tour the US government-funded museum, a five-storey, 3,000-metre exhibit that draws about 1.7 million visitors each year.
The Palestinian president accepted the proposal. But the museum's governing board, apparently capitulating to pressure from within the American-Jewish community (one of whose members reportedly characterised Mr Arafat as "Hitler incarnate"), blocked the move.
The museum chairman, Mr Miles Lerman, said Mr Arafat was "more than welcome" to visit in a private capacity, but that, were the museum to host him in an official capacity, "we'd be making a political statement . . . The museum does not become part of political disputes, one way or the other".
The stormy debate in Israel yesterday over the issue illustrated how controversial a figure Mr Arafat remains, more than four years after he and the late Yitzhak Rabin shook hands at the start of an intended process of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation.
The late Egyptian president, Mr Anwar Sadat, visited the Israeli Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem 20 years ago; King Hussein of Jordan went to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Holocaust museum in Los Angeles two years ago, with the support of most Jewish leaders.
Demonstrating the different standards that apply in the case of Mr Arafat, the same Wiesenthal's Centre's Israeli director, Mr Efraim Zuroff, yesterday endorsed the Washington museum's cold-shouldering of the Palestinian leader. He alleged that the Arafat-led Palestinian Authority and the Arafat-controlled Palestinian media were guilty of systematic Holocaust denial.
Mr Arafat did not genuinely desire to learn about the Holocaust or identify with victims of Nazism, asserted Dr Zuroff, but was "most likely" engaged in "a ploy to gain support in western public opinion".
That view was echoed by Mr Yehoshua Matza, an Israeli cabinet minister, who said that the idea of inviting Mr Arafat to the museum represented "first-class insensitivity to the Jewish people".
Lined up on the other side of the dispute were members of the opposition Labour Party, a kibbutz Holocaust museum, the head of the 25 Holocaust survivor groups in Israel, and the national Yad Vashem memorial.
The director of Yad Vashem, Mr Avner Shalev, said he would be "honoured" to host Mr Arafat, "and I'm sure he would gain much by such a visit".
Mr Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian peace negotiator, said Mr Arafat found the Washington snub "very offensive," adding that the Israeli museum invitations would now be considered.