Arens’ Brother Delivers a Scathing Attack on Israel

Richard Arens, brother of Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens, delivered a scathing attack on Israel here yesterday at a meeting sponsored by pro-Palestinian groups.

He likened Israel’s settlement drive on the West Bank to Nazi Germany’s quest for “lebensraum” and accused the Israelis of subjecting Palestinian Arabs to curfews, torture, confiscation and mass arrests. He said Israel wants the Arabs out of the territory.

Arens, a professor of international law at the University of Bridgeport (Conn.) Law School, has long been at ideological odds with his brother, the Israeli defense chief, a Herut hard-liner who as a Knesset member opposed the Camp David accords and the Israel-Egypt peace treaty.

In the course of his address to about 1,000 people at a meeting sponsored by the Arab Palestine Association and the Canada-Palestine Solidarity Committee to mark the first anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps massacre, Arens criticized his brother for failing to investigate the murders of Palestinian students last July by what he alleged were Israeli death squads.

This was a reference to the attack by masked gunmen on a group of students at the Islamic College in Hebron during which three students were killed and 33 were wounded. The attackers have still not been identified.

Arens called the refugee massacres — perpetrated by the Phalangists — “one of the most horrible examples ot genocide humanity has had the misfortune to witness,”

Arens described himself as a penitent and Jewish by heritage but not in faith. He shared the platform with Abdullah Abdullah, the unofficial representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Ottawa.