Berlin, March 9(IRNA) Germany's powerful Central Council of Jews is nothing more but the mouthpiece of Israel and is not pursuing German but Israeli national interests, said the daughter of the late chairman of the Central Council of Jews, Evelyn Hecht-Galinski on Friday.
"The Central Council of Jews has acted once again as a mouthpiece of Israel's government and has linked itself with the Israeli embassy (in Germany), labeling critics as anti-semites and Jewish critics as Jewish anti-semites," Hecht-Galinski told the Deutschlandfunk radio station.
She was reacting to the statements by the deputy chairman of the Central Council of Jews, Dieter Graumannn who branded a group of leading German Bishops as "anti-semitic" for comparing the situation of in the Palestinian-run areas with the suffering of Polish Jews under Nazi occupation.
The charge of being an anti-semite is used to silence critics.The Jewish-Israeli lobby and its networks are active worldwide to stiffle any criticism of Israel, added Hecht-Galinski, whose father headed the German Central Council of Jews from 1988 until 1992.
She stressed that as a German Jew she does not want to be "misused for the illegal policies of Israel."
Hecht-Galinski criticized also the German government for its blind support of Israel.
A frequent critic of the German Zionist lobby, Hecht-Galinski also lashed out at Israel for having built a "huge open-air prison" in the Palestinian territories.
Hecht-Galinski who is a member of the German section of a group calling itself 'European Jews for a Just Peace', made headlines in the press last year for her strong condemnation of Israel's brutal military actions in Lebanon and the Palestinian-run territories.
"As a German Jew, I am ashamed of Israel. Target killings, humiliating the Palestinian population, land dispossessions, destroying infrastructure, border checkpoint harassments, building the wall, blowing up houses, bombing UN monitors ...," she wrote in a letter to the Stern news magazine.
Hecht-Galinski said Israel was misusing the Nazi mass killings of Jews to justify its own atrocities in Palestine and Lebanon.
"Those governing in Israel are not only misusing my name but they also have the nerves to invoke the name of our murdered ancestors," Hecht-Galinski wrote in an article for the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Friday.
"They (Israelis) are not ashamed of referring to my grandparents who died in the concentration camps and mass graves, to justify their misdeeds in Palestine and Lebanon. The dead cannot answer back. But I can!," she added.