Shmuel Saarlouis, a Holocaust survivor residing in Ashdod, gave back to Brig. Gen. Ilan Harari the IDF citation of merit he had received on Passover, in protest against the IDF’s role in the destruction of Gush Katif.

Channel 7 journalist Haggai Huberman reports that the citation was in the name of the IDF’s Education Corps, the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum and the Welfare Fund for Holocaust Victims in Israel.

The seventy-one-year-old Shumuel Saarlouis, a native of Amsterdam, was expelled from his home at the age of eight, together with his mother, his late sister and his brother Yehuda (today living in Bnei-Darom). Fifty-eight members of his extended family were murdered in the Holocaust. When he was Bar-Mitzvah he was evacuated from the orphanage where he studied because of hostile Arab fire from the villages of Kula and Migdal Tsedek. His two sons lived in Neveh Dekalim, and were expelled from their homes last summer.

In a letter to Brig. Gen. Harari Saarlouis explains why he is returning the citation to the IDF: “I gladly received in my home the two charming soldiers, both from the NAHAL Brigade (in which I served as well), Itay Zuckerman and Anat Cohen, who presented me with the citation. However, when I reached the age of seventy, the IDF was ordered by the Israeli government to expel my two sons, my two daughters-in-law and my eleven grandchildren from their home in Neveh-Dekalim (they are still living in a hotel to this day).

For this last expulsion your commander, the IDF Chief of Staff, gave a citation to the cadets of the air force. And now you, the same Chief of Staff’s subordinate, give me a citation for “extraordinary human achievement”. I simply cannot stand the thought of being put in the same category as the people who carried out the expulsion order”, wrote Saarlouis to the commander of the Education Corps.

“I apologize to the Fund for Holocaust Victims and the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum, who also took part in this worthy endeavor, but I must return the citation”.