Occupied Jerusalem: The head of Israel's central Holocaust memorial yesterday assailed Jewish colonists who harass Palestinians in a tinderbox West Bank city, saying the abuse recalled the anti-Semitism of pre-Second World War Europe.

Yad Vashem chairman Yosef Lapid's unusually fierce and public attack was prompted by Israeli television footage showing a Hebron colonist woman hissing "w***e" at her Palestinian neighbour and colonist children lobbing rocks at Arab homes.

The spectacle stirred outrage in the Jewish state, where many view the colonists as a movement opposed to coexistence with a future Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Lapid, a Holocaust survivor who lost his father to the Nazi genocide, said in a weekly commentary on Israel Radio that the acts of some Hebron colonists reminded him of persecution endured by Jews in his native Yugoslavia on the eve of Second World War.

"It was not crematoria or pogroms that made our life in the diaspora bitter before they began to kill us, but persecution, harassment, stone-throwing, damage to livelihood, intimidation, spitting and scorn," Lapid said, reiterating remarks made earlier this week in Israel's Maariv newspaper.

"I was afraid to go to school, because of the little anti-Semites who used to lay in ambush on the way and beat us up. How is that different from a Palestinian child in Hebron?"

Hebron has been a frequent flashpoint of more than six years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. Some 400 colonists live there, under heavy Israeli military guard, among 150,000 Palestinians.

Hebron colonists were not immediately available to respond to Lapid's criticism, but Israel Radio broadcast earlier comments by the community's spokesman, Noam Arnon, in which he played down the televised harassments as "fringe incidents". "In six years, 37 Jews have been murdered in Hebron, and now they're preoccupied with curses?" Arnon said.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ordered a cabinet-level probe last week into Palestinian allegations that abuse by Hebron colonists is commonplace and routinely ignored by Israel. Deputy Defence Minister Ephraim Sneh said he hoped for an Israeli crackdown against the colonist "provocateurs", but Palestinian officials called for comprehensive action.

"If they are serious about coexistence, the Israelis must take practical steps on the hundreds of daily violations against Palestinians in the old city," Hebron Governor Arif Jabari said.