Remark By Dalai Lama Upsets Israeli

EILAT, Israel - When the Dalai Lama found a "seed of human compassion" in Nazis, an Israeli parliament minister called it "unconscionable."

The exiled Tibetan leader, spiritual guide for millions of Buddhists, visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial on Sunday and said: "Even in such people, deep down there is a seed of human compassion, this is my basic belief."

He apparently was referring to the German Nazis who killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.

"Any relating to Nazis in terms of humanity is unconscionable," Environment Minister Yossi Sarid told reporters yesterday on his way to joining the Dalai Lama at a jazz concert in the Israeli resort town of Eilat.

The Dalai Lama, on his first visit to Israel, is spending five days as a guest of the Society for the Protection of Nature. He is scheduled to address an international conference on the environment from Mount Yoash near Eilat.

He visited Jerusalem's Western Wall, Judaism's most holy site, yesterday as well as Muslim holy sites.

Wearing a red yarmulke, or skull cap, he offered the Western Wall a prayer in his native language.

He met with Israel's chief rabbis, Christian clerics and officials of the Islamic trust in charge of the al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third most holiest site.

Israeli leaders have been careful not to confer the status of state visit.

Israel is cultivating trade ties with China, which frowns on any political recognition of the Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lama fled Tibet, a formerly independent Himalayan mountain region seized by China in 1951, after the Chinese army crushed an uprising there in 1959. He maintains a government-in-exile in Dharmsala, India.

Sarid and Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert stressed that they were meeting the Dalai Lama in his capacity as a religious leader, not as the exiled leader of Tibet.