Holocaust denial at home

Holocaust denial at home

Dan Margalit

A surprising new trend has come to Israel's shores. In recent years, the voices of those who wish to sever the lessons of the Holocaust - or at least diminish the link between the two - have grown louder. These people find the topic of the Holocaust distasteful.

They're not Holocaust deniers, heaven forbid, in the vein of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or his European antecedents. Of course the Holocaust happened, they say, just don't learn any important lessons from it. Don't travel to Auschwitz or wave a blue-and-white flag there. Don't fly over the gas chambers and crematoria wearing an IDF uniform, letting out quiet tears when you get home. Besides, say these modern-day preachers, history's worst killing field is more of a universal human than a purely Jewish tragedy. They're not Holocaust deniers exactly, just aiders and abetters to the fading of the Holocaust from public consciousness.

These belittlers of the Holocaust would have us distance ourselves from the event and suppress its memory for our own good. So that we don't become too neurotic. So that we overcome our psychological trauma. So that we don't become too nationalistic, something they believe could undermine peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

In their view, playing down the Holocaust will bring comfort to our tortured souls. We should not identify with the Haggadah's cry that "in every generation they rise up against us to destroy us." We must give up the habit of keeping our weapons cocked and not loosening our grip for a second.

Surprisingly, many Israelis deny that the Holocaust informs our daily existence here. They are wrong.

In fact, everything we do applies the lessons of the Holocaust. We teach our sons and grandsons that both here and abroad, a Jew must always carry a weapon. That defending our country is a humanist value, not worship of militarism, as the Holocaust belittlers would have us believe. That our right to live trumps everything else. At the same time, we have learned from the Holocaust that any use of force must be measured. It must be the least of our bad options, when there is no other choice.

Those who wish to remove the Holocaust from public discourse, to relegate it to private conversations in bedrooms and kitchens, who claim it no longer speaks to the reality of 2012, are ignoring the permanent condition of the Jews. The Holocaust proved the Zionist worldview right, as well as the tragic fact that it came to the Diaspora too late. It bears witness to the terrible blunder of the ultra-Orthodox, Bundists and Communists, who failed to understand that the primary path to salvation was sovereign existence in our homeland.

Holocaust Remembrance Day, which begins tonight (Wednesday) at sundown, is not merely a memorial day for victims. It is an active reminder that unless we maintain our readiness, the inferno could consume the nation in its homeland as well. What happened there and could happen here are both different and the same. When Moshe Dayan delivered his beautiful eulogy for Roey Rotberg, murdered by Palestinians at Nahal Oz near the Gaza border, saying that "without the steel helmet and the cannon muzzle, we will not be able to plant a tree or build a home," he added a chapter to the Jewish dilemma, which did not begin with early Zionist pioneers, but in the cursed lands of Europe.

The only thing that has changed about the Jewish condition is that here, in Israel, our fate depends on us alone, and we can internalize the lessons of what happened in Europe. Just as the Jewish people could not establish themselves in the land of Israel without our 3,800-year-old property rights to the Cave of the Patriarchs, we can no more skip over the intervening period to the 20th century settlement of the land of Israel. The cave, the gas chambers, and the IDF base cannot be untangled from each other. It is our obligation to ensure that the Jewish people sitting in Zion do not listen to advice from a modern-day Ahithophel (who betrayed King David) to remove one of these links in the chain.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1745