The Politicization of the Holocaust: Examining the Uses and Abuse of Its Legacy
The Politicization of the Holocaust: Examining the Uses and Abuse of Its Legacy
By Allan C. Brownfeld
October/November 1998, pages 47-49, 100

For many years, every foreign visitor to Israel, soon after arriving, has been taken to Yad Vashem, the memorial in Jerusalem to the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.

Early in 1995, this policy was changed. Since then, Israel has decided to merely suggest that those making official visits walk through this museum of Nazi barbarity and Jewish suffering. Only presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers will still be taken as a matter of course.

Council for Judaism. (c) Copyright 1995-1999, American Educational TDuring his term as prime minister, Menachem Begin repeatedly invoked the Holocaust as a justification for his policies. He often compared Yasser Arafat to Hitler, referring to him as a “two-legged beast,” a phrase he had used earlier to describe Hitler. Begin compared the PLO’s Palestine National Covenant to Mein Kampf. “Never in the history of mankind has there been an armed organization so loathsome and contemptible with the exception of the Nazis,” he said.

On the eve of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, Begin told his cabinet, “You know what I have done and what we have all done to prevent war and loss of life. There is no other way to fight selflessly. Believe me, the alternative is Treblinka, and we have decided that there will be no more Treblinkas.”

A few weeks after the war in Lebanon began, Begin responded to international criticism of Israel, Segev points out, “by repeating a premise that his predecessors had shared: after the Holocaust, the international community had lost its right to demand that Israel answer for its actions. ‘No one, anywhere in the world, can preach morality to our people,’ Begin declared to the Knesset.

with my own hands. I am sure that in your soul a similar fantasy hovers. There is not and never will be a cure of this open wound in our souls. Tens of thousands of dead Arabs will not heal this wound.
“But, Mr. Begin, Adolf Hitler died 37 years ago...Hitler is not hiding in Nabatea, in Sidon or in Beirut. He is dead and gone. Again and again, Mr. Begin, you reveal to the public eye a strange urge to resuscitate Hitler in order to kill him every day anew in the guise of terrorists...This urge to revive and obliterate Hitler over and over again is the result of a melancholy that poets must express, but among statesmen it is a hazard that is liable to lead them along a path of mortal danger.”

Some in Israel seem to learn a universal lesson from the Holocaust and apply it in creating a more humane society. In February 1983, the Knesset held a debate on “Fifty Years Since the Nazi Rise To Power—The Day and Its Lessons.”

Yair Tsaban (Mapam), a leader of the Israeli peace movement, said that the most important lesson of the Holocaust was the universal one: “To be on guard, to be alert to every sign of the erosion of democracy, to every inclination toward dictatorship of any type, in any clothing, even if populist or pseudo-leftist. This lesson is accompanied by another lesson: the terrible peril involved in the conjunction of the destruction of democracy and the rise of dictatorship with the cancerous growth of unrestrained, overpowering nationalist madness.”

Others in Israel, however, are learning a different lesson. Young Israelis are sent to visit the Nazi death camps in Europe and are taught a largely narrow and nationalistic lesson.

Segev cites a special booklet, a message for teachers and guides, written by Avraham Oded, the Ministry of Education’s director of youth, which includes the following passage: “As we stand beside the death furnaces in the extermination camps, our hearts fill with resentment and tears come to our eyes…Yet while we weep and suffer pain and sorrow over the destruction, our hearts fill with pride and contentment at the great privilege we have of being citizens of an independent Israel…

of the state, Israel was sending its children into the Jewish past abandoned by its founding fathers, who hoped to create a ‘new man,’ free of the ghetto past. The young people were sent to seek out what secular Israeli society was, apparently, unable to offer them, roots. The trip was a ritual laden with emotion and symbols and a sometimes bizarre obeisance to what Saul Friedlander once described as the union of Kitsch and death...

University, attended the “March of the Living.” At a ceremony on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau he heard Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu declare that, “The Nazis failed...we won.” Netanyahu then expounded on the “lessons” of Auschwitz to the 7,000 participants.

Writing in The Forward (May 22, 1998), Dr. Nadler laments that, “To my regret I was among them. For Mr. Netanyahu, as for many Israelis, the Holocaust is as uncomplicated as it is tragic. Its lessons are the lessons of Zionist historiography.

“If only the Jews had listened to the warnings of the Zionist leaders and evacuated Europe for Eretz-Yisrael, Auschwitz would not have happened…Most important, the rise of the state of Israel is history’s answer and consolation for the catastrophe that befell European Jewry.”

The Netanyahu speech “offended me,” states Nadler. “The Holocaust is rarely confronted in Israel on its own bleak, inconsolable terms. Even the country’s official day of mourning for the Holocaust connects the tragedy with the glory of Jewish resistance and subsequent rebirth...


Alive and Well in the U.S.
Unfortunately, the politicization of the Holocaust and its confusion with the contemporary politics of the Middle East is also alive and well in the United States. After a brutal assault upon him by those who disagreed with his views of the current Israeli government and its policies, Professor John Roth of Claremont McKenna College in California, an internationally respected Holocaust scholar, resigned as director of the Holocaust Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, a post he was slated to officially begin in August.
teacher/scholar for his work on The Holocaust and the American Experience.

“As to the attackers, the Talmud asks who is a powerful person—one who makes an enemy a friend. I wonder what our sages would say of one who shamelessly and without foundation labels a friend an enemy?...This is a sad day for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and an even sadder day for public Jewish life in the United States.”