Unlike Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, who sees antisemitism as a general problem of different nations intent on killing one another, my parents, both survivors of the Nazi extermination camps, had no doubts as to the essence of antisemitism. "Non-Jews hate Jews," my father concluded in one of his short and sad conversations with me about the Holocaust. My mother, who was separated from her parents at the age of 14, had no illusions either after her relatives were burned in the crematoriums. They both made aliyah, neither seeking to rehabilitate themself in other countries after the war.
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Unlike bloody territorial disputes between different peoples, many of which are temporary, antisemitism has accompanied this ancient people throughout its existence, beginning with the exodus from Egypt and continuing till this day. Antisemitism has its own literature and ideological substrate. Incitement to the murder of Jews has accompanied the Jewish people in their Diaspora in the East and the West throughout history. It appears in Muslim and Christian literature as well as the Nazi literature that led to the Holocaust. There was no diplomatic or territorial dispute between Germany and the Jews, and yet they destroyed the Jews. And the world was silent precisely because they were Jews.
Explanations for antisemitism are wrapped in attempts toward its practical justification: They are rich, they steal the land, they lend money and charge interest, among other charges. In the end, though, there is something mystical about the hatred of the Jewish people. It is because we were chosen to deliver God's message and the Torah to the world. This is what established a polarity in which the Jews are situated on one end and the world on the other.
President Chaim Herzog also declared this in front of the representatives at the UN. He and his brother Michael, who served as director-general of the Prime Minister's Office, did not make the same distinctions as Lapid when he turned antisemitism into yet another bloody conflict between peoples. No, they understood the depth of the hatred for the Jewish people. Their father, Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Halevi Herzog, instilled them with this understanding from our Torah and generations of experience.
What led Lapid to turn antisemitism into a cosmopolitan problem? Was it a political agenda? Even if this was not Lapid's intention, his words could provide ammunition for Palestinian propaganda efforts to revoke our rights to the Jewish state.
The Holocaust transpired against the background of the UN resolution on the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. The Palestinians used slanderous anti-Israel propaganda, claiming the Nakhba – the "catastrophe" of the displacement of Palestinian refugees during Israel's establishment - was a Holocaust perpetrated with the world's support and the Jewish state is therefore illegitimate and has no right to exist.
Lapid must issue a correction and rectify the situation. He owes it to the memory of Holocaust victims, including his own relatives, and the memory of all victims of antisemitism throughout the generations.
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