Prime Minister-designate and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid's comments about the Jewish Holocaust were met with a hefty dose of criticism. The comparison he drew between the murder of a third of the Jewish people in the world in the biggest slaughters in modern history were seen as a kind of desecration, the feeling being that the Holocaust was "ours" only and cannot be compared to any other event.
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But the Holocaust is an open wound for the Jewish people, not some kind of property. It allows us to warn others about different signs, and mainly venomous incitement, which is an almost certain path to an outbreak of violence, and who knows where that will end. It works going back, too – for example, there should be no concern about recognizing the Armenian holocaust since "only" a million and a half Kurds did in it, so it can't be compared to our own Holocaust.
For my generation, who were born right after the Holocaust and couldn't comprehend the sheer human brutality of it, our parents explained that we didn't need to worry that it would repeat itself, because it happened far away from Israel, a long time ago. The Eichmann trial and many other discoveries made it clear to us that they had lied to calm us down. Many of us realized what Hannah Arendt did about the banality of evil: that it wasn't a society of madmen but just ordinary people that had been responsible for the murder of 6 million Jews, and that certain circumstances can make regular people into monsters.
Antisemitic incitement can cause people to believe that Jews make Passover matza out of human blood, for example, and someone who believes that could seek revenge or to be avenged. Antisemitism is a sort of trigger for unexpected brutality. We have no interest in making it unique to ourselves, as victims. The insufferable ease with which it spreads, and the Jewish people's bitter experiences at a target of it, make it possible for us to warn others and identify with other victims, which is exactly what Lapid did.
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