If Israel were a supermarket, the Holocaust would be our store brand. All Israelis have their views about it, and everyone uses it – and not only on certain days or at certain times. It is an all-season brand that many also carry with them when they go abroad.
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The Holocaust is about the only thing that Israelis, who are known for being unusually generous, won't share with other nations. The opposite – when someone so much as tries to touch it, we are outraged. And it doesn't matter if he's a Jew named Zelenskyy whose people are currently being subjected to a terrible tragedy, a war that is sending them into exile and bringing them destruction and death. But who are they to touch our holiest of holies? Why is he making comparisons? There is nothing to compare. The Ukrainians are just being attacked and forced to flee for their lives – pregnant women are being killed when hospitals are bombed and families are murdered by snipers. The Russians only have a deep-seated hatred for the Ukrainians, and incite against them and against their leadership, while using dictatorial means to block reliable information – but it's not a racial supremacy issue.
Lest there be any doubt, there is nothing that is like the Holocaust – which was a precise genocide that entailed violence and brutality that neither the head nor the heart can comprehend. But it's a long jump from that to thinking that Zelenskyy's remarks made "light" of the Holocaust.
We are allowed to do anything we want with the Holocaust, and in its name, even make ugly and cynical use of it. Until not long ago, Israel had a prime minister who in order to prevent a new Iran nuclear deal from being signed brought Elie Wiesel to Congress and at a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem said that, unlike the Holocaust, Israel had seen the danger of COVID in time. Every year, Israel holds a pageant for Holocaust survivors, which is a PR event for the nonprofit organization that runs it. On social media, right-wing extremists compare the costs of security Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's home in Raanana to the Nazi Party's Eagle's Nest, and of course we can compare the Iranians and the Nazis. But heaven forbid we compare the violent dictator Putin to Hitler.
At this very moment, the citizens of Ukraine are facing the destruction of their country in the name of expansion by a person who controls the biggest country in the world. And that same world is not taking physical action to stop that person, and Israel is opting to stay neutral. We're Switzerland – all we need to do is start making good watches and chocolate.
"I can only urge the leaders of the world not to repeat the mistakes of the past… Not to ignore aggression in the hopes of gaining an illusory peace," Benjamin Netanyahu told the US Congress in 2015. If Zelenskyy had wanted to make cynical use of the Holocaust, he wouldn't have needed to do much – just use our own words against us.
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