Michael B. Oren: Why the Holocaust Still Matters
[Michael B. Oren is an Israeli scholar, historian, author, now Israeli ambassador to the United States.]
... Detractors of Netanyahu alleged that, by asserting the reality of the Holocaust, he stooped to Ahmadinejad's level--worse, that he granted credibility to the Iranian thug by debating him over a universally accepted truth. “If 64 years after World War II concluded with Hitler’s fall … the debate on the reality of the Holocaust has reached the UN General Assembly,” Benn wrote, “then Ahmadinejad has succeeded in instilling doubt.”
Perhaps because they were raised in a society suffused with Holocaust consciousness, some Israelis might be unaware of the extent of ignorance of the Final Solution throughout the world, even in the United States, and especially among youth. Confronted with the enormity of the horror, many young people today--much like American Jewish leaders in 1942--react with incredulousness, rendering them susceptible to denial. Millions of Muslims, moreover, subscribe to the syllogism: If Israel was created by Europeans out of Holocaust guilt, and the Holocaust never occurred, then Israel's existence is unjust. Where better than the General Assembly, a body established in response to World War II and affording a global audience, to reaffirm the veracity of an event now so widely questioned if not refuted?
But in concentrating on the prime minister's preamble, critics overlook the deeper connections between the Holocaust and his subsequent themes. Recognizing the murder of six million Jews more than six decades ago is, in fact, vital for understanding the supreme dangers posed to six million Jews in Israel today by a nuclear Iran and by the Goldstone Report. Reasserting the factuality of the Holocaust is a prerequisite for peace.
Many factors contributed to the Holocaust--European anti-Semitism, mass murder technologies, and Allied indifference--but none more elemental than the Jews' inability to defend themselves. Israel and its citizen Defense Forces represent the most palpable means for redressing that incapacity.
Accordingly, denying the Holocaust not only deprives Israel of its raison d'être, but, more nefariously still, it invalidates the Jews' need to defend themselves. So, the Iranian leader proceeds to arm Hamas and Hezbollah and produce nuclear weapons while claiming that the Jews of Israel--like those of 1940s Europe--have nothing to fear. But Ahmadinejad does not stop short at merely deeming the Holocaust a "fairy tale;" rather, he portrays Israel as a Nazi state--guilty of perpetrating the very offenses against the Palestinians that the Nazis never did to the Jews.
Where Ahmadinejad leaves off, the Goldstone Report, or, as it is officially called, the “United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” persists. The U.N. mission purports to have investigated Israel's military action in Gaza last winter, an operation launched in response to the firing of more than 7,000 Hamas missiles at Israeli towns since Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the Strip. But instead of probing Hamas's deliberate effort to maximize Israeli civilian casualties and its doctrine of hiding behind Palestinian human shields, the judges interviewed handpicked Hamas witnesses, several of them senior commanders disguised as civilians, and uncritically accepted their testimony. Inexorably, the report, which presumed Israel's guilt, condemned the Jewish state for crimes against humanity and for mounting a premeditated campaign against Gaza civilians...
Read entire article at The New Republic
... Detractors of Netanyahu alleged that, by asserting the reality of the Holocaust, he stooped to Ahmadinejad's level--worse, that he granted credibility to the Iranian thug by debating him over a universally accepted truth. “If 64 years after World War II concluded with Hitler’s fall … the debate on the reality of the Holocaust has reached the UN General Assembly,” Benn wrote, “then Ahmadinejad has succeeded in instilling doubt.”
Perhaps because they were raised in a society suffused with Holocaust consciousness, some Israelis might be unaware of the extent of ignorance of the Final Solution throughout the world, even in the United States, and especially among youth. Confronted with the enormity of the horror, many young people today--much like American Jewish leaders in 1942--react with incredulousness, rendering them susceptible to denial. Millions of Muslims, moreover, subscribe to the syllogism: If Israel was created by Europeans out of Holocaust guilt, and the Holocaust never occurred, then Israel's existence is unjust. Where better than the General Assembly, a body established in response to World War II and affording a global audience, to reaffirm the veracity of an event now so widely questioned if not refuted?
But in concentrating on the prime minister's preamble, critics overlook the deeper connections between the Holocaust and his subsequent themes. Recognizing the murder of six million Jews more than six decades ago is, in fact, vital for understanding the supreme dangers posed to six million Jews in Israel today by a nuclear Iran and by the Goldstone Report. Reasserting the factuality of the Holocaust is a prerequisite for peace.
Many factors contributed to the Holocaust--European anti-Semitism, mass murder technologies, and Allied indifference--but none more elemental than the Jews' inability to defend themselves. Israel and its citizen Defense Forces represent the most palpable means for redressing that incapacity.
Accordingly, denying the Holocaust not only deprives Israel of its raison d'être, but, more nefariously still, it invalidates the Jews' need to defend themselves. So, the Iranian leader proceeds to arm Hamas and Hezbollah and produce nuclear weapons while claiming that the Jews of Israel--like those of 1940s Europe--have nothing to fear. But Ahmadinejad does not stop short at merely deeming the Holocaust a "fairy tale;" rather, he portrays Israel as a Nazi state--guilty of perpetrating the very offenses against the Palestinians that the Nazis never did to the Jews.
Where Ahmadinejad leaves off, the Goldstone Report, or, as it is officially called, the “United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” persists. The U.N. mission purports to have investigated Israel's military action in Gaza last winter, an operation launched in response to the firing of more than 7,000 Hamas missiles at Israeli towns since Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the Strip. But instead of probing Hamas's deliberate effort to maximize Israeli civilian casualties and its doctrine of hiding behind Palestinian human shields, the judges interviewed handpicked Hamas witnesses, several of them senior commanders disguised as civilians, and uncritically accepted their testimony. Inexorably, the report, which presumed Israel's guilt, condemned the Jewish state for crimes against humanity and for mounting a premeditated campaign against Gaza civilians...