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Alan Perlman is a resident of the community of Carmel in the Hebron Hills region and a technical writer. Perlman has a master's degree in social work.
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By Alan Perlman
December 27, 2004
In protest against their scheduled expulsion, the Jewish residents of Gaza took to wearing orange Stars of David on their clothing, clearly appropriating the image of the yellow stars worn by Jews during the Holocaust into their protest.
Then, following a highly negative response from the public, the protesters dropped the orange star almost as quickly as they adopted it.
The objection to the orange star is clear -- the Holocaust was and remains a unique Jewish experience of such enormous magnitude that use of its symbols for anything else can only serve to trivialize the Holocaust. This argument is powerful, and perhaps ultimately correct.
But one must ask -- were people upset that the yellow star symbol of the Holocaust was used for a non-Holocaust issue, or did they merely disagree with the particular issue? Settlers are certainly not the first Jews to use Holocaust imagery for non-Holocaust issues.
Nobel-laureate Elie Wiesel, who speaks against injustice everywhere, frequently relates other peoples' sufferings to Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. Now this is not a criticism of Elie Wiesel; his universal concern for humanity can only be commended. Nevertheless, we must ask whether such a linkage is acceptable or if it diminishes the uniqueness of the Holocaust.
Another such linkage was established by the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., which is not only a museum to the Holocaust but to issues of tolerance everywhere. (There were, to be sure, objections when the museum issued an invitation to a famous, and now dead, mass-murdering terrorist to come on a VIP visit. But I guess even tolerance is not such a clear-cut issue.)
Closer to home, a member of Knesset, himself a Holocaust survivor and an anti-Religious Semite who hates all things associated with Judaism, objects to all use of Holocaust symbols unless he is the one using them for his own agenda. And so, for example, when it suits his fancy, he accuses one of the greatest Rabbis of our day of killing his (the member of Knesset's) father again (the father had perished in the Holocaust), because the member of Knesset did not like, and clearly did not understand, a particular Torah lesson of this Rabbi. This same member of Knesset also compared the plight of an Arab woman, whose home was destroyed because it was a base for terrorism, to the plight of his grandmother during the Holocaust.
Shabak, the famed Israeli Protective Services organization, utilized the Holocaust for non-Holocaust purposes. It will be recalled that Shabak agent provocateur, Avishai Raviv, whose job was to delegitimize the Israeli right wing in the eyes of the country, had leaflets printed up of Yitzhak Rabin in a Nazi uniform. The Israeli Left still hasn't forgiven the right-wing victims of that Shabak prank.
The Israeli Left, of course, loves to compare Israeli soldiers to Nazis (the late Professor-Rabbi Yeshayahu Leibowitz used the term "Judeo-Nazis"), and the so-called occupation of the Arabs to the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust. Much more recently, the Israeli Left and Israeli media had a field day when media across the world flashed a picture of an Arab at a checkpoint playing his violin in front of Israeli soldiers. It was the perfect opportunity to compare the plight of this poor Arab to Jews during the Holocaust who were forced to play music in order to pretend to the world that the death camps were not so bad.
Never mind that the suicide bomber who blew up Sbarro's Pizza Shop in Jerusalem carried his explosive device in a guitar case. Never mind that the soldier was merely trying to ascertain if the violin was only a violin and not a bomb. Never mind that you cannot compare the checking of a violin at a checkpoint to the forced music in the death camps.
The Israeli Left and media were able to demean Israeli soldiers and the dangerous but life-saving work that they do on behalf of all Israelis -- at the expense of the Holocaust.
And if you want a measure of how successful they were, consider that Kibbutz Eilon is allowing that very same Arab (whose violin was not a bomb) to participate in a master violin course, despite the fact that this required the kibbutz to bend its own rules since the Arab has only been playing for a month.
I appreciate that Kibbutz Eilon felt bad for the man. But do they feel bad for, and invite, all Arabs who get checked at checkpoints, or only those who are portrayed as the Arab counterparts to Jewish victims of the Nazis?
The Jewish world must decide. Are the symbols of the Holocaust sacred and not to be used for any other purpose? If so, well and good, and let's all abide by that.
But as it currently stands, not only are Jews using the symbols of the Holocaust for causes of their choosing, the latest usage of the Holocaust was to bash those "horrid" settlers in Gaza that the "good" Jews hate and cannot wait to deport.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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