It was 1969. Israel had just come jaw-droppingly victorious out of the Six Day War, where it had dealt a swift and fatal blow to three Arab armies and occupied territories that were three times its size. The United Nations Security Council had subsequently passed Resolution 242, which would pave the way to a settlement of the Israeli-Arab conflict, coining the famous phrase "land for peace." Israel was about to see one of the underlying principles of Zionism realized: a Jewish state living in peace with its neighbors.
The pill, it seems, was too hard to swallow. Israel was to give up territories that it had occupied and seen as parts of its homeland, and return to the armistice borders established in 1949; according to them, in some parts of the country, the distance between the Mediterranean Sea and Israel's eastern border was a mere 15 kilometers. When asked about the plan by a German magazine, then-Foreign Minister Abba Eban replied that those borders reminded Israelis of Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi death camp.
These comments, made actually by one of the more moderate members of the Israeli cabinet, have become symbolic of Israel's exploitation of the Holocaust for political ends. How on earth could these situations be comparable? How can the Jews of Israel, assembled in a sovereign country that, though small, boasted a formidable military power, be likened to the stateless, defenseless Jews of Europe who were murdered in the millions?
Menachem Begin, who was elected in 1977 as Israel's first right-wing prime minister, made that practice into an art form. He said the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, then a charismatic commander of a paramilitary force, was the modern incarnation of Adolf Hitler; for him, the alternative to Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, was Treblinka, another notorious Nazi death camp. In the minds of those people, 30 and 40 years ago, the analogy held water. Members of that generation, who in many cases saw their entire families decimated, understandably saw a catastrophe behind every danger.
Today, Benjamin Netanyahu is cashing in on the same tactic. The man who prides himself on being a historian's son is bent on learning history's lesson — but a very specific one. "The year is 1938, and Iran is Nazi Germany," he famously said in 2006 (which, if you do the math, makes today 1944, so Iran is facing imminent defeat), and only last month [February 2012] his speech at AIPAC was loaded with Holocaust references.
And it works. By painting a nuclear Iran as the doomsday scenario, Netanyahu has convinced Israelis that any other alternative would be preferable, even a preemptive strike on Iranian soil that would instigate a conventional war that may well spiral out of control. He should be commended for this achievement. If all Israeli eyes are set on Iran, people's attention is swayed away from domestic issues — that, judging by last summer's unprecedented protest movement, are quite serious — and the ongoing Israeli occupation of the Palestinians, then that will cast serious doubt on Israel's future as both a Jewish state and a democracy.
Political imagery so backward-looking and planted in the past betrays the most basic tenet of the political endeavor: to make the country — any country — a better place. And more precisely, Netanyahu is a traitor to the Zionist cause, of which he would probably crown himself the biggest champion. Because Zionism, initially, was meant to provide the Jews with a normal existence. And a normal existence is above all a safe one, one which would enable the Jews to concentrate on the future instead of living in the past. It is regrettable that almost 64 years after the establishment of Israel, when Holocaust survivors become increasingly scarce, the worldview of the man at the helm is composed of an event that most Israelis haven't experienced. "Never again," the vow that humanity took after the extent of the horror became apparent, has never been so devoid of real meaning.
In his speech before AIPAC, Netanyahu outlined the details of the Iranian nuclear program and ended with a rhetorical question: "If it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck, what is it?" And the crowd went wild. "What is it?" he repeated, and the applause intensified. Had it not been a rhetorical question, someone might have given him the answer he was looking for: that it's Hitler.
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