THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

than a million Jews who had walked here on their last path. At the same time, threeIAF F-15 fighter jets flew above the barracks, the bunk beds, the marching grounds,and the ashes. The planes saluted their commander on the ground and the dead underhis feet. Colonel Shai Gilad, native of Kibbutz Yifat, flew one of planes. Hisgrandfather and grandmother, whom he had never known, were reportedly amongthe victims. He carried with him in the cockpit the documents of his lost family, givento him by the Yad Vashem Institute for the memorial flight.Israeli journalists interviewed the pilots after they returned from their mission. Inone interview, a journalist for a periodical of a Kibbutz movement asked the pilot,“Did your f light above Auschwitz-Birkenau take place sixty years too late?”The pilot, one of the finest native-born Israelis, replied naively, in the spirit of Barak’sspeech:It reminds me of the sentence that Ehud Barak said ten years agowhen he, as [IDF] chief of staff, visited the death camps. “We arrivedfifty years too late.” I assume that it was not easy to bomb a camp likethis. Also, a targeted bombing would have not prevented the Shoah,and many innocent victims would have died as a result . . . This actwas meant to unite the heart around the ethos of the memory of theShoah and it should not be taken any further. 3I disagree with him and wish to take this further. The chief of staff and his pilot,together with the Israeli masses, anachronistically identify military uniforms and theIsraeli armed forces as an integral part of the Jewish history of the Shoah period. Butthe Shoah happened before the IDF was formed. We did not just arrive late, as wekeep saying, as if it were simply tardiness due to technical difficulties, a schedulingconflict. We did not arrive and could not have arrived. We did not exist and thereforecould not aid and rescue. It is nonsense to say otherwise. The intimidating flightmission above the death camps was a show of bravado and arrogance, in the samemanner of the supersonic boom-producing flights of folly above the Syrianpresidential palace, or the low-altitude sorties that scare shepherds and refugees insouthern Lebanon. It is a way of showing off, and it underlines the differencebetween us and them. It is like saying to the dead, after their unheroic, unimpressive,pathetic deaths, that to us, the Israelis, it would have not have happened. We speaknot just to them, but also to ourselves: We are pilots and generals and veterans of