THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

fight. 13Sharansky, who then read verbatim from his prepared speech, claimed that Israelwas facing a threat of the same level as sixty years earlier. To him, Europe is the sameEurope, and the world the same world, just as for me he is not the same Sharansky.Without blinking, the Israeli minister in charge added the Palestinians to the Shoahequation.This official position is the Israeli ghetto at its worst. Without being able to identifyand understand the world’s dynamics, we are digging in our identity foxholes.Apparently old habits die hard in the face of new realities. Perhaps it is a survivalinstinct that the Jewish people learned to distrust. Could it be that what we viewed asblessing is now a curse? According to the Bible, King Balak hired the Mesopotamianprophet Balaam to curse us. But instead Balaam managed only to bless and praise us.Balaam was an observer, and he notes: “Lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shallnot be reckoned among the nations.” In our generation, it seems that our seclusion—and insensitivity to the sacrifice of other nation—is perhaps the core of Balaam’slong-term curse. The spiritual isolationism is the national curse of our generation.Once we decided to accept K. Zetnik’s testimony in the Eichmann trial verbatim,without questioning, we exiled ourselves to “another planet” on the Shoah platform,and our lives are a journey between dark planets. As far we are concerned, we liveon the Auschwitz planet. All is Shoah and everything is weighed on its scales. Therays of light that reach Israel break as they pass through the prism of crematoria.When it happens to others, we move to the next planet, where there is no room forthe other’s suffering, no genocides, no atrocities, and no holocausts that are not ours.We are on the side the Turks in their denial of the Armenian Holocaust, and we arebeside the U.S. right-wingers, not knowing anything about America’s original nations.We supplied arms to those who perpetuated the massacres in Rwanda and our denialreaches inside the Balkans. Soon after the Eichmann trial concluded, the Israeligovernment, and society in large, denied Hannah Arendt’s argument that the Shoahwas a human crime, committed by human beings, made possible by a new type of amurderer, the bureaucrat. The rejection of Arendt’s Eichmann Trial was brief andfatal. No, protested the Shoah establishment. The Shoah is unique. It happened onlyto us; do not contaminate our Shoah with other people’s troubles. In this mannerIsrael isolated itself from profound world processes and became a denier of other