THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

liked to compare the Palestinian National Charter to Hitler’s Mein Kampf . “Neverbefore in human history was such a despicable, wicked, armed organization formed—except for the Nazis,” Begin once said, referring to the Palestinian LiberationOrganization. Following the attack on Arafat’s headquarters in Beirut, according tothe Israeli historian Tom Segev, Begin told President Ronald Reagan that he felt as ifhe had sent the IDF to Berlin to kill Hitler in his bunker. His cabinet secretary at thetime, Arye Naor, testified that Begin persuaded his cabinet to launch the war inLebanon with these words: “You know what I have done and what we have all doneto avoid war and bereavement, but our fate in the Land of Israel is such that there isno choice but to fight and sacrifice. Believe me that the alternative is Treblinka, andwe have decided that there will be no more Treblinkas.” “Hitler is already dead, Mr.Prime Minister,” novelist Amos Oz retorted in the magazine Yediot Aharonot twoweeks after that unnecessary war broke out. “Again and again, Mr. Begin, you showthe public your strange urge to revive Hitler in order to kill him anew in the form ofterrorists. This urge to recreate and re-eliminate Hitler again and again is the fruit ofdistress that poets are obliged to express, but for a statesmen this might lead todangerous results.”The political debate between Oz, the prophet of the left, and Begin, the icon of theright, was not about form but about substance, about the ways of influencing history.It was a struggle between the poet’s distress and the politician’s psychosis; it was awrestling match between value systems, in the arena of words, over the use oflanguage, in this case laundered language. A harsh reality needs harsh words todescribe it, live it, and survive it. Laundered words allow us to perceive soiledrealities as clean. We did not invent this method, but we improved it, as if we learnednothing from the evil ones who had laundered words before us.The Nazi method was ingenious. Joseph Goebbels, the father of modernpropaganda, knew how to spin the sickest ideas as if they were health itself. He andhis henchmen sold these ideas, and the Germans bought them and looked away. Inhis brilliant essay, “The Future of Liberty,” Thomas Gauly examined the Westernconcepts of freedom and liberty:In his film Schindler’s List, American director Steven Spielbergpresents an effective example of the danger that threatens freedom asthe result of changing language values. The film tells the story of