Perverting the Message of the Holocaust

Today the State of Israel commemorated Yom HaSho'ah - Holocaust Memorial Day.

One of slogans most frequently associated with the Shoah is Never Again.

Never Again... will the Jewish People place their fate (and faith) in the nations of the world.

Never Again... will the Jewish People question the importance of living as sovereign in their Homeland.

Never Again... will Jews sit passively while their brothers and sisters are being persecuted.

Never Again... will Jews believe that they can solve the "Jewish Question" through assimilation and fleeing from their Jewish Heritage and destiny.

Sadly, not all Jews have internalized these messages.

Pain as common denominator

Group of Israeli students – Jewish, Muslim and Christian – visit Polish death camps as part of course on Holocaust, Nakba, and learning to understand each other’s stories.

Thirty students – 15 Jewish and 15 Arab – from the Yizrael Valley Academic College took part in the trip as part of the course “Holocaust and Existence: Humanistic and Multicultural views of the Holocaust.” The course, like the trip itself, is unusual in its characteristics.

During the first semester, students study the Holocaust, and after returning from the death camps they learn about the Nakba, which signifies for Israeli Arabs the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 during Israel's war of independence...

The students tell that after the trip and the ties created among the group, their will for dialogue with the other side, to know the Palestinian perspective, and learn the other side’s pain, was sharpened.

Under the guise of promoting tolerance and co-existence, the memory of the Holocaust and the six million Jews who were slaughtered, along with the foundations of the Jewish State are being destroyed.

Consider the following points:

* In this course, the Holocaust, where six million Jews were slaughtered, is compared with Nakba ("The Catastrophe"), a day of mourning for the Arabs of Israel over the supposed "expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948." (and on which today sits the Jewish State of Israel.

According to the narrative of the Nakba, the Jewish People who settled the Land of Israel and helped to establish the Jewish State are akin to the Nazis, while the Arabs of Israel take on the role of the weak, oppressed and homeless Jews.

* The Arabs of Israel, in their commemoration of the Nakba on the anniversary of the day that the Jewish State of Israel was established, are in fact lamenting the very existence of the Jewish State of Israel.

I imagine that there are a number of key facts that are being left out of this course:

1st, the active involvement of the Arabs (in particular, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini) who worked together with Hitler to bring the destruction of the Holocaust to the Land of Israel.

2nd, the only reason that the Arabs of Israel have a Nakba to commemorate is because they (and 7 Arab countries) failed in their efforts to wipe the newly re-established Jewish State of Israel off the map by attacking the Jewish State the very moment it was established.

Had the neighboring Arab countries not insisted upon the Arabs of Israel leaving their homes before the war in order to make the destruction of the Jewish State easier, they would not have become refugees. As such, the vast majority of Arab refugees only have their Arab brothers to blame.

3rd, had the Arabs of Israel been accepted the United Nations Partition Plan in 1947, they would have had a state of their own. Instead, as has been the case time and time again, the Arabs rejected the Partition Plan because it would have meant that they would have had to accede to the re-establishment a Jewish State in the Land of Israel - something which to this day, they are not prepared to accept.

But, then again, why should we let facts, history and six million murdered Jews stand in the way of "peace"?

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