What is the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust for Israel and the Jewish people? There is a divergence of opinion:
Many Liberal Jews believe the main lesson of the Six Million is that we Jews should never do to others what was done to us. We know first hand what the horrors of hatred look like, and therefore, we must distance ourselves in every possible way from behaviors which are like those of the Nazis. This way of thinking posits that every mortal person has the potential to be a Nazi and when given power, every human and even every Jew can become abusive. But after the Holocaust, we Jews were tasked with being more ethical and virtuous than the barbarians. We took it upon ourselves to be the archetype of restraint, lest our very human Inner-Nazi is unleashed and we end up mirroring the tormentors we escaped. I call the folks in this camp Fear-of-Inner-Nazi Jews.
The other perspective is very different. It posits that the main lesson of the Holocaust is that Jews, having survived the hell of the Holocaust as a people, should Never Again allow anyone to do that to us again. The Zionist revolution effectuated a return to the land, to agriculture, a revival of Hebrew, and, so meaningfully, a resurrection of Jewish physical courage and military strength. Israel’s ability to put up a fight, and even to be a global leader in defense techniques and technology, is, for subscribers of this outlook, a source of pride. This group I call the Never-Again Jews.
But not only are these outlooks divergent, they also clash. For those in the Fear-of-Inner-Nazi faction, the Jewish State, when acting with force, can come dangerously close to being like the dreaded Nazis. The latest trigger of this phobia took place when a soldier in Hebron shot a downed terrorist. The Inner-Nazi group immediately sensed danger: Israel was slipping morally, carrying out extrajudicial killings, vigilantism, field execution — the Inner Nazi was coming out!
For those of the Never-Again viewpoint, the Hebron terrorist came to kill Jews, like a classic Nazi, and ended up dead. Was it OK to shoot the terrorist when he was down? Maybe yes, maybe no — but that’s not the big issue. The Jewish people are at war with a global Jihad which seeks to destroy Israel and to kill Jews for being Jews. The bottom line is that Israel must, first and foremost, protect Jews, and be the Never Again country which prevents the Nazis of today from harming one hair on one Jewish head.
However, for Never-Againers it’s not only that Jews have the right to kill Nazis or Jihadists because all is fair in war. For many of us, the very assertion that Jews have an Inner-Nazi and the given the ‘right circumstances’ we will herd people into gas chambers is preposterous! The father of Nazism, Adolf Hitler, hunted Jews precisely because we were the embodiment of morality, the “conscience of the world” which he wanted to wipe out. Anyone who really knows the Jewish and Israeli people knows that we have never been in danger of becoming Nazis. To the contrary (and contrary to global media), we are a source of light, liberty, and progress, regionally and globally.
Yet, the Fear-of-Inner-Nazi Jews are not the only ones who subscribe to the idea that Israel’s actions, unchecked, can easily approach Nazism. Anti-Israel propaganda harps endlessly upon those Liberal Jewish fears by insinuating a nexus between Israel’s actions and Nazism. Once the accusation has been lobbied, Fear-of-Inner Nazi Jews face a dilemma: If they believe the propaganda, they become anti-Israel. If they don’t, they bend over backwards to prove that Israel is not like that all, that we are a moral people with a moral army, and we have the Inner-Nazi in check. For Inner-Nazi Jews, the only solution is to throw the soldier who shot the downed terrorist in Hebron into the slammer and throw away the key after making a public example of him! Shackle the Inner-Nazi and hope the world sees the truth of our goodness!
In the meantime, the real Nazis of our time — the Hamas, ISIS, and Hezbollah — arm themselves and prepare for war. We know they are digging tunnels and we know they are building up their supplies of rockets with the intent of wiping Israel out. But we don’t hit them hard and we don’t strike with fury — we are chained down, stymied by our fear of unleashing the Inner-Nazi or by the fear of being accused of having one. We can only strike when we are under full attack, and then retaliate with only a measured response. A roof-knocking rocket, a kinder-gentler moral army, which makes sure to never fully win, and certainly would never use the word “vanquish” at the end of the war. Don’t crush the enemy, be merciful to the weak, even though moments ago he tried to kill you — Remember the Holocaust!
Some people say that we Jews talk too much about the Holocaust. I don’t think so at all. I think we don’t talk about it enough. We should take a minute every day to view photographs of dead-Jew-piles being tractored or burned. Then, after watching that, we should make a commitment each day to Never Again and act upon it by striking mercilessly at the Jihad and sending a clear signal – we have zero tolerance for Jewish injury, we have zero tolerance for Neo-Nazism. Now that we have the power to stop them, we should Never Again allow for the 6,000,001 victim. This should be our fundamental take-home lesson from the Holocaust.
And let’s take it one step further: instead of fearing the Inner-Nazi who will never appear, imagine if we would so embrace our inner Never Again Jewishness that we would not only protect our own, rather, we would use our newly found strength in a new role. Liberator. Israel – post-Holocaust empowered Jews – would go out and fight today’s Nazism wherever it is, and help the world defeat the very same forces that murdered Six Million when we were weak.
we have returned to the day s of the Judenrat in Israel where the GOI operates for the euro nazis to keep the jews within the euro designated ghetto and to sacrifice Jewish dissenters or rebels. todays Judenrat enforces the euro designated ghetto boundaries, arrests uppity Jews praying, publicly declares Jews guilty of heinous crime without evidence in the hope the euro nazis will be satisfied with the sacrifice, assists the euro nazis in giving the jewish homeland bit by bit clandestinely to the honor killers, maintains “law and order” on behalf of the euro nazi code of laws for jews…
the judenrat also pretended that they were good for the jews.
they appear to do more for the euro nazis than the Jews.
Call me whatever the hell you want. But smile when you say it, or I will consider it a threat and not just an insult.
There’s only a small circle of people in my life whose opinions are important to me, and I’m related to most of them.
Learn to live your own lives irrespective of what most other people think, and it will set you free of all the typically Jewish liberal anxieties.
In any case, your own lives are just about all you have, and when the end comes, as it must for each and all of us, it is the very last thing you will lose.
Think on all of this, and try to act accordingly.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
I am insulted by this title. Loosely calling any of us ‘inner nazis’ is disrespectful to the 6 million.
Oh ya….I am an ‘inner nazi’. I am dying to torture good people, and burn and rape and starve them.
I have met some questionable Jews – but none that would fit that criteria!
My experience with survivors of the Shoah was that they were very strong resilient people. They did not have a tendency to collapse into oozing puddles of jelly like modern left liberals.
So I think the most important lesson of the Shoah is how it made people resilient. And thus it is important to learn how it made people resilient. How can one learn these lessons without so much torture or actually being killed.
The first group are sympathetic but without an ability to be empathetic or be open to the sharings of other. Sympathy is destructive to resilience whereas empathy (putting oneself in the place of another )is growth. So in fact they have no learning, their reaction is a defense mechanism. They can’t see the beneficial effect of suffering, so they reject and avoid suffering and thus survival and life itself.
Anyway, whatever alternative theories there may be, it is important to understand the psychology of the first group so we can know how to deal with them.
I agree with revenge attacks AND they should be highly disproportionate for deterrnece. I do not agree with explanations as to why jew killers are killed or that they are not racist or apartheid…. its irrelevant… if there is a policy for anti semites, jew killers and terrorists to be killed there need be no further explanations. its time for Israel to demand explanations from the lying euros and UN whenever they have something to say, rather than answering seriously to their absurd and ludicrous statements.
every day muslims are abusing Jews in the US and this ignorant leftist Jstreet yid is concerned about fear of muslims…. ON HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY….. another low life POS who has used the memory of Jews slaughter and instead remembered the muslims who daily kill Jews. what an insult to compare the honor killers with the Jews… to compare the fear of a real threat of a murdering ideology with the Jews who never posed any threat in europe. I hate these kind of Jews more than I hate the anti semites.
Do the words she used sound familiar… we also heard them from Yaalon and Golan… did they all have the same speechwriter, the coincidence is too great
I wonder who coached them and wrote their speeches…. these generic leftist speeches hijacking the shoah day to cry for the honor killers.
I feel confident that these were the same sort of Jewish leadership that led our people into the ovens.
@ Keli-A:
Yes, I know, and I would add a heartfelt blessing
to the Arabsto G-d who saves us from our leaders each and every time.Lately, Ya’alon seems to be completely out of control. And I think his “feud” with Bibi over Yair Golan (spit) is only kabuki.
PS: I have asked you for a link in the Chit Chat thread. Have you seen the post?
bernard ross Said:
Tanchuma, Shoftim 15: “‘When you go forth to battle against your enemies’ (Deut. 20:1)… What is meant by ‘against your enemies‘? G-d said, ‘Confront them as enemies. Just as they show you no mercy, so should you not show them mercy.’”
Our sages also said (Sifri, Shoftim 192):
“You are going to war against your enemies and not against your brethren. It is not Judah against Simeon or Simeon against Judah such that if you fall captive they will have mercy on you… It is against your ENEMIES that you are waging war. If you fall into their hands, they will show you no mercy.”
If someone renders a halachic ruling that there is no state of war between us and the Arabs in our midst, that we are obligated to treat them with mercy, and that it is forbidden to kill one of them even after he tries to attack and kill a Jew, that person is nothing but a rodef [one who attacks with intent to kill], who collaborates with gentiles in the killing of Jews.
They have gone so far as to rule that if an Arab tries to attack or even to kill a Jew with a stone or weapon and then flees, one may not kill him, but may only catch him and deliver him to the authorities, our impoverished regime which is better off ceasing to exist. As our sages said (Sanhedrin 98a), “King David’s descendent will not come until the impoverished regime ends.” Rashi comments, “Until they lack even tenuous control over Israel.” In Tikkunei Zohar (p. 144), the Jewish kingdom that will exist in the pre-Messianic era is called “the government of the mixed multitude.”
@ Avigail:
This POS, when he was Commanding Officer of military Intel, tried to sell to the public that for peace with Assad Israel could give up the Golan…. The left and a host of stupid military officers supported first Barak and then BB in making such a deal with Assad. BB even agreed to give up the Golan but balked at the ultimate Assad demand that he have access to the Kinneret…. Where would Israel be today if they had made that insane deal??? I knew then that the man Ya’alon was an idiot and had no judgment or was pandering to the political structure for personal advancement. Either way or a combination of both speak volumes…. He is in my opinion an idiot and very intellectually diminished if not corrupted.
Of course herzog, the fake zionist who seeks to give the Jewish homeland to the muslims to build their homes rather than a real zionist who seeks to build in the Jewish homeland of Judea Samaria…. of course he would support such a lunatic blood libel…… after all, isnt that what the day of remembrance is for?…………
and Netanyahu perhaps had Yaalon instruct golan to the speech to show he was on the same page as Herzog in prep for the unity gov that he lied about negotiations.
Herzog and BB are the same because for BB it would make him nauseous, give him a severe allergic reaction, make him vomit, choke him, to utter these words which he has NEVER uttered in all the years of his last two terms…. these VERBOTEN words:
“JEWISH SETTLEMENT IN JUDEA SAMARIA IS LEGAL AND LEGITIMATE”
He would likely fall into a coma if he ever uttered those words.
I didn’t think someone could disgust me even more than Olmert. Now Yaalon does.
There will be a day of reckoning for all these traitors.
the jews get slaughtered and are now worrying about becoming nazis…. really, is this where the top Israeli leadership is leading the Jews?
the damage done here will reverberate around the world and every anti semite will use this lunatic speech as a proof that Jews and Israels are nazis, apartheid, child killers… and that those honor killers daily slaughtering jews are the victims. BB and Yaalon have turned the world upside down with their obsessive stalking of jews while ignoring the daily slaughter and threats of those who teach their children that jews are sons of apes and pigs whom their prophet will slaughter at the end of times. With such leadership their should be no wondering at the lunatic libels of the arabs, the euros and the world.
do you all see this? Jews need to perform a mea culpa for being bulldozed into those mass graves like garbage… according to Golan and his mentor Yaalon…. Jews need to reflect on their growing evil to make sure they dont once more kill folks like nazis. Are these people insane or just drunk on their abuse of power. Imagine a top general at a shoah remembrance admonishing the jews in the jewish homeland….. sick, sick, sick…. but what else should one expect of a soldier doing Yaalons bidding.
no folks, he is not talking about the daily killing of Jews or even the lesser censorship and abuse of power by the GOI…. he is talking about this:
this is his worry, this is his fear, this is his shoah….”callousness and indifference”….. but not the callousness and indifference to Jews, jewish nationalists, Jewish real zionists who settle in Judea samaria.. no, he is worried about these:
but that “other” for him are not betrayed real zionists and jewish nationalists daily charged with false and rubbish crimes like killing terrorists….. no, his other that he worries about are the sick honor killers who teach their children that Jews are sons of apes and pigs and daily kill Jews under his watch.
Indeed, but he describes the behavior of the current GOI, the likud, … those hypocritically with double standards incarcerating jews and corruptly declaring them guilty before and investigation and with spurious “evidence”.
this is a speech which should be given in europe to europeans and not to those who have been slaughtered and bulldozed into mass graves like the daily garbage. This is not a speech you give to those being daily knifed by the muslims who are teaching their children that jews are sons of apes and pigs and sending them out daily to slaughter innocent Jews and their children. What is this lunatic thinking?
I would ask what is his military doing about making sure that “never again” is real? What is his command doing about killing and removing from the homeland those who seek daily to kill jews,…. what are they doing about the daily muslim abuse and anti semitism of jews on the mount and in hebron? Why are they allowing anti semitic nazis to reside in the Jewish homeland? Has golan, like Yaalon, promoted himself to chief rabbi as a result of being a failure at the employment which he now occupies or is he like Yaalon just using it as a red herring to cover up the serial criminal abuse of power and interference with the justice system at the top? thats what I would ask.
see how he is leading up to his real purpose… a purpose to push the criminal agenda of interfering with justice by daily telling the public that the soldier is guilty? Even in the shoah remembrance yaalon has his subordinates pushing for a guilty verdict without a trial and with no credible evidence.
Its always the corrupt criminals who paint their despicable corruption as good deeds. If he and yaalon believed in truth there would never have been any declarations from responsible leadership that a soldier or a settler or a jewish nationalist is guilty before investigation, before indictment, before verdict of a jury… sorry, but Golan, Yaalon, BB, Erdan and Rivlin have proven in that they are willing to do anything to perpetuate their lies…. they will even use the somber occasion of the shoah to find some sort of twisted path to once more push their criminal agenda. I feel certain that Yaalon wrote or instructed that absurd and highly inappropriate speech… a speech that will be seized upon and repeated for decades by every nazi and anti semites on the globe.
Like I always say, whatever evil anti semitic and anti Israel defamation you hear the foreigners saying you will hear it often first in Israel… this is a first because it is not uttered by lunatic libeling israeli leftists but by the top military leadership. Israelis should take note and truly fear where this sick series of corrupt events is leading… to a betrayal of the israeli people.
In other words the Jews are the new Nazis.
Look how quickly the defamers jumped on the Jews are nazis narrative… the narrative of Yair Golan will murder more Jews. His narrative is the narrative of those slaughtering, swindlingn and defaming Jews. the man who is the plumber in charge of a house of leaking pipes, who is responsible to fix those pipes instead gives the jews a sermon on their evil ways just like his boss Yaalon which used the same approach to cover up his criminal vendetta on the jewish nationalists and doubled down on his attacks on the soldier. In fact, I wager that yaalon wrote that speech for Golan…. the words and spirit are the same as yaalons words… that the problem is not the daily attacks and slaughters on jews but the problem is terrorist jews… none of which he has shown us yet. But why wouldnt Golan read the speech that Yaalon wrote for him, just like why wouldnt the investigators plant evidence at duma or give false evidence on the soldier when their own boss said the soldier is guilty …. they know what their boss wants, so they give it.
See how Yaalon feeds Golan the words as the soldier is being tried in order to keep attacking that soldier with lies he attacks all settlers and nationalists… he and Golan use that soldier as the whipping boy as they double down on their criminal abuse of power. Why wouldnt Golan echo the words of Yaalon… perhaps one day he will run for PM as the General who has a heart, the kinder gentler man of war. What slimy creeps they are… using the shoah to convince Israelis that the soldier is guilty…. gosh they say, he must be guilty because Jews must be kindler and gentler and not kill their childrens killers because only nazis do that.
The house is full of leaking pipes, the enemy is daily slaughtering jews and to those responsible for dealing with that merciless enemy the heads of the Israeli military responsible for fixing those pipes, for killing terrorists… instead sink to lecturing jews on the shoah… as if there has ever been a danger of nazi jews to the world. They have replaced the enemy with attacking jews instead. these people are very sick.
Those whose job is to kill terrorists and prevent terror always in these years cover up their incompetence and lack of action by becoming politicians and priests giving sermons. They deflect from their own willful negligence by pointing lying fingers at the real heroes. Do I give a crap about a stinking jew killer who came to kill Jews… of course not… in my view every dead anti semite is a good deed. Those whose only purpose is to stalk and incarcerate jews… stumble over themselves to quickly return bodies of dead jew killers to the families that trained them in Jew killing… how can any jew follow their command, how can a jew and a soldier trust in those creatures.
that is one sick observation, the one thing scary to me are the pictures of thousands of dead jew bodies being bulldozed into a hole like mulch. Its pretty disgusting that these collaborators use the shoah to influence the minds of Jews to convict the soldier…. of not being kind enough to jew killers. In my view, Golans speech came from Yaalons pen as a cynical perversion to add another nail into the soldiers coffin. there appears to be no limit to the slimy depths to which Yaalon will sink. but whatever Yaalon and Golan does, it has the green light from BB.