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A. The Great Escape from Identity
Aharon Barak's statement quoted in the trailer (“The assumption that it cannot happen here is mistaken. If it happened in the Germany of Bach, Goethe, and Beethoven, it can happen anywhere.”) was not an outburst or a casual remark. Nor is this the first time he has expressed it. He merely repeated a foundational statement of his doctrine, which he wrote in the article 'On My Role as a Judge' over twenty years ago, when the revolution of judicial tyranny was still in its infancy.
Barak represents a view that sees the national reality, whatever it is, as a seed of Nazism. In all national glorification he 'identifies processes'. In every majority he sees tyranny. This is his lesson from the Holocaust. This is what his entire view is built on.
This has nothing to do with Germany or Israel. The issue is the ‘banality of evil,’ and it can happen to anyone. The system, which he has built here over thirty years, is based entirely on this distorted thinking about the Holocaust.
Barak sees hatred of Israel as merely an example of the racism, xenophobia, and persecution of minorities that, in his view, characterize every national reality.
The Holocaust, in his view, is not really related to the Jewish people; it is simply the inevitable result of a kind of social “mathematical equation.” It is the scientific product of a national majority and an ethnic minority. According to this view, the Holocaust only affected the Jewish people incidentally, but its main lesson is universal: curbing nationalism. This is not just a legal project, it is much more: it is about an existential anxiety about our own identity.
B. How we understand on Holocaust Remembrance Day
The question of how to understand hatred of Jews in general, and the Holocaust in particular, is not new. A certain group of liberal Jews, originating mainly from German Jews after the Enlightenment, insists that anti-Semitism is a generic phenomenon of a majority against a minority, of racism against foreigners, of violation of human rights against others.
Barak represents a view that sees the national reality, whatever it is, as a seed of Nazism. In all national glorification he 'identifies processes'. In every majority he sees tyranny. This is his lesson from the Holocaust.
This group believed that hatred against Jews was only a result of our being a foreign and different minority within another people, and that the solution to this hatred was cultural and physical assimilation, or alternatively the establishment of a state like all states.
This group refused at all costs to see anti-Semitic hatred as something essential towards Jews wherever they were, as a minority or a majority, as individuals or as a state – in whatever situation they may be.
This group stubbornly refused to recognize hatred of Jews as anti-Semitism directed at the destiny and identity that are inherent in our very existence, such that it cannot be eliminated by erasing identity, or by establishing a state like all states.
Herzl also thought that the establishment of a Jewish state would eliminate the motive for anti-Semitism.
This group therefore sees anti-Semitism as a phenomenon of a Jewish minority in foreign lands only, and does not link it to undermining our existence as a people in the Land of Israel.
This is why it attributes empty rational explanations to every element of the conflict here.
As soon as this group realizes that hatred is not related to land, the lack of a state for the enemy, the Green Line, 'settler violence', economic prospects, or any other rational justification – it will be forced to look in the mirror, at the reflection of its Jewish identity. It will have to recognize its Jewish identity as an essential component of itself, not run away from it and blur it. And it will be required to begin to embrace it again, and fight for it. And this the members of this group are refusing to do at all costs. They are still choosing the old solutions, which have already been tried in Germany – cultural assimilation, blaming conservative Jews for the problem, and attempting to invent a so-called 'new Jew'.
As determined as this group is to escape its identity, it will also insist on seeing hatred of Israel as a "generic example of racism towards foreigners, others and the different," and will continue to search for this racism within itself.
And this is why so many places in the State of Israel have turned Holocaust Remembrance Day into a "general day for the struggle against racism" and "protection of human rights." This is the lesson and vision of Aharon Barak.
But dealing with Holocaust Remembrance Day without dealing with Jews and hatred of Jews, and ignoring its dramatic significance for us and for the entire world, means Holocaust denial at the deepest level.
But dealing with Holocaust Remembrance Day without dealing with Jews and hatred of Jews, and ignoring its dramatic significance for us and for the entire world, means Holocaust denial at the deepest level.
C. The foolish march of the "fear of being a Nazi"
This dividing line, of understanding hatred of Israel and understanding the Holocaust, directly impacts on understanding the lesson of the Holocaust in our day. Because if the Holocaust is the product of "too strong nationalism," "too strong a majority," then our national identity is not the solution but the problem; and our national strength is the nucleus of the next Nazism. Yair Golan "identifies processes," and Aharon Barak ties our hands and feet. Majority rule is automatically 'tyranny of the majority,' and victory over the enemy is a step before 'genocide.'
And so, at the moment of truth, when it was possible to eliminate the entire Hamas leadership at once when it was still negligible, twenty-three years ago, the Chief of Staff refrained from using a one-ton bomb so as not to damage the building next door, and left everyone alive.
Instead of fighting for his Jewishness, the Chief of Staff thought that the lesson of the Holocaust meant that he 'might be a Nazi.' This terrible and tragic mistake allowed the Hamas-Nazi monster to grow again and rise to destroy us twenty years later.
There is no more serious mistake than a mistake of consciousness regarding the lessons of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
That is why the liberal camp on Holocaust Remembrance Day tends to focus on weakening our national identity instead of strengthening it, to attack the sin of militarism, and to blame the right for the coming Nazism. They did not invent it. They are carrying on the legacy of German Jewry. They simply have not yet managed to heal from this hatred of self-identity, from auto-anti-Semitism, as an imaginary and illusory solution to the problem.
D. The attitude towards the Holocaust says it all
Currently, the State of Israel has two Holocaust Remembrance Days that are not only different, but are completely opposite to each other. They shape not only the events of Holocaust Remembrance Day, but the very consciousness of our existence here; and they dictate the direct confrontation between right and left, national vision or defeatism, rule of the people or legal tyranny.
It all starts at this root: an affinity or rejection of our identity and destiny, our perception of national identity, and the implications of these for a correct reading of our situation, an understanding of the undermining of our existence, then and now.
