We will not stop crying
From the darkness of his bunker, in his final despair, Adolf Hitler commanded his troops to continue exterminating Jews until the very last day. Not to fight the Red Army that defeated him from Stalingrad to Berlin; not to fight the stars and stripes that pushed him out of Normandy; not to fight the British who were fighting for their lives under the leadership of the man with the V sign; but to fight the Jews, the people who didn't raise a finger against Germany, and probably couldn't even if they had tried. That is why this chapter of the worst inhuman atrocity in history is Jewish. It belongs first and foremost to the Jews.
It is true that there are those who deny the Holocaust, who fabricate their own diabolical narrative suggesting that the extermination never occurred. In the future, there will be those who believe these false narratives. There are also those who minimize the scope of the Holocaust, and their efforts are even more effective (if less venomous) at communicating their version of the events to the rest of humanity and severing the link between Israel and that little Jewish boy who asked, "Mother, is it okay to cry now-" in Nathan Alterman's poem.
These people don't want our schoolchildren to visit Auschwitz, on the pretext that they want to spare the young souls from the difficult sights. They don't want us to fly our jets over the former death camps with the flimsy reasoning that it makes us a traumatized, neurotic nation. No thanks -- we, the Jews, are better off neurotic than at peace with the national death.
They fear that if we stand guard, vigilant of the worst pogrom ever seen by humanity, it will make it difficult for us to make peace with the Palestinians. We have every reason not to make peace: The Arabs of the region, under the leadership of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, were the only ones who backed Hitler even though the Nazis had not occupied their land. They volunteered to help the Nazis. They also prevented the establishment of a tiny Jewish state within the borders outlined by the Peel Commission in 1937, which David Ben-Gurion accepted in the name of Zionism. Had that state been established, it would have spared most of our brethren from their Majdanek and Sobibor fates.
The democratic West, including the Jews, knows how to make peace. It is not only Israelis who are now shamefully returning to Berlin, egged on by Holocaust minimizers who never stop singing the praises of the German capital. Anyone who sees the movie "The Railway Man" will find the fighters of Great Britain also holding out their hands in peace to their World War II Japanese tormentors. The Jews have also reached out to the Palestinians, despite the mufti and the Holocaust and the War of Independence.
But we will not stop crying out. We will not stop remembering. We are a people of words. We are a people whose words served as a unifying glue when we were in exile. Despite the famous verse "thy destroyers and they that made thee waste shall go forth from thee" (Isaiah 49:17), we will still cry tears of anguish over the Holocaust -- the pinnacle of all the wrongs done to us during our time in exile. On the night when the last living Holocaust survivor lights the last memorial torch, we will sing, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me." (Psalm 23:4). You, God and/or the IDF and/or the morality of our prophets, deserted us during the Holocaust, but now are with us forever.
טעינו? נתקן! אם מצאתם טעות בכתבה, נשמח שתשתפו אותנו