The term "Judeo-Nazi" was coined by Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a man revered by many wise people, especially those who consider themselves "thinking" people. In his characteristic direct manner, Leibowitz used the term to describe Supreme Court Justice Moshe Landau and his colleagues on the Landau Commission (established by the government in 1987 to investigate the Shin Bet security agency's interrogation methods and to formulate guidelines on how the agency should handle terrorist threats). The commission concluded that in Shin Bet interrogations that could potentially thwart terrorist attacks in real time "pressure should be applied mainly by means of psychological pressure," but "when these means fail to yield results, a moderate degree of physical pressure should not be avoided." It was this directive that prompted Leibowitz, the last of the doomsday prophets, to describe the commission members as "Jews with Nazi mentality." It appears that this harsh criticism, pithily summed up in the term "Judeo-Nazis," breached the inviolability of the Holocaust. The rest is a long, sad story in which parts of the Israeli people, often the extreme fringe on the Right but lately also very much on the Left, have trivialized the Holocaust with their own words. They made it comparable to other things. And worst of all, they took an evil unprecedented in human history and applied it to us, the Jews. The unbearable lightness of the use of the word "Nazi," as though it were nothing, is, in fact, unbearable. How can we complain about Holocaust deniers like Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas? How is Holocaust denial any different than taking a term reserved for a uniquely unfathomable level of malice and making it into a run-of-the-mill turn of phrase? "Tell me, when Hitler rose to power, did the 'okay' Germans gripe about it but continue with their daily routines-" asked television director Orna Ben Dor on Facebook last week, comparing Hitler's rise to power with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's decision to assume the post of the economy minister for the purpose of pushing through a natural gas deal. That is simply insane! But it is exactly the point. People have taken to making vitriolic statements instead of making logical arguments. The "okay" people, the ones who think as she does, versus the "not okay" people, who, to her, are like Hitler. The thing is that she represents another needle in a haystack of misleading, unfounded superficiality that fills every forum with photos of late Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon, and living statesmen Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin, dressed in Nazi uniforms. It seems the fact that there are Holocaust survivors living among us, not to mention second- and third-generation survivors, does not prevent ignorance, stupidity or maliciousness from thriving. What we need here is a deep, dramatic process of instilling knowledge about the history of the Nazi party and how it was able to rise to power during the days of the precarious Weimar Republic against the backdrop of deep German bitterness over the poor financial situation and the humiliating defeat in World War I. The guiding principles of the Nazi party -- racist nationalism, rejection of liberalism, democracy and communism, and a powerful hatred of Jews to the point of wishing to exterminate them -- need to be a subject taught in schools. It takes an extreme level of twisted self-hatred to compare Israel to Nazi Germany. It is a malicious and mendacious comparison. It takes a special kind of loathing and a complete absence of tolerance for different ways of thinking among your own people to call someone a Nazi, or Hitler. How strange it is that supporting the Nazi party or using its symbols is a criminal offense in many countries around the world, but not in Israel.
Unbearable lightness of incitement
מערכת ישראל היום
מערכת "ישראל היום“ מפיקה ומעדכנת תכנים חדשותיים, מבזקים ופרשנויות לאורך כל שעות היממה. התוכן נערך בקפדנות, נבדק עובדתית ומוגש לציבור מתוך האמונה שהקוראים ראויים לעיתונות טובה יותר - אמינה, אובייקטיבית ועניינית.
