The Holocaust has never been so relevant. When the Prime Minister of Israel makes the most important decision of his life this summer, he will recall the inability of Britain and France to understand Hitler in the 1930s. He will be influenced, to a large extent, by the fact that the United States did not save Hungary’s Jews from Auschwitz in 1944. The inability of the West to come to the rescue in time in the face of evil, and the lack of readiness on the part of the West to save the Jews in time – both of these shape the way in which Benjamin Netanyahu grasps reality. When he looks to the East, he sees a new Nazism, and when he looks to the West, he sees a new Chamberlain. This time we are not being threatened with Cyclone-B gas, the prime minister believes, but rather with the lethal combination of total extremism and a total weapon. In the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, the Holocaust is alive and kicking. It fills the heart and floods the soul of the person who heads the Jewish state in 2012.

The Holocaust has never been so controversial. In the past, too, there were fissures but now there are fractures. While the right has taken possession of the Holocaust in an oversimplified and chauvinistic way, the left is becoming more estranged to the fact that the Holocaust is a seminal and legitimate national experience for the Jewish people. Many right-wingers consider anyone who criticizes Israel to be a contemporary Himmler, while many left-wingers bow their heads to Gunter Grass. The nationalist camp enlists the Holocaust to provide Israel with immunity from all manner of criticism while the radical camp ignores anti-Semitism and rejects any story in which the Jews are victims, out of hand. Even about the Holocaust we can no longer agree. Even about the Holocaust we can no longer share our experiences. Those who consider the left to be the Judenrat, and those who consider the settlers to be Judeo-Nazis, have difficulty in getting together over the greatest disaster that has ever befallen any nation in modern times. The gap between a Holocaust that is so relevant and a Holocaust that is so disputed, is a dangerous gap. In Jerusalem, the traumatic memory exerts unprecedented power on the way in which we deal with the current reality; in Tel Aviv, the historic memory itself is losing its national validity. Instead of the Holocaust bringing us together into a joint and quiet awareness of the historic catastrophe that was unequalled, it too is becoming an excuse for a quarrel.

Read the article in full at Haaretz.