We call it “Remembrance Day” and not “Memorial Day,” implicitly turning trauma into memory, mourning into reflection. And we need to reflect on the two anxieties that preoccupy us today as a people. The first, I said, concerns the external threat facing Israel – Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas, all the dangers that are the business of all of you around this table. The second anxiety is internal – the threats to Israeli democracy, including our rule over another people and the growing intolerance and anti-democratic sentiments among young Israelis.

Had I said those words to certain right-wing American Jewish audiences, I would have gotten angry responses. But here, among the defenders of Israel – some of them wearing the knitted kippot of religious Zionism – there wasn’t a murmur of disagreement.

Yom Hashoah, I affirmed, is precisely the time to deal with the lessons of the Holocaust. And if it’s legitimate to speak on that day about the Iranian threat, then it is also legitimate to speak about the self-inflicted threats to Jewish and democratic values.

The question, though, is how. We cannot deal with one threat in a way that undermines our ability to deal with another threat. And that, I argued, is precisely what Golan did. In opening the door to a comparison of Israel with Nazi Germany – in any way – Golan inadvertently but substantially boosted the campaign to demonize the Jewish state, to turn us into the new Nazis.

Read the full article at Times of Israel.