Israel's reluctance to embrace lessons of the Holocaust
Against the backdrop of Holocaust Memorial Day, Israelis are debating whether the state should act to defend Syrian citizens from chemical attacks and how it has responded in the past toward genocides and ethnic cleansing.
The cruel April 8 chemical attack in Syria attributed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad nearly coincided with the commemoration in Israel of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which began the evening of April 11. This proximity in timing led many in Israel to call on the state to act in the name of morality and a Jewish obligation not to stand aloof in the face of such horrors. It was in fact impossible to remain indifferent to the terrible photos of dead babies in the Syrian city of Douma that traversed social networks and appeared across Israeli media.
“This, again, shows what we unfortunately already know — a sort of ongoing failure by organizations and apparatuses established by the international community after World War II and the Holocaust to prevent crimes against humanity,” Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Center, said on April 10 at a conference. Shalev called on the world to provide humanitarian aid to the victims and remarked, “[The] shocking sights that we have witnessed, here beyond the border, are enabled and continue as a result of the apathy of the world.”
Israel’s chief Sephardic rabbi, Yitzhak Yosef, went further, calling for real activism on the part of the Jewish state, which he believes has a moral obligation not to remain silent: “As Jews who have experienced a genocide, as Jews whose Torah is a light to the nations, it is our moral obligation to try and stop this murder. It is an obligation no less important than the moral obligation to destroy [the] nuclear reactor in Syria.”
Amos Yadlin, retired general and former head of army intelligence, also connected Holocaust Remembrance Day to the murder in Douma. “As we approach Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah, Israel should clarify that it takes a moral stance against killers who use weapons of mass murder against civilians,” Yadlin tweeted.
