On Monday [April 8], US Secretary of State John Kerry stood at attention and observed two minutes of silence as mourning sirens wailed throughout Israel, just as they do every year, to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day.

This was followed in the Knesset by a ceremony titled “Every Person Has a Name.'' As in previous years, the nation’s elected representatives step up to the podium, one after the other, to read out names of the Holocaust’s victims. More than 70 years after the end of World War II, in which one-third of the Jewish people were exterminated by the premeditated, precise and unprecedented Nazi machinery of death, the trauma is still as etched into Israel’s collective DNA as if it happened last week. The generation of survivors is rapidly disappearing. There are only 200,000 Israelis left who actually experienced the horrors firsthand. But the second and third generations continue to stand with their parents and grandparents in the shadow of the death chambers, making solemn vows never to forget and “Never again!” An entire nation marches behind them. Millions of Israelis continue to live under the long shadow that this unfathomable event still casts on their lives, even today.

In order to understand how hard it will be to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it is vital to have an intimate knowledge of the Israeli experience of the Holocaust. Knesset Member Dr. Ahmad Tibi, perhaps the most outspoken Palestinian-Israeli parliamentarian on all matters pertaining to the conflict, has managed to achieve this. Instead of denying the Holocaust, Tibi studied it. He visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the Holocaust Memorial and the Jewish Museum in Berlin. A speech he delivered to the Knesset just a few years ago [January 2010] was one of the most important and also one of the most riveting ever given about this topic in the Israeli legislature, explicitly because it was delivered by a Palestinian patriot. Tibi claims that it is incumbent on every human being, by very virtue of being a human being, to know about what happened there and to admit that this was the greatest crime against humanity ever committed in the history of humankind. After saying that, he is always careful to note that the fact that the Jews were victims of such an abominable crime does not give them the right to turn another nation into victims too. “Why must we bear the guilt if they abused you?” he asks. And yet, Tibi is fully aware that the Shoah cannot be compared to anything else, not even to the Israeli occupation of the territories. The Shoah, the Holocaust suffered by the Jews, is something entirely different.

A complex debate is underway in Israel on how to understand the Holocaust, its place in the country’s day-to-day life and the ways to commemorate it. Some people argue that the Holocaust must not be compared to anything else. One must never use the term “Shoah” for any other purpose. The term is reserved for a single event in which one people tried to eradicate another people in a methodical and monstrous way in the name of some fascist racial doctrine, and in which they almost succeeded. Those who contend that the Holocaust was a unique event and that the term should not be used for commonplace needs oppose the comparison of Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons with Adolf Hitler, for example. They answer irately whenever Prime  Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks about the need to prevent a “second Shoah,” saying: “How can he compare the millions of helpless Jews in Europe who were led to their death in the middle of the last century, while the Allies and the West turned their backs on them and refused to even bomb the death camps, with the situation today, when Israel is a regional power with the strongest, best-trained and best-equipped army in the Middle East, and when foreign publications contend that it has the nuclear capabilities of a superpower? If we keep repeating this mantra of a ‘second Holocaust’ too often,” they continue, “it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Modern Israel is a strong, self-confident country, which can defend itself. The Holocaust? That’s something entirely different.”