Every year, as sirens blare throughout the country marking the national Holocaust Remembrance Day, I reflect on my uncle, my aunt and the cousins I never knew. I think of my father-in-law who survived a forced labor camp in Hungary and of my mother-in-law who lived in hiding.
In recent years, a cynical politician has been taking advantage of these hours of solemn reverie to score points with the public. This year too, on the evening of May 4, the national fear monger, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was true to his tradition of trivializing the Holocaust. Once again he sprinkled his speech at the official memorial ceremony with demagogic comparisons between the Nazis and Iran, between the incitement against helpless European Jewry and the incitement against Israel the occupier. Yet again he presented the great Zionist enterprise as a retaliatory operation against the Nazi annihilation enterprise.