CREATING A HEALTHY SOCIETY
Shlomi Diskell, Realistic Religious Zionism

Ynetnews, Israel
,7340,L-3244074 ,00.html
April 26 2006

Not every enemy is an incarnation of Hitler,

The months of Nissan and Iyar on the Hebrew calendar are a pressure
cooker of Jewish – Zionist consiousness. It starts with Pesach and
ends on Yom Haatzmaut. The “extra meticulous” extend the period to
Iyar 28, the day the Western Wall and the old city of Jerusalem was
liberated from Jordan in 1967.

Can there be any more appropriate phrase than the one we read in the
Pessach haggadah – “In every generation, someone will rise up and
try to destroy us” – to describe the collective feeling of Israelis
during this period?

Seems to me that not even the most astute playwright could better
describe the terror attack in Dahab as Israel began marking Holocaust
Remembrance Day, and only the most petty amongst us pointed out that
no Israelis or Jews were killed in the blasts.

Over-sensitive

Sometimes it seems that we are so intimidated and over-sensitive about
the assimilate the idea that we are hated that we cannot understand
just how how damaging this is to us, or how much damage it does to
our collective memory.

We’ve had some glowing examples of this phenomenon over the past
year. Some Gaza Strip evictees chose to wear orange stars on their
clothes, to “relive” the dark days. But the move, carried out by
the twisted minds of people calling themselves Zionists and Jews,
shocked only a few of us.

But why point an accusing finger only at them? Just several days ago
we heard one of Israel’s most senior intelligence officers group Hamas
and al-Qaeda together with the Nazis. Many felt the comparison was
correct, and no one objected to the suggestion that Khaled Mashaal
and Ismail Haniya were the current incarnations of Josef Goebbels or
Hermann Goering, or that Sheikh Ahmed Yassin is really light-years
apart from Alfred Rosenberg, one of the Nazis ideological figureheads.

Through the years

This is not surprising. The Israel-Palestinian conflict and the fallout
from it on the Middle East sometimes drives us crazy. We pour elements
into the conflict that only nurture the development of our unhealthy,
separatist and closed society.

On one hand, we jealously protect to unique nature of our fate and
refuse all efforts to compare our past to the Turkish slaughter of
Armenians, or the genocides that happened in Bosnia or Rwanda. On
the other hand, we keep careful watch to identify early signs that
could lead to the next Holocaust, and every Arab, Muslim or other
leader who threatens to wipe out the State of Israel is immediately
compared to Adolf Hitler.

A quick look at the newspapers of yesteryear shows that during the
1970s, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was called “the new Hitler,”
in the 80s it was Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and U.S. black leader Rev.

Jesse Jackson, who was marked as the most dangerous threat facing
U.S. Jewry. But does anyone remember him today?

Tough period

This time of year puts us in a tough spot: we search for explanations,
occasionally seek revenge, and look for a way to deal with Holocaust
Day and other memorial days, to infuse them with new, relevant
messages. But perhaps the time has come to understand we will never
be able to take revenge, to recognize the fact that there are not
always answers, to internalize that there won’t always be someone
trying to eliminate us, and that not every Islamic fundamentalist is
the current incarnation of the German madman.

Perhaps in this way we can create a healthier society, one that doesn’t
wake up each morning looking for the newest existential threat to
justify its existence and its country. One that recognizes the fact
that sometimes our country, too, doesn’t act exactly appropriately,
and not to hide behind the approach that the whole world is against
us and is just waiting for the right moment to rise up to destroy us.