Last year, Israel and Poland entered into a high profile diplomatic spat over the issue of Holocaust memory.
The Polish government, like many of their counterparts across eastern and central Europe, had intentionally weaponised history, distorting the memory of their own role in the genocide in a way completely unacceptable to the Jews.
During that spat, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu baldly asserted that the Jewish state had “no tolerance for distorting the truth, historical revisionism, or Holocaust denial.... We will not accept any attempt whatsoever to rewrite history. We will accept no restriction on research into historical truth.”
That was all well and good but — leaving aside Israel’s record of declining to grapple with this issue in the cases of the Hungary, Lithuania and Ukraine — the Israelis themselves should have paid closer attention to the premier’s message.
This was the week we saw one of Mr Netanyahu’s own ministers go out of his way to instrumentalise the memory of the Holocaust.
Writing in Axios, journalist Barak Ravid reported that during this week’s cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, newly installed Education Minister Rafi Peretz stunned his colleagues when, responding to a think-tank report on growing assimilation of Jews in the United States, he declared the growing intermarriage rate (nearly 60 per cent among those getting hitched post-2000) was “like a second Holocaust.”
Mr Peretz’s rhetoric, which mirrors that used by many observant Jews in the privacy of their homes, was considered wildly inappropriate by his peers, with Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz shooting back that “assimilation is not a critical problem” and that “we must stop disparaging Jews who live in America and see them as Jews in terms of history and culture, not just religion.”
The Axios report led to immediate condemnations of Mr Peretz by American Jewish organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Ruderman Family Foundation.
ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted: “It’s inconceivable to use the term ‘Holocaust’ to describe Jews choosing to marry non-Jews. It trivialises the Shoah. It alienates so many members of our community.
“This kind of baseless comparison does little other than inflame and offend.”
The minister’s remarks, Mr Ravid wrote, “represent the growing rift between the Orthodox parts of Israeli society and politics, and the majority of US Jews who are much more liberal, and most of whom identify with the Reform or Conservative denominations.”
While this is certainly true, it does not mean that the organised Jewish world in the United States is indifferent to assimilation.
When the Pew Research Center published its latest statistics on intermarriage in 2013, it set off a firestorm and years of heated policy debates among the heads of Jewish Federations, foundations and denominations.
But the use of such divisive rhetoric is unequivocally wrong and if, like Rafi Peretz, you are concerned about assimilation, it is harmful to your cause. American Jews do not want, and ought not, to be told that their marriage choices make them similar to the Nazis who murdered their grandparents.
It only breeds resentment and, as Mr Greenblatt so eloquently put it, such terminology “does little other than inflame and offend.”
At the end of the day, if Israel protests the instrumentalisation of the Holocaust abroad, it must also stamp it out at home.
