The human imagination, wondrous as it is, is rather limited. It's easier for us to imagine fictional things than a different reality than ours. Shalom Hanoch called this loneliness "a man within himself is living," and Rachel the poet testified "only for myself to tell a book." And yet, we are commanded to remember the Holocaust with the same ancient Jewish imperative - "Remember!" What Amalek did to us, the Exodus we just celebrated. In this memory our Jewish identity is encrypted, as the historian Joseph Haim Yerushalmi has shown. 

But how do we remember the Holocaust if the shadow of the present is continually cast upon it? Our limited knowledge of the past brings us back and forth to that horrible black hole of all the Nazis created for our people. Political use of the Holocaust is a currency that is prevalent in public discourse in Israel and the world; No turbulent political debate has come out of the clutches of our limited historical imagination. Again and again, we plunge the Holocaust into each other as a deadly and accurate punch to the opponent's stomach, raising it to subdue it. 

In the radical wing this was done as proof of the speaker's righteousness. As if something of the most extreme case in the history of systematic extermination, through modern means, out of orderly and monstrous efficiency, could be derived for our daily lives. The radical left compares Gaza to the world's largest ghetto (yes, a ghetto with missiles, UN aid organizations, Islamic dictatorship and the world's highest naturalization). Experts on their own identify "danger to democracy" on all sides and processes that herald the rise of the Nazis. We are compared to the awful comparison between the State of Israel and Nazism, if not the whole country at least in the Occupied Territories, such as Isaiah Leibowitz who is a hero and symbol for some who coined the dreadful term "Judaism - Nazi". The comparisons to the Weimar Republic, "did not help eradicate the phenomenon. 

On the other hand, on the radical right, there are settlers who use the "Nazis" derogatory call against their opponents on the left, and even against IDF soldiers. In the ultra-Orthodox demonstrations against the police and MDA (yes, MDA), the word is thrown casually into the air by boys The country is in “anti-Semitism.” And there are Palestinian leaders who condemn their Nazi curses in a rude Holocaust denial, and the Muslim and Arab extremist wing joins the call to "end the mission" of Hitler. 

The Holocaust is not the occupation, neither the evacuation of settlements nor the opening of roads on Saturday. In my research on the life of the Jews before the Holocaust, I was assisted by Yizkor's books that compiled survivors of a thousand destroyed communities, a powerful and exciting enterprise that contradicts the myth of "silencing the Holocaust" in young Israel. Whenever I accidentally opened the book in the harsh descriptions of extermination, I was confronted with the worst question of all - how can people be destroyed like that? Village after village, town after town, town after town. Left the six million, that's an unimaginable number. Leave the Holocaust in the political debates and try to read and understand how people came and killed all the people in one small remote community, just one. No conclusions, please. 

Dr. Rona Yona is a historian and lecturer at Tel Aviv University and the Oranim College