A lot of righteous anger was poured on the head of Israel's ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, this week after he and his team showed up in the assembly hall, wearing a yellow star with the inscription "Never again." The deaf officials of the Foreign Ministry briefed against the "cheap gimmick", Yad Vashem was quick to condemn the "cheapening of the Holocaust" or something of the sort, and the Israeli intelligentsia as a whole, including renowned historians and various opinion leaders, criticized the "propaganda attack" and explained that the comparison was misplaced.
Erdan at the UN: "I will make you remember the shame of your silence every time you look at me: I will wear the yellow star until we eliminate Nazi Hamas" // UN
Indeed, it is interesting to ask, is this the most urgent thing for Holocaust remembrance gatekeepers and moralists in the press, in times of war and emergency? To stick a stick in the PR wheel, to embarrass Israel's ambassador to the UN, and in fact to signal to the world that Israel is exaggerating, exaggerating, getting carried away? Is that what's urgent now? Semantic accuracy?
An Inconvenient Truth
And it's not that there is no point in criticism. During World War II, European Jews were helpless, powerless, dependent on the mercy of the world and the slowness of its response, and were led like sheep to the slaughter. 80 years later, the Jews have an advanced country and one of the strongest armies in the world. Although the country's residents were brutally attacked within its borders, in the end the army eliminated the attackers, liberated the settlements and launched a powerful counteroffensive. And no less important: the world is not silent, and it even speaks in deeds. In aircraft carriers, cruise missiles, defense systems and, according to rumors, commando fighters as well.
So no, this is not a Holocaust. There is no comparison. But a speech at the United Nations in wartime is not a scientific symposium. It is an emergency information operation designed to make a point. And the point here is not only related to the inevitable associations that arise in the face of visions, which it is very difficult not to think of in terms of a pogrom. The deep point has to do with understanding the motives, morals and ideology that caused this atrocity, and perhaps worse: the cultural envelope that fed the monster understanding, caresses, empathy and tolerance.
The blossom of hatred blooms. Stepping on a painting of the Israeli flag in Beirut,
This is the disturbing truth from which the entire world is frowning, and I am beginning to think that the loud and kicking reaction to Erdan's banal gesture stems from the great fear of confrontation. Not with the seemingly exaggerated egalitarian symbolism, but with the very act of marking embodied in the patch: I am a Jew, Erdan says, and I am marked as a Jew.
And this is the greatest conception of all that is collapsing before our eyes: the pervasive understanding that at the root of the mass and sadistic violence that struck the residents of the envelope stands, first of all, first and foremost, hatred of Jews. Not a national conflict. Not a reaction to the "illegal blockade" of Gaza. And you know what? Not even "terrorism" as part of a war conflict. With unforgivable delay, many of us arrived only in recent weeks to review the Hamas charter – even in its euphemistic version – and to understand that it must be taken literally, as the cliché goes. Not as some theological vision of the end times, but as a practical imperative for the here and now.
And Hamas is not alone: Mahmoud Abbas, the partner that growing sections of the political leadership and the security establishment are foolishly convinced is the right solution for Gaza, is a Holocaust denier, and a few weeks before the attack gave an appearance full of pure anti-Semitism in one of his speeches.
The younger generation that grew up under his leadership has a clear admiration for Hitler and a fondness for Nazi iconography. Today we must apologize to all those orientalists and independent research institutes who repeatedly warned about anti-Semitic preaching in mosques, about inciting content in textbooks, about Nazi stereotypes in cartoons and television broadcasts. They saw things that some of the academic elite and intelligence organizations simply did not want to see until the end. For too long we thought it was just rhetoric, a bit of folklore, a mutation of nationalist discourse whose harshness stems from years of oppression.
And this is not divorced from hatred of Jews around the world, since on the Palestinian resistance is built the reservoir of arguments against Israel, that is, against dispossession, massacre, apartheid and Zionist colonialism. Therefore, it is also perhaps the greatest duty of Israel's ambassador to the UN to demonstrate exactly this point: Jews are marked in Israel – but also in the entire world. They are worried this month on the campuses of prestigious universities and in residential neighborhoods on the outskirts of Paris. They downplay their identities in London, and they tremble with fear in Russia and the North Caucasus. They are threatened in Sweden and cursed in California.
Ambassador Gilad Erdan to the UN wearing a yellow badge, photo: AFP
And all this hatred blooms in the incubators of academia, in the protest movements in the cities, in the cliques of artists and intellectuals, and in the capitals of the most democratic, liberal and enlightened countries. Is it not clear the connection between the brainwashing that gave rise to the atrocity of October 7 and the moral, cultural, and ideological envelope that hatred of Israel gave it in the world? Isn't Israel's labeling an indirect, seemingly sophisticated way to label Jews?
You haven't changed much
Some of us have been immersed in the hunt for imaginary Nazis within us in recent years. Jewish supremacy in the territories, a promise to hide Eritreans in attics, La Familia and Judeo-Nazis and what not. And every Holocaust Remembrance Day, we wrapped ourselves in false lessons such as "the moral imperative is to eradicate xenophobia within us" and "to oppose all forms of racism." This story, hopefully, is over.
Now it is clear who the real Nazis are, where hatred is sizzling, against whom it is directed and what it is capable of doing. Sometimes it's hard to admit it, because we thought we had locked this old world behind the glass in the museums of Holocaust and tolerance.
Wrong. And Gilad Erdan did well to face the world with this museum item, the yellow star, and said to many around the world: You think you see me as I am, but it is us who see you as you really are. And really, some of you, at least, haven't changed.
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