In today’s Haaretz, Carlo Strenger denounces Bibi Netanyahu’s regular invocations of the Holocaust in defense of unconscionable policies:
Netanyahu plays the Holocaust card to defend the indefensible. Even if Netanyahu thinks that the Gaza operation was justified, the constant harping on the Holocaust to justify Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza is both politically useless and ethically problematic.
[…]In making use of the Holocaust to defend indefensible policies, Netanyahu harms the very ethics of memory that Ahmadinejad is incapable of endorsing. Remembering the Holocaust is a moral duty for Jews and non-Jews alike. Netanyahu’s politicization of it does not fulfill this duty; it taints it. Instead of weakening Ahmadinejad, he enters the arena in which truthfulness about history is no longer a duty in its own right, but where history is used for the sake of political manipulation.
Continue reading “Ahmadinejad, Netanyahu and the Holocaust: The ethics of memory” here. For more of this ilk, see Matt Yglesias’s comments on Michael Oren’s recent claim that Richard Goldstone is more inimical to Israel than Ahmadinejad himself.