The 'N' word

Like the boy who cried "wolf," there is always someone ready to label someone else a "Nazi." It gets attention. Consequently, the term "Nazi" is widely misapplied.

In the 1980s, some of our friends on the American left called President Ronald Reagan a Nazi. (Remember Bitburg?) We sighed and shook our heads at their historical and political ignorance.

Today, some (including, as this newspaper has reported, members of the World YWCA) accuse the Israelis of being "like Hitler" vis-™-vis the Palestinians. We sigh and shake our heads and try to explain: Whatever we may think of the Israeli government's treatment of the Palestinians, we cannot compare Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the dictator who rounded up Jews, Gypsies and other "objectionables" for the sole purpose of murdering them.

When people who have a duty to know better deliberately misapply the "N" word, we must do more than simply sigh and shake our heads.

On Dec. 21, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that a group of Gaza Strip settlers slated for evacuation plans to protest the move by wearing orange, Nazi-style Star of David badges like those the Jews of Europe were forced to wear on their clothing in the '30s and '40s. To their credit, the main settler group, the Yesha Council, immediately denounced the protest.

Apparently Holocaust rhetoric has become increasingly common among the Israeli right wing, some of whom compare the disengagement plan to the deportation of European Jews. And apparently the misappropriation of the Nazi star is not new to the Israeli right. Again according to JTA, Baruch Goldstein, the settler who massacred Palestinians in a Hebron mosque in 1994, was known to wear a yellow Star of David to protest the Oslo peace accords.

Whatever we may feel about the disengagement plan, the Holocaust analogy does not even begin to hold in this situation. Yes, the settlers are being asked to move. But to pretend that they are imperiled like the Jews of Europe once were is to minimize the European Jewish experience and to show an appalling lack of respect for both the victims and the survivors of the Final Solution.

It's not that the world isn't full of atrocities. It's not that the European Jews are the only victims. But for the sake of those who were murdered by the Nazis, and for our own sake, we must remain clear about the Shoah as a particular event in history, and we must not allow others to exploit it for their own ends. To tolerate use of the Shoah's power to make a point, political or otherwise, is to distance ourselves from what actually happened. And the more we distance ourselves, the more difficult it will be for us to carry out the task of remembering.

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