I once gave a lift to a young woman who was a guide at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. “Na’ama,” I asked her, “What do you answer when your groups ask you about the meaning of the Holocaust?”
“That everyone has a small Nazi inside them,” she answered automatically. “Anybody can be a Nazi.”
I almost lost control of the car.
“Listen,” I said to her. “I do not have any little Nazi inside me. I am the good guy in this story. And the Germans were the bad guys. Forget about the ridiculous blather that all those involved in the Holocaust were victims. That both the murderers and the slaughtered were hapless wretches. There were good people there, and those were the Jews. And there were bad people – and those were the Germans.”
‘”If what you told me now is the message of Yad Vashem”, I continued, “then Yad Vashem is the most sophisticated institution in the world for Holocaust denial. Why? Because it denies the meaning of the Holocaust. It is a very important institution for recording and passing down the memory of the Holocaust. But its message is completely wrong.”
Any person can become an animal – including a Jew. But saying that it could happen to anyone is essentially Holocaust denial. It could happen to anyone. Coincidentally, it happened to the Germans. Coincidentally, the Jews just happened to be passing through the wrong place at the wrong time. This application of “coincidence” and the falsity that everyone is essentially a victim is the most sophisticated and dangerous Holocaust denial that exists.
From there, it is only a short distance to the claim that the Jews are the new Nazis. Today, in London, Paris and the world’s intellectual hubs, the Jews are the new Nazis. This is the axis: First, it can happen to anyone. Seventy years ago it happened to the Germans, now it is happening to the Jews. Beware of this false narrative.