We Need to Start Comparing (Originally in Hebrew)

In a recent right-wing protest in support of the war in Gaza, a participant held a sign saying, "One nation, One country, One leader." This picture was posted online juxtaposed with a German sign from the '40s saying "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer" (One nation, one Reich, one leader).

A comment that was posted over and over again to that post was, "please don't compare." The Holocaust has become something sanctified, and we look up to it in awe, still not comprehending the madness and barbarity that occurred in the most civilized nation in Europe. We think of the Holocaust as something so heinous, so inhuman, and it seems like it is a million light-years away. But it's not. It's a mere 70 years apart. And that's why we need to consciously start comparing with our present, future, and past actions.

We use the Holocaust as a yardstick anyway. It's in our daily discourse, in how our leaders justify their acts. "We will never again go like lambs to the slaughter" is a universal statement that every statesman in Israel utters to warrant a retaliation or an offensive. We go back to the Holocaust as a reference to our current situation: many times, including at school, I saw the picture of the Jerusalem Mufti sitting with Hitler. It's a visual mnemonic that works on our zero levels of understanding. Thus, the Palestinian leader is implicated in the horrors of the Holocaust. Our binary view of the world, the "them" - whether it's the bias media, the leftist academia, governments, exist to strengthen the "us."

If the Holocaust is the zero understanding of the way we view the outside world, then we must begin examining everything through that filter. We always need to check, still, to be vigilant that we are not on the same trajectory. As a people persecuted for over 2000 years, we need to identify the patterns of hatred, of dehumanization, of the potential to become frenzied zealots, to lose our coordinates and to plunge into the dark depths of history.

We need to start comparing everything to the Holocaust because even if sin is forgiven, it is never forgotten: not in the collective memory of the victim, and the collective psyche of the perpetrator. Also, if a person kills another in a car accident that was not their fault, that realization, that responsibility will stay with them forever, following them as the shadow of their shadow.

Emanuel Levinas, the French philosopher who lost his parents and siblings in the horrors of Dachau, argued that nobody chooses their other.

"The face speaks. It speaks, it is in this that it renders possible and begins all discourse... The first word of the face is the "Thou shalt not kill." It is an order. There is a commandment in the appearance of the face as if a master spoke to me."

This empathy, this communion exists because when we look into the other's eyes, we do not see them only as perpetrators, but as victims. That's why whenever we see a man holding a fascist looking sign, a protestor lifting up a warning against the government, a member of parliament who utters the word "genocide" – whenever we see a kid throwing a rock at a soldier, we must close our eyes and imagine their face, on a body of a person in Berlin, or Warsaw, or Amsterdam, or Paris, or Dachau, or Auschwitz. We need to start comparing, because if we don't, by the time we'll get our bearings, we might have gone too far down the wrong path