The Holocaust is a good reason, not a bad excuse, for attacking Iran
The expectation that Israel should ignore the lessons learned from the destruction of European Jewry is irrational.
By Chemi Shalev

I can well understand people who dismiss comparisons between Adolf Hitler and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 1939 Germany and 2012 Iran or the modern and well-armed state of Israel and defenseless Holocaust-era European Jewry. The differences are so vast that there is no wonder that many people find them ludicrous. I can also empathize with those who suspect that supporters of an attack on Iran are cynically conjuring images of the Holocaust in order to advance their cause. In recent years, any tin pot dictator who threatens Israel is Hitler’s successor, any critic of Israeli policies is a latter-day Goebbels and every call to negotiate on the basis of the 1967 borders is but a station on the road to the Final Solution.

And when zealot settlers call IDF soldiers Nazis and their commanders Eichmanns, when left-wing radicals describe the Israeli army as SS stormtroopers and Gaza as Dachau, when one of the most popular characters on Seinfeld is a Soup Nazi and when Adolf Hitler himself becomes the darling of YouTube spoofs from the movie Downfall - one can hardly blame people for refusing to take Holocaust analogies seriously. But even if the legacy of the Holocaust has been crassly trivialized and cynically exploited by politicians in Israel and in America, it is still a towering presence in the lives of most Israelis and Jews, individually, and of Israel and the Diaspora, collectively. It is not some distant memory, it is not a historical tragedy, it is not something that happened to our forefathers once upon a time in a strange and distant land, it is not a ruse, not a cover, not a pretext and not an excuse. Even as the last of the survivors are rapidly disappearing from our lives and even if their children and grandchildren are living secure and comfortable lives and even if Israel has the most powerful army in the Middle East and a reported nuclear arsenal that can destroy any combination of its enemies seven times over, memories of the Holocaust are omnipresent. And 70 years after the fact, it is the main prism through which I and most other Jews view the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran and the echo chamber where the arguments for and against a military attack are heard.

more....................West of Eden-Israel News - Haaretz Israeli News source.