Last week, the world marked the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp. The media gave extensive coverage to all the ceremonies conducted in Israel and throughout the world. Here in Israel, all the reporters and commentators focused on a single question: "Did the world learn the lesson?" Have the Europeans internalized the lessons of the Holocaust? In light of renewed anti-Semitism, will the world's leaders make sure not to allow this to happen again?



Not a single reporter or commentator in Israel asked the much more important question: has Israel learned the lesson of the Holocaust? Have we Jews internalized, and comprehended, all that we have learned and heard about the Holocaust, so that this cannot happen again? Anyone who looks at what has been happening in the State of Israel in recent years, and especially in the past few months, will reach the sad and unfortunate conclusion that it is the political leadership in Israel, specifically, that has not learned that lesson.



If previous governments conducted negotiations with Arabs such as the arch-murderer Yasser Arafat, knowing full well that their hero is Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the friend of Hitler, may his name be blotted out, and their bestseller is Mein Kampf - then Israel has not learned the lesson of the Holocaust.



If Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is meeting with the Holocaust denier Abu Mazen - the brains behind the Ma'alot massacre and the attack against the Israeli athletes in Munich - then Israel has not learned the lesson of the Holocaust.



If Israel is planning to release terrorists, and already is rewarding murderers by ceasing the assassinations of the successors of the accursed Nazis, those Arab terrorists such as Dahlan, Tirawi, Abu Shabak, Mohamed Dif, and the list goes on and on - Arabs infamous for their planning and implementation of the murder of Jewish men, women and children - then Israel has not learned the lesson of the Holocaust.



If Israel is repeating the mistakes made by Neville Chamberlain, who handed over the Sudetenland to Hitler in the Munich agreement, in the hope that this would satisfy his appetite - and Israel is currently planning to hand over additional parts of the homeland of the Jewish people to Hitler's successors, hoping that this step will satisfy them and stop their jihad campaign against the Jewish people - then Israel has not learned the lesson of the Holocaust.



If Israel is planning to implement, here in Israel, the anti-Semitic policy of the deportation and transfer of Jews only because they are Jews, as was done to the Jews in Europe 60 years ago - then Israel has not learned the lesson of the Holocaust.



As long as Israel does not understand that the Arabs who murder us daily are the successors of the Nazis, and that their goal is to finish what Hitler, may his name be blotted out, did not succeed in completing - that is, the destruction of the Jewish people - then Israel has not learned the lesson of the Holocaust.



The prime minister preaches to others "to remember and not to forget," but does he himself act in accordance with this imperative? In the Knesset ceremony last week, Sharon said: "The Allies knew about the destruction of the Jews. They knew and did nothing. That same obtuseness was revealed by the British Mandatory authorities who locked the gates of Eretz Israel to the Jewish refugees who sought to find a safe haven in Eretz Israel. ...The airplanes of the Allies attacked targets close to Auschwitz, but they refused to bomb the camp itself, where tens of thousands of Jews were being murdered each day. The sad and horrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being murdered."



Isn't his all-too-true statement indicative of terrible hypocrisy? Sharon's very same words in the Knesset could be used to say that in the three years since he took office, Ariel Sharon has known that the Arabs are attacking and murdering Jews daily, throughout Israel and especially in Gush Katif. Sharon knows, but does nothing. This is the same obtuseness exhibited before him by the Oslo criminals when they gave weapons, ammunition and cities of refuge to Arab murderers.



IDF airplanes have, indeed, been given orders to attack some low-level terrorists here and there, in order to spread the illusion that something is being done, but Sharon refuses to give them the order to eliminate, once and for all, all the nests of Arab terror, with their leaders, members, helpers and supporters. And so, more than one thousand Jews have been murdered during Sharon's term in office as prime minister. Now Sharon shakes the bloodstained hands of those Arab Nazis, the murderers of Jews, and rewards them. The sad and horrible conclusion is that Ariel Sharon does not care that Jews are being murdered, here in Israel. How dare he, therefore, speak of the need "to remember and not to forget"?



"The memory of the Holocaust is not functioning," Mordechai Horowitz, the husband of the late Naomi Shemer, wrote in a booklet he published in 1980. Horowitz compared the State of Israel to the Jew before the Holocaust who tried with all his might to assimilate. The following are a few quotations from his said writing:



"If the Jew encountered signs of rejection from the Christian environment in his daily life, he tended to accuse himself for this. He would think that he had not done enough to assimilate into his surroundings, and he cut off another two centimeters of his beard and peyot [sidelocks].



"Just as, prior to the Holocaust, the Jews paid with centimeters of beard and peyot for entry to European culture, so, too, today does the State of Israel pay for such admission with square kilometers of the territory of Eretz Israel.



"The State of Israel finds itself in Holocaust conditions. The PLO and its leader Yasser Arafat [and today, Abu Mazen and Mohammed Dahlan - NM] are like a declared contractor for the destruction of Jews. Once again, there are Jews of Haskalah [Enlightenment] and assimilation whose vigilance can be anesthetized. The Jews are anesthetized by means of peace. 'Peace' - that is the code word for the Final Solution of the Jewish problem. 'Peace' in the Holocaust of Israel's Jews is functionally identical to Arbeit macht frei in the Holocaust of European Jewry: both slogans were intended to deceive Jews who are weary unto death. Just as many Jews in the camps believed that the gas chambers were showers, so, too, many Jews in Israel believe that someone seriously intends to make real peace with them.



"In order to prevent the next Holocaust, Israelis must allow the memory of the previous Holocaust to function. Instead of searching in it for acts of heroism that did not lead anywhere, they must view it as the culmination of Jewish suffering, that prods us to an effort and way of life that are capable of bringing an end to this anguish. This means only one thing: the spontaneous creation and accumulation of power. This is the primary lesson of the Holocaust, and if this lesson has not been learned, then the Germans wasted tons and tons of Zyklon B (Gas) on us."



In other words, Mordechai Horowitz is saying to us: the State of Israel must act as a proud and strong Jew who is not afraid to declare: "The Land of Israel belongs to the People of Israel in accordance with the Torah of Israel;" a proud and strong Jew who is not afraid to fight to the end against those who come to destroy us. Only in this manner will we show that we have learned the lesson of the Holocaust. Only in this manner will we show that the slogan "to remember and not to forget" is not meaningless.