The old will die and the young will forget

No prizes for guessing that those are the words of Ben Gurion regarding the victims of Israel's first ethnic cleansing campaign. I was reminded of them by an article in Ha'aretz by Hanna Yablonka titled Verging on Holocaust Denial. History has proved Ben Gurion's optomism wrong with regard to the young Palestinians forgetting. He was, of course, right about the old dying. Old people do that eventually and if they seem like they're not going to, then there's always plucky little Israel to help them on their way.

Hanna Yablonka's article is about how the persistent distortion of the holocaust through its use as an instrument of Israeli state policy has led to the most grotesque holocaust analogies by, of all people, the armed fascist activists of Israel's settler movement.

With an increasing degree of sharpness, many Israelis are using motifs that they perceive as clear symbols of the Holocaust in the political debate. It seems there is no longer any point in the protests and expressions of shock that come as a conditioned response after any such incident - especially in light of the fact that they fall on deaf ears. Even the argument of hurting Holocaust survivors is no longer effective. Evidence of this can be found in the response of Ronny Bakshi, the originator of the idea of using the orange patch, to the use of the number on the arm: "I don't take into account what people think, but rather do as I feel.".............

...now, at the juncture when the survivors are disappearing from our lives, and at the same time Holocaust "distorters" are springing up among us, in the next generation nobody's feelings will be hurt any more, because the dead are silent, the survivors will go the way of all flesh and we will have nothing left - certainly not the shared memory we owe them.

Hence, the old will die and the young will forget. But in the case of the latter, these things don't just happen, they are made to happen.