“I have a suggestion for them on labeling;” Lieberman said on Israel Radio, “label all products from Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights with a yellow star. I think that is extremely fitting to the cynical and hypocritical position expressed in this letter.”

His reference to symbols imposed on the Jews by the Nazis, besides not being comparable for legal and other reasons, is the latest example of the use of Holocaust terminology and imagery in Israeli political campaigns and rhetoric. The negative effect of this abuse on the global public opinion is self-evident and more so when taking into consideration the urgent need for instruments to maintain the memory of one of the worst tragedies in the history of man as the generation of victims and perpetrators disappears.

There is almost total world consensus about the uniqueness of the Holocaust but even Jewish and Israeli leaders are finding it more and more difficult not to consider other tragic events and defining the death of one third of world Jewish population “first among equals of genocides”. Anshel Pfeffer, journalist of Haaretz, referring to Israeli president Rivlin’s speech, as part of the United Nations’ Holocaust Remembrance Day events, noted that it was “the first time an Israeli leader implicitly acknowledged the Armenian genocide”. The resolution that created the UN Remembrance Day had been a compromise in as much that it reaffirmed “that the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities, will forever be a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice.” Jews and other minorities: a very fundamental element when considering the past and, even more so, other contemporary tragedies.

In non-mainstream press and Jewish community associations, there is an ongoing discussion about the use or, better, abuse of Holocaust imagery. In Israel, Daniel Goldman, a politician, posted an article in which he claims that he was personally called a “Nazi” several times during local election campaigns, mainly by screaming kids. One campaign in official ads used Holocaust imagery (barbed wire around some Haredi kids, illustrating the alleged risks to these children if a secular politician were to be elected). David Morris, (a nominee for the President of Israel’s Prize 2010) accused respectable politicians such as Benjamin Netanyahu of trivializing the Holocaust in his speeches about the Iranian threat or in reference to the PLO’s agreement with Hamas. Menachem Begin, as prime minister he adds, was renowned for using the Holocaust in his political speeches about erstwhile unrelated issues.

Morris underlined the fact that the enemies of Israel or critics of Israeli governments also use Holocaust references. “If an Israeli soldier is heavy-handed, or if Israel takes some military action, then the Palestinians will draw comparison to the Nazis. They could instead, to make the same point, draw comparisons to the hundreds of unpleasant regimes, from the British in India, to the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, the Americans in Guantanamo etc, etc. Reaching for the gas-chambers comparison instead, and outrageously applying it specifically to Israel’s army, is clearly grossly abusing the memory of the Holocaust”.

Dan Ephron, Newsweek Jerusalem correspondent writes elsewhere that “even as Israel zealously guards the memory of the genocide, many Israelis invoke it frivolously in a manner that can seem shocking to outsiders and might even be illegal in some countries (the EU has a provision against trivializing the Holocaust, as do several European countries individually). The litany of misuses of Holocaust analogies and references is familiar: In its more benign form, Israelis might talk about the 1967 line that divides Israel and the West Bank as “the Auschwitz border,” or equate Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with Adolf Hitler.

One of the most important Holocaust researchers, Yehuda Bauer recalls that during Israel’s Lebanon war in 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin famously likened the blockade against PLO leader Yasir Arafat in Beirut to the siege on Hitler’s bunker near the end of World War II. Ephron continues his analysis: It’s not uncommon to hear Israelis refer to other Israelis as Nazis as well. Jewish settlers regularly use the term against Israeli soldiers in the West Bank, as when troops are sent to dismantle unauthorized outposts. The late Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a well-known left-wing religious intellectual and philosopher, once described settlers as “Judeo-Nazis.” Israeli traffic cops occasionally complain they’re called Nazis by the motorists they pull over. A few years ago, Yehuda Bauer, who is also a leading advisor to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, accused the people in Israel for misusing the Holocaust in politics and other areas all the time”. “The comparisons, he said, tend to dilute the real significance of the Holocaust.”

Well known journalist and writer Peter Beinart, in a much-discussed 2010 New York Review of Books article explains how “in the world of AIPAC (the major pro-Israel lobby in the Usa), the Holocaust analogies never stop, and their message is always the same: Jews are licensed by their victimhood to worry only about themselves.” Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has used more than one a nearly identical formulation. “As for Israel – he said in front of Congress – if history has taught the Jewish people anything, it is that we must take calls for our destruction seriously,” he bellowed. “We are a nation that rose from the ashes of the Holocaust. When we say never again, we mean never again. Israel always reserves the right to defend itself.”

“Victimhood sets you free,” wrote Avraham Burg, son of one of the founding fathers of Israel and himself one time President of the Knesset, in his book published in 2008: The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes. In 1980, Israeli journalist Boaz Evron explained the same concept: “If we assume the world hates us and persecutes us, we feel exempted from the need to be accountable for our actions towards it.” Israeli professor and historian Avi Shlaim went even further 2008 when Israeli bombs, bullets, and white phosphorous tore Gaza and hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children to shreds. “As always – he wrote in The Guardian – mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted – a small and defenseless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, “crying and shooting”. In May 2008, Uri Avneri, Israeli journalist and peace activist noted: “The whole world sympathizes with the Israelis because the Jews were the victims of the most horrific crime of the Western world. That creates a strange situation: the oppressor is more popular than the victim. Anyone who supports the Palestinians is automatically suspected of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. In an analysis published in the daily Haaretz, Chemi Shalev connects the abuse of the Holocaust by prime minister Netanyahu with the Palestinians. “While Israel complains (not altogether accurately) that Abbas is violating the holy of holies by daring to compare Jewish trials with Palestinian tribulations, it’s apparently quite all right for Netanyahu to equate Hamas with the Third Reich and to accuse it of seeking another Holocaust,” Shalev wrote. “And to counter comments in the U.S. media that Abbas’ acknowledgement of the Holocaust is groundbreaking and significant, Israel pits an anonymous senior official who tells the New York Times that the new statement is worthless because it fails to condemn the Nazi collaborating World War II Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini” who found an ally in the Germans against the British occupiers of Palestine and their project to divide the land.

In a recent one day conference in Rome about the future Holocaust museum to be built in Villa Torlonia, the accent was placed on the need to fill the innovative space with new language, concepts and instruments. The need to perpetuate “never again” as the prime concept found most of the participants agreeing that for future generations to understand it is necessary for all to feel that they could also become victims of genocide. As Jews, Christians, Muslims or members of other religious or ethnic communities. The continued trivialization of the Shoah for political reasons is only going to make the memory of the tragedy disappear.