Every year, as sirens blare throughout the country marking the national Holocaust Remembrance Day, I reflect on my uncle, my aunt and the cousins I never knew. I think of my father-in-law who survived a forced labor camp in Hungary and of my mother-in-law who lived in hiding.

In recent years, a cynical politician has been taking advantage of these hours of solemn reverie to score points with the public. This year too, on the evening of May 4, the national fear monger, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was true to his tradition of trivializing the Holocaust. Once again he sprinkled his speech at the official memorial ceremony with demagogic comparisons between the Nazis and Iran, between the incitement against helpless European Jewry and the incitement against Israel the occupier. Yet again he presented the great Zionist enterprise as a retaliatory operation against the Nazi annihilation enterprise.

At last year’s ceremony on April 2015, the prime minister outdid himself when he told participants how a survivor had implored him to prevent another Holocaust. “I responded: 'That is exactly how I see my responsibility. That is exactly how I see my responsibility.’” Speaking at the annual ceremony at Yad Vashem in 2013, Netanyahu mentioned Iran no fewer than four times so that we would know that “in every generation we must see ourselves as if we have survived the Holocaust.” And so, a nation that lives under a constant threat of another Holocaust obviously needs a strong leader, a leader who will not hand out lands to Arabs, a leader who is even willing to quarrel with the American president in order to prevent Iran from annihilating Israel. 

Over the past few years, a fairly new tradition has been added to Holocaust Remembrance Day: The media features empty refrigerators of elderly survivors and the politicians promise that survivors will “never again” be poor — even though 45,000 of the estimated 189,000 survivors subsist below the poverty line. On the 2013 memorial day, Netanyahu announced that the government had decided to allocate additional resources for the survivors’ welfare, care and medications, “and we will add as much as needed, with an open heart.”