Gideon Levy has a piece here in which he berates the government of Israel for sending ministers abroad to participate in ceremonies marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. He does this because he regards it as nothing more than cheap propaganda and an attempt to distract attention from criticism of Israel arising out of its policies towards Gaza and, especially, Operation Cast Lead. He writes:

The Holocaust must not be forgotten, and there is no need to compare it with anything. Israel must take part in the efforts to keep its memory alive, but in doing so it must show up with clean hands, clean of evil of their own doing. And it must not arouse suspicion that it is cynically using the memory of the Holocaust to obliterate and blur other things. Regrettably, this is not the case.

The first argument here is a variation on the classic “Why haven’t the Jews, of all people, learned the lessons of the Holocaust?” trope combined with a nice twist of another one, “It’s okay for Jews to have their  own state as long as its relations with its neighbors display a Scandinavian level of calm and good fellowship.” The second argument about not arousing suspicion is particularly interesting. What could the Israeli government - or any government - do to prevent other governments, as well as private individuals, having suspicions about the real motivations for its actions? I don’t know and I bet Levy doesn’t either. He goes on to excoriate the government for planning to build a fence along the frontier with Egypt (the horror!), having a racist Minister of the Interior (he’s right about that) and various other things besides.

The paradoxical result of all this is that Levy ends up doing exactly what he accuses the Israeli government of; deliberately confusing the issues and misleading his readers. He’s perfectly entitled to attack those policies and persons in the current government that are not to his liking and indeed as a journalist he has a duty to do so. What he shouldn’t be doing is suggesting that because the policies of the present and previous Israeli governments may not always have attained the highest standards of moral perfection then the current government has no business commemorating the Holocaust.

The government of Israel is right to promote greater awareness of the Holocaust abroad, as indeed it is to warn of the threat from Iran. Only those in the thrall of various stereotypes about appropriate standards of behavior for Jews will see something necessarily illegitimate about this.