Olmert Says Zionism Will Prevent Second Holocaust
Israel cannot stand on the sidelines and watch Iran attain offensive nuclear capabilities, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Monday, forging an implied link between the Iranian regime and the Third Reich during a special Knesset session to mark International Holocaust Memorial Day.
"The Jewish people will never again be homeless and powerless as they were during the Holocaust," the prime minister said. "But our ears are more attuned and our sensitivity is higher to threats of destruction than other nations. We do not allow ourselves to remain complacent when we hear voices calling for the annihilation of Israel, especially when behind those voicing the threats is a fanatical, murderous ideology; a despotic terror-supporting regime that strives inexhaustibly to achieve regional hegemony and a malicious nuclear weapons development program. As far as we are concerned, as far as the Holocaust-taught Jewish people are concerned, this is an intolerable situation."
"On the International Holocaust Memorial Day we demand action from the international community," Olmert said. "We respect and value the governments and leaders that assume a decisive stance against this danger, [and] we call upon others whose stance is influenced by various interest-driven calculations to relinquish any foreign consideration and pose a unified determined front to remove the ominous peace- threatening shadow."
This arrogant attitude of "we will never let it happen again" is heresy in Judaism. Religious Jews have always believed that G-d alone controls the world and nothing happens unless he wills it, let alone a major event such as the Holocaust. To say that the Holocaust only happened because Jews were powerless and homeless is a total denial of G-d's providence. Olmert is denying the existence of G-d, or at least saying that G-d did not care about the fate of European Jewry, and He let them die simply because they were powerless. This is heresy of the utmost gravity, and although it is only to be expected of a secular Jew like Olmert, it is important for us to speak out on this because there are unfortunately some religious Jews who think in similar terms.
Just as we believe the Holocaust was not a result of Jewish weakness, we believe that the correct Jewish response to the Holocaust is not the response of Zionism: to arm ourselves and start wars with other nations. The correct response is to look inward for the sins that brought on the calamity, and to repent of those sins.
The Zionists, who attempt to address a spiritual problem with physical means, are no better than the builders of the Tower in Genesis 11. Our Rabbis teach that the people's purpose in building the Tower was to hold up the sky so as to prevent a recurrence of the Flood. The builders failed to realize that the Flood was brought by G-d in response to a spiritual problem, and they saw it merely as a natural event. This was a severe sin.