Last update - 00:00 26/01/2007
A helpless world
By Haaretz Editorial
Tomorrow, January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day will be observed for the third time. Fixed on the date of the liberation of Auschwitz, it is a memorial for the destruction of the Jews of Europe, which was first established by European countries and later adopted by the United Nations. This welcome initiative is seemingly the climax of a process in which the Holocaust of the Jews has come to be perceived not only as a disaster for our people, but as having universal significance: a reminder of the horrors that people are capable of inflicting on other people, and also a warning - if not an alarm bell - that summons humanity to fight determinedly against present or future dangers of this kind.
The dignity of these ceremonies and memorial days can be assumed. But will they also be accompanied by action? Doubts creep in when one surveys the current state of the world: The international community failed embarrassingly in its handling of the slaughter in Rwanda, and it is now having trouble dealing with the mass murder in Sudan's Darfur province as well. And for all the denunciations and the shock, it seems that the international community is also standing by helplessly, doing nothing, in the face of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denies the Jewish Holocaust and threatens the very existence of the State of Israel.
His open threats of destruction are backed by Iran's efforts to arm itself with weapons of mass destruction that would be capable of carrying out this threat. Yet the international community is not excited. It has not gone into overdrive in order to at least deny Iran nuclear weapons. It sometimes seems as if this community is more concerned with ceremonies and memorial days to cleanse its conscience over its inaction in the face of past catastrophes than it is with dealing with the catastrophes that are occurring now, or that are on the horizon.
In this context, European countries and their leaders have a special role to play. This continent, on whose soil the horrors of the Holocaust occurred, is admittedly now leading the memorialization efforts, but has it really learned a lesson? Has it, for instance, learned the dangers of appeasing fanatic tyrants, who interpret every concession as weakness, and not necessarily as a sign of goodwill?
History does not usually repeat itself. We are not "in 1938" (as Benjamin Netanyahu warned recently), but in 2007, and there is no point in making endless analogies to the victims of World War II or comparisons to Chamberlain, Churchill and Hitler. This merely interferes with the effort to look with open eyes at the real dangers: the atrocities in Africa and the dangers inherent in the Iranian regime.
In a balanced address about the Iranian threat delivered at the Herzliya Conference, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert refrained from putting Israel alone at the forefront of the struggle, but, at the same time, he left no doubt about Israel's determination never again to allow an existential threat to develop against it. But Israel's isolation in this struggle does not depend only on itself. The struggle against Iran's threats and its nuclearization - a struggle in which diplomatic and economic channels have not yet been exhausted - demands international and, especially, European determination against these developing threats, and not just a rallying round memorial days and ceremonies for the holocausts of the past.