Lipmann’s lessons

Writing in The Spectator, Anthony Lipmann uses the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp to compare the IDF to the Nazis:

‘What would I have done?’ I ask myself. ‘What should I be doing now? What am I doing for those being persecuted today — among them the Palestinians, who are suffering at the hands of Jews? But for a turn of fate, could I have been a Nazi too?….

When on 27 January I take my mother’s arm — tattoo number A-25466 — I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah. I will pray that each of us who is born of suffering becomes also the end-post for it. If the survivors and their descendants do not lead the way, who will?

This little band of 600 has a terrible responsibility — to live well in the name of those who did not live and to discourage the building of walls and bulldozing of villages. Even more than this, they — and all Jews — need to be the voice of conscience that will prevent Israel from adopting the mantle of oppressor, and to reject the label ‘anti-Semite’ for those who speak out against Israel’s policies in the occupied territories.

UPDATE: See Mark Steyn and Caroline Glick on this Lippman article.

(Hat tip: Melanie Phillips, who responds: “At any time this would be disgusting stuff. As a piece marking the liberation of Auschwitz, it is obscene.”)