When my father was just three years old, he and his family were expelled from their home to Ukraine on the Transnistrian death march. It was there that his baby sister was murdered. In order to keep him safe from the Nazi terror, his parents sent him away into hiding. The next time he would see them would be when he was 23. My mother was three weeks old when her parents handed her over to a member of the underground in the Netherlands. For two and a half years, this woman, one of the Righteous Among the Nations, kept her alive while putting her own life at risk on a daily basis.
All of this happened because the Nazis decided to kill the Jews just for being Jews.
And yet here, in the timespan of three generations, none other than the president of the Jewish state, Reuven Rivlin, thinks he can compare my parents to those that harmed them, the murderers to the murdered, the exterminators with the exterminated.
In an entirely superfluous remark, Rivlin "apologized in the name of Israel's citizens" to Maj. Gen. (res.) Yair Golan, who you may recall identified "processes that occurred in Europe…70, 80 and 90 years ago and finding evidence of their existence here in our midst, today" at an official Holocaust memorial ceremony in 2016.
These intolerable remarks were widely condemned at the time. And yet it is none other than Israel's president that has now come out against the condemnations and sided with the speaker.
Before we get into the substance of the matter, one cannot help but be astonished at the folly in such a move. The president is bringing up a dispute that has been forgotten, while at the same preaching statesmanship and unity. He is commenting on one of the more difficult disputes to ever arise here. Why?
And as for the significance of the move, Rivlin's remark was as absurd as then-President Ephraim Katzir's remarks following the 1973 Yom Kippur War that "we are all guilty." Rivlin did not ask Israel's citizens their opinion on the matter. He is not authorized to speak in their names, and appears not to be updated as to their views on the matter.
Take for example what two citizens of this country, who just happen to be my parents, have to say about the issue. According to my father, Michael Kahana, "Never before in human history was there an event like the Holocaust. That is why any type of comparison to the Holocaust is inappropriate, including haredim who yell, 'Nazi' at police. It wasn't the president's place to intervene in a political dispute in this way, and it certainly wasn't his place to apologize. And as a Holocaust survivor, I ask, where does he get off apologizing in my name?"
My mother, Rebecca Kahana, painfully addded, "What Golan said was terrible, and he is the one who should have apologized to the public. The president didn't ask me and the other Holocaust survivors if we are willing to have him apologize in our name. That is why the act was rude. No one gave him a mandate for that."
You don't need to be a Holocaust survivor, or even a second-generation Holocaust survivor, to understand that Golan's remarks deserve condemnation and not support. According to the timetable he laid out three years ago, the Knesset should have legislated its own version of the Nuremberg Laws, confiscated Arab property and carried out our own Kristallnacht in Umm al-Fahm three years ago. After all, these are the very processes he identified. But not even a semblance of any of these things has taken place or will take place. The honorable major general said such deplorable things that were so detached from reality, and by doing so, provided Israel's haters with endless ammunition.
Now, instead of throwing cold water over Golan's head, or showing him the righteousness of the Jews, Rivlin turned the tables and apologized "in the name of Israel's citizens."
As the Prophet Isaiah said, "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that change darkness into light, and light into darkness (Isaiah 5: 20)." There is no better description for the declarations made, and not for the first time, by His Highness, Israel's president.
Mr. President, I have no idea in whose name you apologized, but it certainly wasn't my parents, my siblings, or mine.
