Eli Cohen sold out Jewish history

As a high schooler, I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that maybe, just maybe, I could visit Auschwitz despite the absence of an agreement between Poland and Israel last year. The Holocaust is a part of my family’s history, and I really wanted to honor those who died there by visiting the camps with my school. 

But it turns out, the only reason that my school will be able to do a tour in Poland is that the side negotiating as a representative of Israel was ready to give up anything just so high schools could again launch trips there. Aside from visiting camps and museums dedicated to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, Israeli students will be required to visit museums devoted to Polish heroes, those who fought against Soviet oppressors. This sounds nice until we learn that many of the same activists fighting for Poland played a significant part in murdering Jews and aiding Germans to do the same thing during the Holocaust. 

This comes, surely as a surprise to many, not from the last government that, just because the presence of an Arab party and a couple of leftist parties was denounced as anti-zionist but from the current one. The same government, remember, that was supposed to bring back the Jewish character of the country. 

A government that is made up of religious zionist and ultra-Orthodox parties, is now allowing a foreign government to teach its children a revisionist version of the Holocaust. Because on top of visiting the museums of antisemitic Polish heroes, Israeli students also have to learn how there were just so many Poles who saved Jews, all the while ignoring the fact that there are simply much more Polish people snitching on their Jewish neighbors than ones saving them. 

This wouldn’t even be a point of mine, had Netanyahu’s current government not been the most Jewish-supremacist, Arab-murdering one yet. 

We’ve arrived at the point where radical ideologically blinded religious groups lead the country. To top that, these politicians don’t even care when their religion, which is, you know, supposed to be their main selling point, is being at least disrespected. You’d think that Deri, Goldknopf, Ben-Gvir, or Smotrich would start shouting just at the prospect of the memory Holocaust being scorned at this level, but that simply didn’t happen. 

Because at this point, the religious elite of Israel is entirely the same as the religious elite of any other country. Corrupt. Like a church that uses faith as a weapon against marginalized groups. At the point of organized religion, leaders don’t care about the theology itself. They only care about how they can use it to make populist and xenophobic waves. 

We’re at this point in Israel. Thankfully, there still are religious people in Israel who are self-aware enough to know where the bounds are between a personal belief and forcing others to observe their beliefs, but the leaders of the religious simply don’t care. About anything. The politicians who use their faith as a shield, they don’t think about how many times they’ve broken the laws of the Torah and the Tanakh. They’re only thinking about their personal gain. 

And that’s why religious politicians didn’t speak up against the new deal between Poland and Israel. They wouldn’t be gaining anything. Parents may be happy their child can visit the site of the history of their families – a religious man starting a riot against it wouldn’t have an effect. 

So here we are, a government blinded by religion, but refusing to protect the history that tells the tale of how the believers of the same religion were discriminated against, and, in the end, wiped out.