Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday criticised Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan after he compared modern Israel with 1930s Nazi Germany.
“The deputy chief of staff is an outstanding officer, but his remarks on this issue were utterly mistaken and unacceptable to me,” Israel’s public radio reported Netanyahu saying.
“The comparison that was made in IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Major General Yair Golan’s remarks about processes that characterized Nazi Germany 80 years ago is infuriating.”
“The remarks are fundamentally incorrect. They should not have been made at any time, much less now. They do an injustice to Israeli society and belittle the Holocaust,” Netanyahu added.
On the eve of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Golan said the commemoration “must bring us to reflect deeply on the nature of man, even when that man is ourselves.”
“If there is something that frightens me in the memory of the Holocaust, it is identifying horrifying processes that occurred in Europe…70, 80 and 90 years ago and finding evidence of their existence here in our midst, today, in 2016,” he said.
“After all, there is nothing simpler and easier than hating the foreigner, there is nothing easier and simpler than arousing fears and intimidating, there is nothing easier and simpler than becoming bestial, forgoing principles and becoming smug,” he added.
In a statement he said he did not mean to draw parallels between the Israeli army and the Holocaust. “It is an absurd and baseless comparison and I had no intention whatsoever to draw any sort of parallel or to criticise the national leadership.”
He went on to call the IDF “a moral army that respects the rules of engagement and protects human dignity.”