Canada

Collective trauma is real. The Jewish people, and the world, should never forget the Holocaust. But when “never again” gets twisted into “never again, for us” it changes the attitude entirely:

I will tell you something about the Holocaust. It would be nice to believe that people who have undergone suffering have been purified by suffering.

But it’s the opposite, it makes them worse. It corrupts. There is something in suffering that creates a kind of egoism. And when such monstrous things have happened to your people, you feel nothing can be compared to it. You get a moral “power of attorney”, a permit to do anything you want – because nothing can compare to what has happened to us. This is a moral immunity which is very clearly felt in Israel.

Uri Avery, speaking after the IDF’s massacre at Sabra and Shatila

Uri was a Zionist poster child - his immediate family fled to (then mandatory Palestine) after the Nazis took power; every other relative who stayed in Germany was murdered in the Holocaust. His life story is incredible to read, and it’s a bitter truth to accept that he was marginalized and ignored by wider Israeli society because of his peace activism later in life.