Jewish WWII veterans at the Yad Vashem ceremony on Thursday, May 8, 2014. Photo: Anav Silverman, Tazpit News Agency / Yakov Karasin.

Below is an excerpt from author Tuvia Tenenbom’s latest novel, Catch the Jew! The book recounts the adventures of Tuvia, posing as a foreign journalist in Israel and the Palestinian territories, as he tracks the activities of left-wing and anti-Israel organizations.

On the next day I again join the ex-Jew Itamar and the Italians. Today they go to Yad Vashem, and I wonder how they’ll feel at the Dead Jews’ Museum.

Itamar is leading the tour but he’s not just a tour guide, he’s also an educator and as we walk from section to section in this museum Itamar does his best to turn the WWII story into a contemporary one. He achieves this admired goal by making comparisons between then and now. If you are perplexed and don’t know what this means, let me be clearer: between yesterday’s Nazis and today’s Israelis.

“In Israel today, Africans are being put into concentration camps,” Itamar says, referring to illegal Sudanese and Eritrean immigrants.

I’ve heard about various problems and issues with those Africans, though I have never heard about them being put into concentration camps. But, to be fair, I write a note for myself to meet these Africans and to also check whether there is forced labor or crematoriums operating in Israel.

We move to another section of other dead Jews, where a normal visitor to this museum learns about the most potent phase in the mass extermination of millions of Jews, but our ex-Jew has other things on his mind. He says:

“With the beginning of the loss in 1942, what is called ‘extermina- tion of the Jews’ starts. What you see here is all from the eye of Jewish victims, this is after all a Jewish museum. But what you see here, with the Nazis and the Jews, is also happening today, in Palestine. What happens here in Israel is Holocaust. Today, the Israeli army is doing the same thing, and the American army too.”

We move to the Łódź Ghetto section, where the infamous Chaim Rumkowski’s “Give me your children” speech is played out on a screen. Rumkowski was the Nazis’ appointed leader of Łódź Ghetto and in September of 1942 they demanded that twenty thousand Jewish children be given to them, for the purpose of burning them. Rumkowski was ordered to deliver the children and on September 4, 1942, he made this speech to his fellow Jews:

“A grievous blow has struck the ghetto. They are asking us to give up the best we possess – the children and the elderly. I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg. Brothers and sisters: Hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers: Give me your children!”

These chilling words are interrupted by Itamar’s voice, as he con-tinues comparing Jews and Nazis: “The Palestinian Authority today executes many people at the command of Israel.”

We get to the section of the mass killing of Jews, with Jews digging their own graves in various countries conquered by the German army. And Itamar, self-certified historian, notes: “Eighty percent of the killing was not done by the Nazis but by the local people.” The Nazis, like Israel, were commanding others to kill.

Brilliant.

Time to talk about the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, the infamous Nazi masterful job of Jew killing. Itamar speaks.

“We don’t have any order from Hitler that says, ‘Kill all the Jews in Europe.’ Today we know that the killing of Jews was not something that started from above but something that came from the ground, by soldiers who were experiencing death around them – from partisans, for example – and had to find ways to deal with it. Then one thing led to the other and people killed more and more. I can give you an example from my experience, serving in the Israeli army. I arrested two hundred, three hundred Palestinians, sometimes little children, and sometimes I beat them up and then put them on a truck. Without asking any questions. Having this experience myself, I can imagine myself doing the same thing that the Germans did.”

It is interesting to see what the EU people are busy with these days: using Yad Vashem, the monument for millions of Jews slaughtered at their hands, as a platform for poisonous propaganda against the survivors of their butchery. When you walk here with Itamar, seeing the dead of Auschwitz but hearing the name of Palestine, watching a Nazi officer on a video but hearing the name Israel, you can’t deny how hugely effective Itamar’s propaganda is. When you leave Yad Vashem after touring it as a gift of European generosity, what remains in you is this: the Poles arrested six million Palestinians, who were then gassed by Jews in Tel Aviv, and later burnt at Treblinka crematoriums operated by Palestinians at Israel’s command.”

Catch the Jew! (Gefen Publishing House Ltd. Jerusalem-New York, 2015) joins Tenenbom’s other book, I Sleep in Hitler’s Room, a bestseller in Germany that reveals anti-Semitic trends in Germany.