Swiping at Smotrich, Lapid says Holocaust lesson is to stay moral, not ‘burn down villages’

Speaking at a Holocaust memorial day ceremony in Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, opposition chief Yair Lapid swipes at Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s remark that the Palestinian town of Huwara should be “wiped out.”

Lapid says that the lessons of the Holocaust present Israel with a “dual challenge” — ensuring the survival of Jews “at any price,” while remaining moral when faced with enemies who “in their perspective, we aren’t really human.”

“Our moral test is to continue, even under these circumstances, to differentiate between enemies and innocents,” he says. “To kill our enemies without hesitation, but not to burn down houses and not burn villages, because Jews don’t commit pogroms.”

Lapid goes on to recall how his grandfather in Hungary was taken to a Nazi death camp in 1944.

“Why didn’t they fight?” he says of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust. “The only possible answer is that because they were good people, they did not believe in the existence of evil.”