The journey of Holocaust Remembrance Day runs parallel to the journey of the Holocaust itself in Israeli culture. It is governed by bad taste, even if it has supposedly been privatized. It is full of documentary films that always end with the phrase “Mourn now!” as if it were an order.

Two days ago, Maccabi Tel Aviv began the soccer derby it hosted — at the heart of the carnival with its songs, slogans and scarves — by leading an elderly, bespectacled man onto the field. He was a Holocaust survivor, they announced over the PA system.

He had fought in the Jewish Brigade, brought clandestine immigrants into pre-state Israel, fought in several wars, they announced. As though he were a kind of circus attraction.

The behavior pattern of national commemoration in Israel has built citizens who are not really capable of honoring memory, of their own free will, for a half hour let’s say, instead of working. Someone will say learned things, someone else will respond, or be remembered, and afterward people will go their separate ways in respect for the mourning and in tolerance for those who abstain from it. The ceremony takes place here as a kind of pleasure-filled response to a painful law: A frightening siren. By the law of the state and the municipal inspectors, everything stops. The lesson of the Holocaust? A state that rips our ears apart. And prohibitions.

We do not really have a civil society. We have a political society that is given command of our awareness, which is privatized and nationalized at the same time, by means of “remembrance” days. We have no communities. Nor do we have meetings between communities that are not part of the great transmitter of our national lives. Certainly no one honors the voices of the survivors. Even the currently-prevalent cliché, “Once upon a time, when their voices were not heard,” does not come from them, but from the state, which reproduces memory and supposedly speaks “in their name,” but really always in its own name. Now, give a speech!

The state is the master of mourning. Its essence is part of the state's obsession with control: Who dares not mourn? What do the Haredim do during the siren? What do the Arabs say? How do we involve the Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern descent)? And when people say, for example, to the leftists, “Don’t talk about politics today,” they mean, “Today, the state has exclusive control over politics.”

Holocaust Remembrance Day and remembrance of the Holocaust have become part of the mechanism that mobilizes the Holocaust for every issue, from the fight against anti-Zionism abroad to the authority of going after small children in the territories to the discussions about the war against Iran. The moral corruption did not start yesterday or during Likud’s time. One of the low points of Holocaust remembrance used as a tool of symbolism was during the first Rabin government: the visit to Yad Vashem in 1976 of John Vorster, at the time prime minister of South Africa, where laws like those of Nuremberg were in force.

Speaking in the name of the dead is part of every country’s national ethos. We have more than one remembrance day (and who still remembers Tel Hai Day? Trumpeldor bled to death in every school, whispering, “It’s good to die for our country"?). Now everything drains out into a single week and is embodied by a great deal of propagandistic kitsch. Not only on Holocaust Remembrance Day is heroism is commemorated. Memorial Day for soldiers now includes the victims of terrorism, as if to teach us that not only are all wars the same, but that we are heroes simply for having been victims, and vice versa. The voice becomes a single text.

This is how the state is growing generations of nationalistic androids, spreading ignorance of history and disrespect to the victims. Ashes do not talk, after all. Ceremonies in which the names of the victims are read aloud only emphasize the fact that the names are names of the dead, but the voices are always the choir of the state.

A large portion of the Jewish people was annihilated in ways that historians are still trying to describe, as they also try to describe the sources of Nazi racism. We have no simple words to describe the monstrosity. Still, it seems that the ability to bow our heads and be silent in the face of the atrocity has been taken from us: to weep, or be horrified, or pray and move on. Because we do not have a national philosophy that is not politicians’ propaganda. We have no respectable national mourning.