Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent resistance against an oppressor is surely one of the most admirable political phenomena of the 20th century. Yet ultimately his success lay in his choice of oppressor. Say what you will about the British, they regarded themselves as basically decent and, faced with Gandhi's challenge, they ultimately backed down.

The Nazi, Soviet, Khmer Rouge, and Hutu genocidists never allowed the passivity of their victims to slow them down, not for a minute. When Gandhi's grandson, Arun Gandhi, recently visited Yad Vashem, it would have been fair-minded of him to reflect upon this distinction. Instead he took the opportunity to lecture the Jews on their mistakes: "We got rid of Hitler but not the philosophy of hate that still threatens and strikes," he admonished.

It's hard to know where to begin when someone implies that Zionism resembles Nazism as an ideology of hate. When someone stands at Yad Vashem and says that the practice of Zionism is akin to the persecution Jews suffered in Europe, he has opened an unbridgeable chasm between his version of events and the historical truth.

When Arun Gandhi says that the barrier Israel is building in the West Bank is worse than Palestinian suicide bombings, his listener can only reflect morosely on the devastation of moral thinking that is so common in our generation.

Gandhi's confused moral thinking is augmented by his impudence in preaching to the Jews what lessons they should learn from the Holocaust, even while implying that the Jews should desist from remembering. The pictures at Yad Vashem, he notes, reawaken Jews' deep fear of the experience and strengthen their anger and understanding that people are out to get them. Better to forgive and move forward.

Is it even possible to talk to a man who shrugs off an ancient cultural trait – the imperative to remember – as if it were a pesky hindrance?

Gandhi was willing to concede one important historical lesson: that the poor economic situation and the type of despair to which the Western countries subjected Germany after World War I caused the Holocaust because, in their desperation, the Germans were willing to attach themselves to Hitler in order to restore their sense of dignity. And the contemporary parallel, to him, is the downtrodden Palestinians, whose youth think it is better to die killing Jews than to live.

Any serious student of history knows that there is no law of human behavior that connects persecution to criminality. Some of humanity's most horrific crimes were committed by people or nations who were not previously downtrodden, while some of the noblest chapters of history were written by people who were suffering.

Had Arun Gandhi been at Yad Vashem to learn rather than to preach, he might have discovered that the tale told there is perhaps the clearest example of the latter.

The racist anti-Semitism adopted by the Nazis was fully developed before World War I, when Germany was a major power. While the turmoil of the early 1930s was clearly crucial in the rise of Nazism, it was resolved by the mid-1930s. The Germans launched the genocide of the Jews when they were at the pinnacle of their power, in 1941, years after their grievances of World War I had been ameliorated. It was a triumphal policy, not a despairing one.

Nor did Jewish behavior fit Arun Gandhi's paradigm. There has never been a chapter of human persecution more horrific than the Holocaust. It was preceded by many centuries of intermittent persecution of the Jews, some of it severe, much of it prolonged. And yet, in spite of endless provocation, the Jews were never "ground into dust," to use Gandhi's description of the Palestinians under Israeli rule; and although they must have felt intense frustration, they never preferred death with their tormentor's children, over life. No matter how much the Jews were persecuted, they never produced suicide murderers.

Moreover, the survivors of the Holocaust hardly even engaged in revenge killings; and if any of them ever murdered German innocents, it has not been mentioned in the history books.

Morality is about decisions, not circumstances. Decisions made by adults, who could have decided otherwise had they so chosen. The Nazis launched the murder of the Jews at the moment of their greatest triumph, not in their dark years after World War I. While we do not equate the Palestinians with the Nazis, the Palestinian campaign of suicide murders began in the early years of the Oslo process as Yitzhak Rabin was leading the Israelis out of Palestinian territories, not during the preceding decades of Israeli control.

And the Jews, no matter how much they were persecuted, managed to preserve their moral behavior, even under Nazism.

It is a past of which they should be proud.
Israel's enemies could learn from it.

The writer is the director of archives at Yad Vashem and the author of Right to Exist. A Moral Defense of Israel's Wars.