The 60th anniversary of Israel’s “independence” was met with all the usual fanfare celebrating the “achievements” of the “only democracy” in the Middle East and as a refuge for Jews – Bush fed into that, saying Masada won’t fall again.

What was missing, of course, was the real meaning of that anniversary. It’s imperative, then, to revisit the Jewish state’s crutch – the Holocaust.

Israel’s establishment – which was supposed to settle once and for all the anti-Semitism that produced the genocide – only created more questions.

The main question: How is the Holocaust viewed through the prism of cultural and political lenses?

Recently, when Libya’s deputy permanent U.N. representative Ibrahim Dabbashi made a comment comparing Gaza with the Nazi death camps that sparked a walkout by Western envoys, the reaction revealed a fissure in the ways the Holocaust is perceived.

To Libya — and by extension the Arab/Muslim world — the Holocaust is a metaphor for what’s happening to the Palestinians. It’s a way to communicate the urgent need to act against the death and destruction visited upon a people by a racist regime in the same way the Nazis did to the Jews. It’s also a way to frame the issue into a paradigm of victims and victimizers in a way the Western world would understand without any reservations.

For the walkout participants and the world they represent — which includes Israel — the Holocaust was a singular world event with no parallel in history. The evil behind it was unique and so are the victims, therefore their nation-building project is unique and beyond reproach. Any comparison of the Jewish state’s actions to the Third Reich is immoral and — get ready for it — anti-Semitic.

U.S. envoy to the U.N. Alejandro Wolff said the remarks “reflect a degree of historical ignorance and moral insensitivity that is one of the large reasons… why peace in the Middle East is so difficult.”

Of course, it’s the U.S.’s pro-Israel policy that makes Middle East peace so difficult, given the foreign aid, vetoing of Security Council resolutions and standing by silently allowing the Israelis to brutalize Palestinians and bomb Lebanese with impunity.

There is a tendency among Muslims and especially Arabs to “Holocaust-ize” the Palestinian issue. However, it should be noted that Israel isn’t a fascist state and no premeditated genocide is occurring. The atrocity that is Gaza differs in that the killings are collective punishment to break the will of a rebel populace, not a final solution to eradicate a whole people.

This isn’t to say that Israel isn’t a racist state. It is. It’s a Jewish state where non-Jews — mainly Palestinians — are discriminated against on a daily basis inside the state and violently oppressed in the territories (despite the withdrawal, Israel still controls the air, sea and border crossings of Gaza.)

But all this can’t be compared to the Holocaust for another reason: While the destruction of European Jews occurred largely in secret, the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza is happening out in the open, for all the world to see. Perhaps that’s what Dabbashi meant when he said, “it is worse than that.”

Accusations of anti-Semitism aren’t a new phenomenon. Not even the “new anti-Semitism,” coined by the Anti-Defamation League in 1974, is new, just a recycled intimidation tactic that has reached new distorted heights, with terms like “Arab anti-Semitism.”

Despite the contradiction — Arabs are Semites — this has been used to great effect, especially throughout the Al-Aqsa Intifada, to justify Israeli violence and repression and to de-legitimize Palestine solidarity movements.

It doesn’t hold because anti-Zionism is a rational analysis of a real problem, not an irrational prejudice containing Jewish cabals and conspiracies at its core. Besides, it’s the Jews who are the aggressors, not the victims in the Middle East conflict.

“Uniqueness” is where the Holocaust has assumed a religious aura — an object of worship instead of an object of study, the meaning of which only the elite priesthood can decipher.

In the eyes of this priesthood, the Holocaust is “unique” — it can’t be compared to other acts of mass murder, and therefore the suffering of Jews is unique.

Among the practitioners of this religion is Elie Wiesel, a lauded Holocaust survivor and pro-Israel bigot, who has said the Holocaust “lies outside, if not beyond, history” and that it “defies both knowledge and description.”

By de-politicizing the Holocaust and removing it from the realm of rational historicity, it becomes a tool of a bourgeois establishment to make money, expand political influence and silence dissent — in short, a Holocaust industry, as written by Norman Finkelstein.

Deborah Lipstadt, author of “Denying The Holocaust,” wrote of “immoral equivalencies” in comparing the Holocaust with the 1915 Armenian genocide, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. occupation of Vietnam that left at least two million dead, among others.

The proper use of the history of the Holocaust is as a lesson about the evils of racism and colonialism — the death camps wouldn’t have been possible without the occupation of Europe.

Instead, the Holocaust is understood through the narrow lens of anti-Semitism, and the exclusive narrative of Jewish suffering, thereby excluding others.

And with 60 years of Israel we’re left with 60 years of Holocaust perversion and pimping in the service of the oppression of another people, a disaster not only for Palestinians and Muslims, but for Jews as well.