When I read this week’s New York Times story about Israeli grandchildren (and some children) of Holocaust survivors who have tattooed their elders’ concentration camp numbers onto their forearms (and in some cases ankles), I wasn’t sure what to think. Who am I to put down a memorialization of the Holocaust? These people obviously feel strongly about what they’re doing; what right do I have to judge them?

Mention of the Holocaust, of course, has a tendency to paralyze one’s critical faculties, and it happened to me upon reading this story. But something didn’t sit well. Young, modern Israelis tattooing themselves like Auschwitz inmates? (If you look at the photos, you see that the numbers, which were inscribed at Israeli tattoo parlors, are done much more aesthetically than the Nazis did the originals.) Isn’t this a little … over the top?

The young people interviewed said they did it to remember their grandparents and to remind people of the Holocaust.

“All my generation knows nothing about the Holocaust,” said Ms. [Eli] Sagir, 21, who has had the tattoo for four years. “You talk with people and they think it’s like the Exodus from Egypt, ancient history. I decided to do it to remind my generation: I want to tell them my grandfather’s story and the Holocaust story.”

I imagine being at a party and seeing some young person with a long number tattooed neatly on his or her forearm or ankle. A conversation-starter it would definitely be. And if I were throwing the party, nobody with a neo-Auschwitz tattoo would be allowed in.

What is this weirdness about? It’s about commemorating the Holocaust, but it is also about Israeli bad taste, which unfortunately tend to go together. Reserve, subtlety – these are not well-known Israeli traits, and especially not when it comes to the Holocaust. With all things, and definitely with the Holocaust, the Israeli style is more along the lines of “if you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

If people want to remember their grandparents who went through the camps, if they want people to remember the Holocaust, let them find a less garish, grotesque way of doing it. (At this point we’re talking about a microtrend. The article says only a “handful” of Israelis have gotten the tattoos; 10 were interviewed. But with such a big story running in the New York Times, along with a series of arty, shadowy photos of young, hip-looking, numbered Israelis, who knows? It could catch on.)

A related Israeli trait that the tattoos represent, one that also meshes perfectly with popular Holocaust consciousness, is emotionalism. Give people a jolt, yank their heartstrings, make them cry. Obviously, this is not only an Israeli thing, but Israel, given its preoccupations with death, heroism and victimhood, has taken to it fiercely. The Israeli media runs on emotionalism; the biggest, longest-running story of recent years, Gilad Shalit, was strictly a tear-jerker. And now, so is the legacy of the Holocaust.

My son, Alon, went with his high school class this summer to Poland, to the concentration camps, like all Israeli high school classes do. I was afraid the trip would be an exercise in nationalistic brainwashing, but Alon says that was not the emphasis. The emphasis was on getting the kids to cry.

He said once they went to a forest where Jews had been slaughtered, and the guide told a story about a girl who lost her mother there. Then the guide told the students to form a circle and hold hands. Then the guide turned on a disc player and played a song by Zehava Ben (who always sounds like she’s crying), called “There Is No Love Like a Mother’s Love,” which is one of the great weepers in the Israeli canon. On a Holocaust study tour in the middle of a Polish forest.

But who’s going to say it’s wrong, it’s gross, it’s embarrassing, please stop? Nobody. If it’s supposedly in the name of the Holocaust victims, anything goes – third-generation concentration camp tattoos, Zehava Ben cry-a-thons, it doesn’t matter. Whenever and however the Holocaust is being memorialized, shtum is the word.

Rampant anti-Semitism drove my great-grandmother from Eastern Europe. There’d been pogroms; there were restrictions on the type of work Jews could do. My family made their way to New York City with little more than the clothes on their backs; the relatives they’d left behind disappeared during the Holocaust, never to be heard from again.

So when the United Nations voted in favor of the partition of Palestine in 1947, my great-grandmother’s son, my grandfather, rejoiced. He ran into the street and danced. He sang HaTikva. And when fighting broke out in Palestine, he decided that he would make the trip east and join the Haganah, which later became the Israeli army. Sure, he was only 16, but he would lie about his age and enlist.

It was my great-grandmother—an Orthodox Jew who’d fled anti-Semitism, who’d lost family and friends in the Holocaust—who stopped him.

“No way are you going to fight the Arabs,” she said. She was an anti-Zionist and, as such, there was a lot packed into those words.

Even though I never met her, I always find myself thinking about my great-grandmother a lot this time of year. This is the period in Israel when we enter the cycle of nationalist holidays that starts with Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Day). Never mind that Israel treats Holocaust survivors so poorly that they have protested the issue. Never mind that many Holocaust survivors are still struggling to survive in Israel and that, according to Ynet, that state is cutting their benefits by twenty percent. Never mind that Israel cynically uses the Holocaust as a political tool to defend indefensible policies of occupation and expansion and to beat the war drums against Iran.

After Yom HaShoah, the flag-waving continues with Yom HaZikaron (Remembrance Day) and culminates with Yom HaAtzmaut (Independence Day). Stacked one on top of the other, the three holidays maximize feelings of victimhood, self-righteousness, and unity. For many Israelis, that the sad Yom HaZikaron rolls straight into the joyful Yom HaAtzmaut gives a feeling of triumph, of exhilaration. It’s intoxicating. And it’s dangerous.

Maybe that’s why my great-grandmother didn’t want her son to fight in a war that wasn’t her own. I think she understood that Israel wasn’t the solution to the Jewish people’s problems. Today, I’m watching the bits of democracy that exist here tremble under the weight of the occupation. I watch the conversation about Israel grow increasingly divisive in the Diaspora. I consider the vibrant Jewish cultures and languages that were virtually wiped out for the sake of forging an Israeli identity. I see Jews turn away from Judaism because of Israel’s ill-doings. I wonder if my great-grandmother saw all this coming, if she knew the trouble that lay ahead.

Last night we found out there is an apparatchik at the Treasury who came up with a brilliant idea for curbing the deficit: Raising the rent of Holocaust survivors. As the clerk – his name is Tzahi David – proudly explained to the somewhat shocked Knesset members, the government subsidizes the rent of many Holocaust survivors, who pay only 8 percent of it. From October onward, said Tzahi David, they’ll pay 10 percent. This will cost them about 70 NIS (about 18 USD); a small amount for Tzahi David, a large sum for a retiree. The government will rake in some seven million NIS per year.

Several years ago, the country was in an uproar when the Olmert government proudly announced that it would raise the monthly stipends of the survivors by only 83 NIS. The amount was considered shamefully low. Olmert hath given, and Tzahi David hath taketh away, let the name of the Treasury Boys be blessed. As for those extra 83 shekels? Fear not – the rising prices have long gnawed at it, leaving little.

Israel’s cynical use of the Holocaust survivors is astounding even to those familiar with the unsavory face of Israeli history. At the beginning, after 1948, they were something to be embarrassed of, the embodiment of the Old Jew, and they were ordered to be silent about what they had experienced. Later, when Zionist ideology breathed its last and David Ben Gurion founded the religion of the Holocaust in its stead, using the Eichmann trial as its equivalent of human sacrifice, the survivors were faced with the demand to publicly re-open their barely healed wounds. From that moment, until the final logic of the Holocaust religion was exposed in General Eliezer Stern’s saying that “in every generation, a person should see himself as if he himself went out of Auschwitz,” they served as Israel’s fig leaf, as a walking, talking plea to the world: Look at us, how dare you judge us?

Yet, strangely enough, Holocaust survivors have often found themselves in the sights of the Treasury Boys (the unelected band of treasury officials who have an inordinate amount of power and who actually write Israeli policy on everything, except military operations and foreign relations): They forced the closing of the Holocaust Survivors’ Welfare Fund in 2006, by denying it funding while cynically saying they might renew it the next year – with dozens or hundreds of survivors dying in the meanwhile. The Knesset even created an investigative committee, so far with no results.

Now, I understand that Tzahi David must find a way to raise that seven million shekels somehow, and I’d be glad to help him. I’m no economist, but I’m pretty certain that if we raise Israel’s corporate tax back to 27 percent, instead of 25 percent as it has been since 2010, we’re likely to end up with a bit more than seven million. Yes, I know – the voodoo doctors tell us that if we raise the corporate tax, companies will bolt. I dunno: they seem to doing rather well in New Zealand (with a tax rate of 30 percent) and Australia (likewise), Britain (where the rate can go up to 28 percent) and even in the good ol’ USA, where the federal tax can go up to 35 percent, and that’s not including state taxes. Nobody seems to think California is particularly hostile to business, even though it has a corporate tax – again, different from the federal tax – of 9.3%.

Assuming Tzahi David doesn’t like the idea, since it will imperil his ability to get a corporate job once he leaves the Treasury, maybe we ought to roll back the “reform” in the internal revenue tax. After all, this particular reform – which lowers the rates of the 10th percentile – is the cause of the missing funds in the first place. Another good idea is seriously fighting the army over its budget, since we learned last night that – oops! – it wasted some 560 million over a misguided car leasing project. Making a quick calculation, it seems that 560 million will cover Tzahi David’s missing seven million for, oh, 80 years. Few people seriously believe Israel will be around then.

Yet another trick of the Treasury Boys for closing the gap – assuming there is one; the Treasury keeps trying to make the public look away from those notes it is obliged to publish, which say that every quarter, the government collects more taxes than expected – and yet it is raising taxes on goods and services. The oligarchs may be paying lower taxes, but everyone is spending more on water, food, fuel, alcohol – you name it. The bastards even had the temerity to subject water to VAT, which never happened before Netanyahu came to power. One of them, a former aide to Treasury Minister Steinitz, said that “a long shower is a luxury.” For reasons beyond human understanding, Tzahi David and his colleagues seem to think this is perfectly natural, perhaps because they are guided by an ideology which does not recognize human beings, only products, producers, and invisible hands.

The Treasury Boys hold the reins of power in Israel. In effect, they run every governmental department. Nothing can be done, unless they approve it. The department’s treasury official can block any initiative. He knows everything. He understands education better than teachers, health services more than doctors, welfare better than social workers.

So it is about time the people who wield the power will also bear the responsibility. Let’s stop talking of amorphous Treasury Boys and name names: Every draconian measure bears a name. We can start with Tzahi David, who will live in infamy as the man who seriously suggested cutting rent subsidies to aged Holocaust survivors. Do you know where he lives? Send him mail saying precisely what you think of him. Meet him in the street? Tell him, publicly and to his face, what you think of his sorry existence. Until we manage to nationalize the Treasury, it’s time for a “price tag” policy against it.