In the first decades of its existence, the State of Israel did not identify with the Holocaust. Indeed, as Tom Segev and other historians have shown, the Holocaust was in conflict with the image the State wanted to convey: that Jews were finally agents of history and not its subjects, heroes rather than victims. Only later did certain Israeli politicians decide it was opportune to underscore the Holocaust as the prime example of murderous antisemitism in order to discredit all criticism of state policies as antisemitic. This lecture will describe the history of the deliberate strategies involved in this process.