Restaurants, cinemas and theaters closed, flags were lowered to half staff, and at one point sirens blared across the country--not as warning of an attack, but as a signal to millions of Israelis to shut off their engines, stop working, hang up their phones, stop chattering, and observe two minutes of silence in remembrance of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis from 1933 to 1945.

Thursday marked Israel's annual Holocaust Remembrance Day.

At Yad Vashem, the nation's custodian of Holocaust documentation, memory, heroism and education, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and others laid a wreath at the at the Warsaw Ghetto uprising memorial. "Today." Olmert said, "the 60-year-old State of Israel promises the millions of Jews who disappeared into the eternal silence that we will forever uphold the memory of the events of the Holocaust."

Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948. Harry Truman, president of the United States at the time, recognized Israel's existence within 11 minutes of the declaration. Olmert was careful on Thursday not to connect the Holocaust with the creation of Israel, although it's undeniable that the two events are in many ways intricately and painfully connected. Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, the Nazi death camp where between 1.1 million and 1.6 million people were exterminated, some 90 percent of them Jews, 12,000 people took part today in the March of the Living ceremony, and were led, for the first time, by an Israeli military chief--Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, chief of staff of the Israeli army.

"The fact that an independent Jewish state exists is not something to be taken for granted," Ashkenazi said. "Even today, we hear the horrible sounds of those who call for the destruction of the state of Israel. Even today we are forced to continue and fight for our right to have a national home in a safe place for the Jewish people in their own land. We have learned our lesson and we take very seriously the threats of state leaders who call for the destruction of Israel."

True to form, the Arab press was virtually silent on Holocaust Remembrance Day, when it wasn't flat-out vile. In Mid-April Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV broadcast an "educational" program claiming that "The Satanic Jews thought up an evil plot [the Holocaust] to be rid of the burden of the disabled and handicapped, in twisted criminal ways. While they accuse the Nazis or others so the Jews would seem persecuted, and try to benefit from international sympathy. They were the first to invent the methods of evil and oppression."

In a perverted sense, the Hamas libel is an improvement: Islamists and other Israel-hating extremists generally take the deniers' approach that the Holocaust never happened. (You can see the video for yourself.)