The Israeli discourse on the Holocaust seeks to preserve the language of the Holocaust as a one-time event, a “different planet” with no past or present. In my lecture, I will seek to trace the Jewish-Arab narrative that suddenly emerged from the “language of the Holocaust” in Jewish-European literature, thus challenging the detachment of this language as “another planet” and revealing the historical and narrative connections between Jews and Arabs. I would like to focus on three points: The first is the cultural meaning of the Yiddish term muselmann, which means “Muslim person.” In addition, I would like to examine Heinrich Heine’s renowned admonition, “those who burn books will in the end burn people,” which, in Israeli discourse, is associated with the Nazi burning of books in 1933. In fact, an examination of the linguistic and cultural history of the statement reveals that it was made by the Arab character Hassan in Heine’s 1821 tragedy Almansor regarding the burning of the Koran in Granada in 1492! the sentence is preserved as a one-time linguistic event without history and without cultural context. This surprising web of connections is also preserved in Dan Pagis’s poem “The Dead Village.” With the death of Pagis, Amos Oz published a commentary on the poem in which he discussed it as relating to the Holocaust, but 20 years later the poem was published in the anthology Don’t Tell it in Gath: The Palestinian Naqba in Hebrew Poetry edited by Hannan Hever. How is it possible that the same poem was interpreted in such different contexts? In my lecture I will take a step back to the cultural and linguistic past of the “language of the Holocaust” to trace the unstable system of signals that underlies it and to mark the breaking of boundaries between the Jewish and Arab identities.