Of course the Holocaust is relevant to Israel now
“People love dead Jews.” Dara Horn used that title for her 2021 book, noting that while remembering the Holocaust was generally accepted as the right thing to do, acknowledging, let alone confronting, modern-day antisemitism was not considered especially relevant or important. It suited many, and still does, for annihilationist hate to be put in a box marked “the past”.
After the brutal slaughter perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October there needs to be a caveat: for some people to love them, the dead Jews need to be perceived as powerless. Grimly, it seems that for some, even murdered babies, toddlers or elderly people – dead Jews all – do not qualify for powerlessness, and therefore love, if they are Israeli.
During the Holocaust, Jewish men, women and children were systematically stripped of any vestiges of power, strength, or the opportunity – in nearly all cases – to resist. The world turned its back when Hitler came to power, allowing the Nazis to pursue their murderous goals with little assistance or help from the non-Jewish world.
But on 7 October, when death squads infiltrated Israel, massacred 1,400 civilians in their beds, on the streets and at a music festival; raped women; murdered and mutilated babies and young children; and kidnapped more than 200 people now hostage in Gaza, there are many who once again looked on, many who justified it and a distressing number who even celebrated it.
Some of those who were murdered, kidnapped or survived the Hamas attack included people who had survived the Holocaust. It is depressing, therefore, that there are those who don’t understand why, for the Jewish state and for Jewish people across the world, the past is the present. And more shocking are those who wilfully deny those echoes and seek to silence them, to silence Jews even in the face of tragedy. For them, it is better that Jews be merely a reminder of man’s inhumanity to man; living Jews pose much harder questions than dead ones.
The accusation that Israel is “weaponising the Holocaust” should be seen in this context. Jewish people have long been accused of attempting to gain sympathy or somehow benefit from the horrors inflicted on them by the Nazis. Weaponise. Even the word, mere weeks after weapons of death were used to massacre Jews, is offensive. At this moment, the accusation comes across as an attempt to invalidate Jewish pain.
The Hamas Charter states “our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious”. Its aim is the eradication of Israel from the face of the earth. It calls on its members to “raise the banner of Jihad in the face of its oppressors” – namely, Jews. We have heard the recording of a terrorist phoning his parents back in Gaza and heard their pride at him murdering 10 Jews with his own hands.
And yet on the very day of the attack – in fact while the attack was ongoing – there were posts across social media saying the Jews, in blunt terms, had it coming. The reaction of many during the Holocaust was very similar. In the days since, the horrors of the attack have been denied, the truth questioned again and again. The State of Israel took the unprecedented step earlier this weekof airing previously unseen barbaric footage for journalists – horrifyingly deemed necessary in light of the falsification of events spreading like wildfire.
Across the world, marches and protests have taken place where the flags of terrorist organisations, whose aim is to murder Jews, have been on open, proud display; as have placards comparing the State of Israel and its leaders to the Nazis. In Tunisia a synagogue was vandalised and set on fire. In Germany a synagogue was firebombed and Jewish families have had the Star of David daubed on their homes, marking them out as Jewish.
Since the attack, active antisemitism here in the UK has surged. The Community Security Trust has recorded a 689% rise in incidents in the UK. The Jewish community is strong and resilient but still anxious, with many parents asking if it’s safe for their children to go out.
Yet for some people, today the Jews are no longer victims. The fact that so many were victims is irrelevant.
The fact that across the Jewish state people are mourning their loved ones is immaterial. The fact that Hamas murdered babies is irrelevant in this analysis, firmly grounded in the kind of discourse that talks only about “power”, because the Jews have a state and because Israel is more powerful than the Palestinians. By this dehumanising metric, therefore, the Israeli baby is more “powerful” than the Hamas terrorist who murdered them, and unworthy of our attention.
Let me be very clear here. Jews will inevitably connect the trauma of an attack that murdered more than a thousand innocent civilians with the trauma of Nazi massacres. It is macabre that Jews should be denied the right to voice those connections that are so deeply rooted in our trauma.
And acknowledging that trauma does not have to come at the expense of acknowledging the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza we are witnessing on our TV screens, which is heartbreaking. All life is sacred and we must not forget that the Palestinian people are also victims of Hamas, used as human shields to pursue the hateful agenda of these murderous terrorists.
The fact the massacre committed by Hamas terrorists was carried out within a Jewish state, rather than to a stateless group across Europe, should not make it more palatable, or evoke less sympathy. Unfortunately, it seems, even if people love dead Jews in history books, they have no love for them if they are murdered in their own country, in 2023.
Karen Pollock is chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust