The International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust arrives each year like a bell rung in heavy fog, solemn, necessary and too easily muffled by the surrounding noise. It asks for stillness in a culture addicted to velocity, for moral clarity in an era that treats history as a buffet. We say “never again,” and then we check our phones. We light candles and then return to our preferred arguments, already warmed up, already rehearsed, already eager to recruit the dead into the service of the living.
The Holocaust is not an abstract warning label affixed to civilization; it is a record of what happens when prejudice becomes policy and fear acquires a bureaucracy. Its victims were not symbols. They were accountants who forgot umbrellas, children who hated homework, women who sang badly, men who worried about their blood pressure. Their destruction was industrial, imaginative in its cruelty, and justified with the paperwork of reason. To remember them is not merely to grieve. It is to accept that modernity itself, with its forms and files and railways, can be turned into a weapon.
Yet remembrance today is conducted in a strange hall of mirrors. On one side, anti-Semitism has learned new costumes. It wears the shabby coat of conspiracy, the tailored suit of “just asking questions,” the casual hoodie of meme culture. It thrives online, where old libels are given new fonts and the Jew is again cast as puppet master, pathogen, parasite. Synagogues need guards. Jewish schoolchildren learn evacuation drills not unlike those practiced in places officially described as war zones. We repeat “never again,” while the vocabulary of “again” quietly repopulates the streets.
On the other side stands the government of Israel, draped in the language of historical trauma while practicing a politics of permanent emergency. Under Benjamin Netanyahu, memory has been hardened into armour. The Holocaust is invoked not as a human catastrophe but as a strategic asset, a moral credit card that never expires. Gaza becomes a laboratory for disproportionality, and suffering is measured with a calculator that only counts on one side of the border. Civilian death is described as unfortunate weather, an unavoidable climate condition of security.
To criticize this is not to deny Jewish history; it is to refuse its conscription. The dead of Auschwitz did not perish so that other civilians might be flattened with cleaner technology and better press briefings. Their absence does not grant moral immunity. Memory is not a shield that turns missiles into virtues. When a state claims eternal victimhood, it risks becoming deaf to the sound of its own boots. Trauma, left untreated, has a habit of reproducing itself in unfamiliar faces.
What makes this moment particularly grotesque is the forced binary it offers. Condemn anti-Semitism, and you are told to accept every action of the Israeli state as a sacred reflex. Condemn the destruction of Gaza, and you are accused of flirting with the ghosts of European hatred. The argument is arranged like a narrow hallway with armed guards at both ends. Choose your execution. Nuance is smuggled out in ambulances, bleeding quietly on the floor.
Holocaust remembrance should expand our capacity for moral imagination, not shrink it into a tribal coupon. It should train us to recognize early symptoms: the language that dehumanizes, the jokes that rehearse contempt, the policies that turn neighbours into numbers. It should make us suspicious of leaders who speak in absolutes, who confuse strength with righteousness, who treat empathy as a strategic vulnerability. The lesson of that catastrophe is not that one people must forever be untouchable, but that no people should ever be.
Anti-Semitism and the devastation of Gaza are not competing tragedies in a grotesque Olympics of pain. They are connected by the same human failure, the inability to see the other as fully real. The conspiracy theorist and the missile technician share a deficit of imagination. Both reduce lives to abstractions, whether as demonic plots or acceptable collateral. Both rely on distance, one psychological, the other physical. Both are fed by the comforting lie that safety is achieved by shrinking the circle of who deserves to live.
A commemoration that avoids this connection becomes a museum with excellent lighting and no exits. We admire the exhibits, nod gravely, and then return to a world organized around newer, faster justifications for cruelty. The victims of the Holocaust do not require our silence; they require our courage. Not the theatrical courage of slogans, but the tedious, socially expensive kind that insists on holding two truths at once: that Jews are still endangered by hatred, and that Palestinians are still endangered by power.
The dead cannot correct us. They cannot object when their memory is rented out to excuse the inexcusable. That responsibility belongs to the living, who, inconveniently, must think. To honour the victims is not to fossilize their suffering into a political tool, but to let it interrogate our present behaviour with unbearable precision. Remembrance, if it is honest, should make us less comfortable, less certain, less willing to trade one group’s terror for another’s. Other
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