Approaching “never again,” again

Still all too relevant this Yom HaShoah, and every day

Wojtek Radwanski / AFP

The Holocaust is globally known, and also denied, as the single most defining rise of antisemitism and death of Jews, without any event coming anywhere close in vicious and intentional savagery…until October 7th. It is literally beyond belief that global Holocaust survivors have had to witness another attempted genocide within their own lifetimes, and it is the height of surreality that some individuals have had to become dual survivors of both.

The only thing sadder than observing a day of remembrance for the genocide of one’s people, in the wake of another attempted genocide…is observing it while unimaginably being accused of the very crime itself.

Welcome to the sick reality of Holocaust inversion: using a term conceived by a Jew, to describe the mass extermination of Jews, against Jews today, in nothing short of an absolutely conscious decision and malicious calculation to retraumatize.

Everyone has heard at least once the grotesque allegations that many Jews hear weekly, if not daily: Jews are literal Nazis, Israel is committing genocide by ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population, Gazans are being held in at best a ghetto like Warsaw…but additionally an actual concentration camp…and also exactly the same horror as Auschwitz itself.

Aside from the demonstrably ridiculous fiction, and the fact that if Israel were truly committing “genocide,” it is occurring on the most Jewish time ever, why choose these terms specifically?

It is not simply because genocide is the worst thing that one can do, and Nazis are the worst thing that one can be. It is because some of the worst crimes in modern human history are also inextricably tied to Jewish history. Never underestimate the absolute intention and gleeful thrill of deliberately inflicting greater present pain on Jews by co-opting and warping the pain of their past. The cherry on top for these quintessential antisemites is watching Jews being forced to defend themselves, their humanity, and overall reality against horrific accusations. To be a disingenuous distraction, waste of time, and energy drain, is pure victory in itself.

This should be abhorrent enough on its own, but there is more intentional malevolence behind this perversion of history and morality than just deranged spite: comparing Jews to Nazis lays the framework for first rationality of dehumanization and then acceptability of destruction.

The tactic is unfortunately working.

Most commonly seen among the general population is passive dehumanization. No one would ever second guess any other country for needing to eliminate threats of terrorism despite the undesirable consequence of civilian casualties that might arise. Every other nation would be granted the acknowledgment that their own well being would depend on the utter eradication of all terrorists next to them and would also be worth the effort. However, the world doesn’t see Israel as worthy of well being and doesn’t value the lives of its citizens as full humans, so it doesn’t value its necessary eradication of terror over casualties.

The West has become unnervingly lax on acceptable antisemitism, due to the same dark truth: there is no reason to take implied or even literal violence seriously when you don’t take the wellbeing of Jews seriously. Therefore, it is now acceptable to yell “death to Jews” in the street (and I do mean literally, above and beyond the slogans that only “imply” that), to harass, taunt, and block Jews from public areas and roads, and repeatedly threaten Jewish spaces. With this as the new standard, it comes as no surprise that assault and murder of Jews has had new room to increase as well…all while “progressive” nations sit back in seeming moral paralysis, insisting through top-notch gaslighting that the most obviously reprehensible still requires context.

The unfortunate itching of history to repeat itself gravely proves that Holocaust education has not been globally successful, assuming it has been bothered to be attempted at all. For too many that even experienced any education, it appears to have only been a memorization of numbers (twelve years of Hitler’s regime, six million dead Jews) while the crucial takeaways of why and how have been lost. As a result, we have the modern phenomenon of diluting the grave concept of Nazism into anyone that disagrees with the perpetually offended. Further, it is shallowly assumed that such horrific hate can only be a manifestation of a single political side, with those on the opposing side utterly oblivious to the transformation of themselves into that which they live to despise. Thus, among everything else the past few years, we’ve seen Palestinian flags flown by Auschwitz, the planning of a “Kufiyas in Buchenwald” rally at that very site, Anne Frank’s likeness wrapped in keffiyehs at best and her memorial defaced and hidden from further defacement at worst, and Western youth calling for the same global genocide that their grandparents likely fought against.

What we can take away from both past and recent history is that when the conditions are right, the sentiment hasn’t necessarily changed…rather, the resentment has simply intensified now that Jews are not sitting ducks without a nation and army this time around.

The Dara Horn quote that “people love dead Jews” could not be any more appropriate in this age. The only genuinely politically savory Jews are the ones to be pitied and forgotten in death, as these are the ones who no longer pose a nuisance, and certainly not the ones who both dare to exist and are capable of fighting back. It truly bothers too many to the core that we even choose to keep surviving, and worse, solidifying our survival through our own defended nation.

Antisemitism certainly hasn’t changed over the decades, or millennia, but fortunately neither has our resilience. What has changed is our fortified strength of community and resources, so we, and not just the bigotry of others, decide our future now. It’s a good thing, too, because if there’s one basic truth that we have sadly learned multiple times now over the past century, it is that most of the world is at very best apathetic to a fault and will go out of its way to do nothing to help, so it’s truly on Israel and Jews to defend ourselves…which, despite both the age old and current disdain, is exactly what we will keep doing.

“Never again” isn’t just a nice little slogan for hypocritical world leaders to mindlessly say or parasitic movements to cringely appropriate…we actually mean it. Israel may not have been created because of the Holocaust, but the Holocaust showed the need for Israel, and because of Israel, we won’t have to face one again. And much to the dismay of all our timeless naysayers and bigots, Jews will sustain the ultimate vindication…continuing to not only survive but absolutely thrive, just as we always have.