As a child, I had to wash my hands before I was shown books of photographs depicting the ghettos and death camps so that I didn’t leave fingerprints on the pages. This wasn’t a Jewish custom, just the way things were done in our house. Looking back, however, it felt part of the rituals of memorial designed to prevent the atrocities of previous generations from slipping into the sands of time.
The Jews – the only people to have been persecuted in every single century of their existence – hold a culture rich in traditions of remembrance, all freighted with duty. Never mind books of photographs. On Passover we stayed up all night to relate the story of the enslavement in Egypt and the redemption. On Tisha B’Av, we fasted to commemorate the destruction of the Temple in 70AD, which precipitated the Jewish exile from the land of Israel. Holocaust Memorial Day – which is today – does not have such a formal religious significance, but it bears similar moral obligation. However distant the events of the Shoah, however grainy the footage, and however comfortable our lives become, it has been a duty to never forget.
This year we don’t need a duty. The animating darkness of the Shoah is once again among us. But it wasn’t just the Nazi genocide that was revived on October 7. In Baghdad in 1941, Jewish bodies were mutilated; in Kishinev in 1903, Jewish babies were torn to pieces by the mob; in 1834, in the mystical city of Safed in northern Palestine, Jewish women were stripped and raped; in the Iberian Peninsula in 1391, Jews were butchered in their thousands; in York in 1290, Jews were burned alive in Clifford’s Tower. Aside from the cosmetics of modernity, there is one difference. Throughout history, the slow progress of everyday bigotry had climaxed in an orgy of violence; in 2023, an orgy of violence gave way to everyday bigotry.
Around the world, Jews face graffiti on their schools, homes and places of worship – a slogan about Gaza was scrawled outside my house – and weekly marches calling for their eradication. (In a television interview this week, the Hamas leader Khaled Mashal dismissed talk of a two-state solution with the words, ‘from the river to the sea’) On a cultural level, the spread of the new anti-Semitism has continued apace, beginning in the elite institutions and among the youth and seeping outwards.
A poll in the United States found that two-thirds of young people saw Jews as ‘oppressors’ and thought they should be treated as such. And what do we do with oppressors? As I wrote in my book, the core mechanism of anti-Semitism has always been the same: demonisation demands destruction. If the Jews of the Nazi imagination were malign by their very nature, it was logical to endorse the harsh but urgent project of exterminating them. If the Jews of medieval Europe had killed Christ, it was logical to drive them out, murder them or convert them under torture. Likewise, if the Jews are unable to help themselves from indulging their natural taste for genocide, ethnic cleansing, white supremacy, colonialism, occupation, apartheid and revelling in the blood of children – if they are repeating, even, what the Nazis did to them – they forfeit their right to a homeland. They forfeit their right to go about their lives free from bullying. They forfeit their right to exist.
The ability to masquerade as a virtue has always been one of the hallmarks of anti-Semitism. None of the perpetrators of the past considered that they were in the wrong. They believed they were erasing moral corruption for the good of the world. Similarly, it does not seem likely that the Hamas savages, who filmed their crimes on GoPros and exulted to their parents on the phones of their victims, felt any guilt. I suppose it is possible that the western progressives who make excuses for the atrocities, or cast doubt on them altogether, experience the occasional prick of shame in their hearts. But perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps they remain so convinced of the supposed virtue of their Israelophobia that their moral degradation, seen so clearly by the rest of us, remains obscure to them.
The very people who build their identities around #MeToo and #believewomen and #silenceisviolence, who hyperventilate at the sin of misgendering, who can detect a microaggression at twenty paces, who require trigger warnings for performances of Romeo and Juliet, who see racism everywhere, have suddenly developed a stomach for such things, have suddenly been able to cite ‘the context’. As Howard Jacobson put it: ‘It would seem that a massacre is not small enough to be a worry.’
Rather than unite behind a beleaguered democracy on the front line in the war on jihadism, these people blame the Jews for their own massacre, warning them that to mount a defence against such unvarnished evil – as other democracies have done against Islamic State or the Third Reich – would make them guilty of crimes against humanity. When is collateral damage not collateral damage? When it’s the Jews doing the killing. While other democracies wage war, the Jews wage genocide. In London, New York and elsewhere, mobs took to the street even before Israeli jets were in the skies. What were these people demonstrating against? The Israelis had done nothing but get themselves slaughtered. That first day lifted the mask. The activists were demonstrating for something.
As the months went by and demands for the genocide of Jews rang out weekly across our cities, it became clear that at the core of the protests were those who glorified an act of depravity refashioned as anti-colonial resistance. (When Hamas mutilated corpses, butchered babies and toyed with severed heads, it was a reaction to Jewish oppression. When they committed bestial sexual violence, they had been pushed to it by imperialism. Anyway, who could guarantee that the footage had not been fabricated?) The thousands of progressive moderates were prepared to turn a blind eye to blood-curdling chants and placards simply because their political identities were at stake. Tens of thousands saw Gazans suffering on television, wanted an end to the killing and thought it likely that the Jews were to blame. What’s that term again? Ah yes. Unconscious bias.
The thousands of progressive moderates were prepared to turn a blind eye to blood-curdling chants and placards simply because their political identities were at stake.
George Orwell wrote: ‘One of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true’. Once again, this has been confirmed by the October atrocities. Before our eyes, the viral strain of Holocaust denial has found a new expression in Hamas massacre denial. The Palestinian killers filmed themselves committing their crimes and shared the footage wantonly. How much more evidence do you need? But denial is never about the evidence. It is about piling humiliation upon the Jews by casting doubt on their suffering. The anti-Semite, an old saying goes, accuses a Jew of theft merely for the pleasure of seeing him turn out his pockets.
Other more subtle lies are now commonplace. Take the notion that Gaza was an ‘open-air prison camp’, used so often to endorse the Hamas savagery. How could people seriously believe that Gaza had been a sealed territory for decades, while also criticising Israel for no longer providing extra water, food and fuel into the Strip? How could they at once demand that Israel resume deliveries of lorryloads of aid and condemn the Jewish state for keeping Gazans in a state of starvation for years?
Today, actual footage of the Hamas atrocities is dismissed as airily as evidence of the gas chambers. Today, the ‘moderate’ Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas wrote a PhD thesis arguing that that no more than one million Jews had been killed in the Holocaust; the Zionists had inflated the numbers to win sympathy for their cause; and Israel only seized and tried Adolph Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, to prevent him from revealing the role of the Zionists in the genocide.
So much for the similarities. But we must not forget the wonderful difference: In 2024, the Jews have a nation-state. Menachem Begin, the founder of Likud and a former prime minister of Israel, said: ‘I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilised history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again.’
If Holocaust Memorial Day this year holds a lesson for the world, it must be this: The appetite for the Jews is never sated by swallowing the Jews. As in the time of Hitler, so today. We face an enemy. On Saturday after Saturday, mobs in Britain bay for the blood of Israel as a totem of western liberal values. They chant for the Houthis, they deface the cenotaph, they tear down the Union flag. This is not Israel’s problem. It isn’t even a Jewish problem. It is our problem. If we are to save our societies from themselves, the time to take a stand is now.
Comments