When the World Forgot About the Jews
“Never Again”. A sacred oath for many believed by even more to be a slogan. But a scarce amount of the population neither understands the Holocaust nor the price that is paid when it isn’t intimately understood. The testimonies given over the last eighty years have ultimately fallen on deaf ears. The cost: a world-wide turning of the other cheek when the Holocaust’s ghost came to haunt the victims’ descendants and the subsequent global persecution campaign that befell them.
This isn’t about the Holocaust. This is about what happens when the world ignores its lesson, which is what happens when the Jewish people wake up and go to sleep with targets on their backs. Make no mistake: this is neither a declaration that Jewish lives only matter when the aftermath affects non-Jews, nor is it meant to paint a picture of Jews as weak, fragile, or defenseless. It is an attempt to hold a mirror up to the rest of the world, it is daring to challenge the unchallenged.
At the core of the problem lies the fact that the Holocaust — the infamous Jewish genocide— has been rendered unimportant. It is not ghastly and unholy enough to be immune from “meme culture”, where even the most heinous events are not spared from being mocked or delegitimized. Across the board, Holocaust survivors’ pleas for what they endured to be taught and learned from are seemingly meaningless. The country that holds the largest percentage of those who made it out alive, Israel, is also on the internet’s chopping block. Content after content is curated to stimulate negative and hostile feelings towards the world’s only Jewish state. Benjamin Netanyahu and evil myths about Israel’s existence in the world invade screens, essentially having no identity short of digital effigies. The netizens who digest these things are not even aware of why this content is being loaded onto a conveyor belt, neither are they conscious as to why they believe them.
On the other hand is something equally as sinister: the manipulation of the Holocaust and its use as a label to make false allegations against Israel. What has emerged since the war against Hamas is a flood of baseless accusations; the deliberate targeting of Gazans, their forced starvation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, among other things. And those parroting these blatantly sinister lies chime in with their unfounded claims that the Israelis have brought the Holocaust unto the Gazans. Not only is this factually untrue in every possible way, it is also perverse and abhorrent. It is far beyond offensive to insist that Israel, which became a refuge for Holocaust survivors and now holds about half of world’s survivors in their old age, would ever commit such a travesty elsewhere. Just because the rest of the world has forgotten what actually happened doesn’t mean that the Israelis have.
In the immediate aftermath of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, the legendary shamelessness associated with Jew-hatred rose from the dead. October 7th, 2023 was both a terrorist attack and the rope that was pulled of the curtain that revealed the world’s true face. Israel was no longer the Jewish country. It was the Jew.
When Germany’s economy plummeted following the first World War, the Nazi party insisted that the only way to restore the country to its former glory would cost the head of every last Jew on a silver platter. They got a discount for six million, that’s two-thirds of Europe and one-third of the whole planet. Less than a century later, the world — better, but still scraped and bruised — is looking at the same menu. Some (but certainly not all) aren’t too keen to point fingers at Jews outright but many take no such precautions with the state of Israel and its proponents, the Zionists, and in turn thinly veiling their real targets, the Jews. This phenomenon is the latest finding in the science of Jew-hatred; the newest phenotype in the genetics of antisemitism. But it is still applicable in the perfect mathematical formula: identify the problem, the need for blame, arrive at the conclusion that it must be the Jews.
In a nutshell, Jew-hatred has always been prevalent because of its capability to adapt. As Dara Horn and Melanie Philips put it, whatever your values are, the Jews are attacking it. Whatever is broken is because the Jews broke it.
Now, Israel, which is unanimously associated with Jewish people (as it should be), has been cast as the role of the world’s scapegoat, and those applauding have either forgotten (or don’t know) why Israel exists in the first place or they just don’t care. Putting aside the theological, historical, and political arguments “in favor” of Israel’s status, facts altogether also take no position in diminishing the problem. It matters not that Israel is a core component of Judaism, that it is conclusively known to be the origination point of the Jewish people, or that its territory is geographically legitimate and autonomous. What matters is that Israel conjures up emotional responses to non-existent or hyperbolized versions of events that are portrayed and perceived to be as real, and that’s enough. Therefore, there is no amount of Israeli blood that can be spilled or Jewish voices that can go hoarse for the world’s anti-Jewish fan club to facilitate honest peace.
That is why it is so comfortable looking away when Jewish children are kidnapped from their beds, endangered at school, and murdered during holiday celebrations. That is why no one bats an eye at the Red Cross’s selective assistance. That is why no one raises an eyebrow when news articles publish pieces about Israeli soldiers who can apparently bend the rules of science to train rape dogs, or when definitions of genocide become conflated, or when celebrities wear bloody handprint pins ignorant of its origin. No one minds when Jews, Israelis, and Zionists are hounded and chased out of industries and institutions. So, when men get assaulted for speaking Hebrew and embassy employees die by gunshot, those who are keeping up no longer ask “why?”. We are asking “how did this happen?”.
That is not the correct question. The question is “who will be next?” If everyone is more than willing to sit back as Jews and Israel are sent to the gallows, at which group of people, or which country, will everyone decide to draw the line? Who will be the one who had no one to speak for him when it was his turn to be strung up? Will he know that first it was because he did not speak for the Jews?
The pattern is carved in the stones of history. Every entity that seeks the annihilation of Jews has a series of others on their hit list. None can be forced to think positively of the Jews. None can be forced to identify and speak out against Jew-hatred for the sake of their own lives. None are invincible from being subjugated by the enemy.
The catastrophe of the Holocaust was a warning. What happens when the majority fail to come to the aid of Jews in their time of need, when visible Jewish persecution is not gut-wrenching, when it is inconvenient or beyond concern to put a stop to such evil, only more violence will follow in its footsteps. Whether it is a defensive war, like when the Allied Powers decided to mitigate the German threat of conquest and when the Israeli military went into Gaza to retrieve the hostages, or an act of God, like when plagues befell the Egyptians because Pharaoh would not release the Israelites from the house of bondage, one thing is for certain: once it is acceptable for Jews to go to their deaths, it is acceptable for everyone. Only history books will be able to teach the next generations what happened when the world forgot about the Jews.
