'Never Again' — Again

A few reflections on Jews and the Holocaust, as Israel observes Holocaust Memorial Day today.

The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel

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In the context of the Jews, the slogan “Never Again” originally traces back not to the Holocaust, but to a 1927 epic poem, “Masada” by Yitzhak Lamdan.

The poem is about the siege of Masada, from 72 to 73 CE, in which a group of Jewish rebels (the Sicarii) held out against Roman armies and, according to legend, committed mass suicide to prevent being captured.

In Zionism, the story of Masada became a national myth and was lauded as an example of Jewish heroism. Lamdan’s poem went on to become one of the most significant examples of early Zionist literature, as well as part of the official Hebrew curriculum and an unofficial national motto.

In the early days of the State of Israel, the “behavior” of Jews during the Holocaust was unfavorably contrasted with the behavior of the defenders of Masada: the former were denigrated for having gone “like sheep to the slaughter house” while the latter were praised for their heroic and resolute fight.

During the 1960s, Israel armed itself with nuclear weapons — aided by the French government and its prime minister, Maurice Bourges-Manoury, who told the Israelis: “I gave you the bomb in order to prevent another Holocaust.”

Diaspora Jewry predominantly turned to Zionism and supported Israel, especially since post-Holocaust Jews understood that they must take power to protect themselves. This translated into maximum financial support and then political activism to ensure that a Jewish state would defend Jewish lives and offer persecuted Jews, anywhere in the world, a guaranteed haven.

“The second half of the twentieth century was a golden age for Jewry,” wrote Rabbi Yitz Greenberg. “Consequently, the understanding of ‘never again’ was more benign and broader in scope, reflecting the glow of renewed life and Jewish greater acceptance in the Diaspora, while Israel grew by leaps and bounds. The climactic victory of the flowering came in liberating Soviet Jewry and restoring them to the world Jewish community. This redemption occurred in the midst (and was a partial cause) of the triumph of democracy over totalitarianism.”¹

But the 21st century gave a push back at the Jewish advance. The Arab nations were not “softened” by consciousness of the Holocaust and subsequent Western “guilt.” Over time, Holocaust denial and unfettered antisemitism spread in Muslim-majority countries, and the Arabs tried to destroy the Jewish state repeatedly.

To add insult to injury, the Palestinians co-opted much of Jewish history in every sense of the word, including:

• Claiming that Jesus Christ was a Palestinian, even though it is historical record that he was born to a Jewish family, from the bloodline of King David, in Judea, the homeland of the Jewish People

• The slogan “Free Palestine” which was first used by a Zionist group, the American League for a Free Palestine, in 1944 to call for the liberation of the Mandate of Palestine from British rule

• The watermelon as a symbol of resistance, which was originally used by Jews in the 1930s as a national symbol to support the Jewish homeland. The Israeli Ministry of Agriculture encouraged consumers to buy locally grown produce, such as “Hebrew watermelons,” to compete with those from other countries.

• Images equating the Palestinian Territories with Jewish ghettos in Europe as an explicit effort to demonize Israel’s policies — and close off reasonable debate — by equating Israeli policies with Nazi genocidal ones

• Misappropriating the terms “genocide” (coined by a Polish Jewish lawyer specifically because of the Holocaust) and “ethnic cleansing”

Ultimately, in order for the Palestinians’ narrative to be attractive and compelling, it has become a bizarre double-sided coin: on one side, the complete denial of Jewish nationhood, culture, history, and heritage; and on the other side, the Palestinians’ appropriation — the inappropriate or unacknowledged adoption of elements of one culture by members of another one — of Jewish nationhood, culture, history, and heritage.

Consequently, much of the world has taken the Palestinians’ side, not because of who they are, what they have historically done, or how much they contribute to the world, but because their manufactured enemy is “the Jews.”

Hence why many “pro-Palestinians” call themselves “anti-Zionists” — a code name for antisemites to unjustifiably oppose Jews undertaking the world’s greatest decolonization project in their indigenous homeland, and living their best Jewish lives.

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You can tell if someone is being antisemitic when they add a “but” to the end of a sentence about the barbaric war crimes and crimes against humanity that were perpetrated on October 7th.

Yet many people who say or do antisemitic things do not realize that they are guilty of this behavior, because society (education, culture, media, and politics) has a bad habit of making us internalize certain thoughts and feelings, and then regurgitating them without thinking twice about what we say and/or how we say it.

This explains why many people might say something directly or indirectly racist, homophobic or sexist — while passionately considering themselves not to be racist, homophobic, sexist, et cetera.

But Palestinian society is not like most societies. It is riddled with all types of obscene, flagrant Jew-hatred, and obsessed with not the creation of a Palestinian state, but destruction of the Jewish one.

Unfortunately for Israelis and Jews, the Palestinians are not an independent actor. Led by Hamas, which is far more popular than the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians are deeply connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. And collectively these actors have great influence on the West, namely its politics, culture, education, and media.

The Qatari-run Al Jazeera, for instance, was not created to “enhance the world’s relationship with Qatar.” It was built to be a mouthpiece for Islamist propaganda that cheers on Hamas, among other anti-Western subjects, on a global scale.

And the nearly $4 billion that Qatar has donated to U.S. universities since 2001 — that explains everything we are seeing on U.S. universities today, not to mention its tremendous spill-over effects to more countries and other societal arenas.

What’s more, all of the Palestinians’ reasons for their war crimes are immersed in a world of terms that are easy to digest among many circles in the West, and even admired by them, notably “resistance” and “liberation” — which are described as the legitimate weapon of “natives,” the incessant victim — in a fight with the colonialists against whom any violence is permissible (e.g. “Rape is resistance” as many “pro-Palestinians say).

With this in mind, the Palestinians and their affiliates are not the Nazis, as some have tried to postulate. They are actually much worse and much more dangerous than the Nazis. But do not just take it from me. Here is how Israeli author Yuval Elbashan described scenes from the October 7th massacres:

“Since my first visit to the Gaza border towns, a few days after the atrocities, I had trouble finding words to describe the land there. There were places that, to my horror, were still bleeding when we got to them.”

“In other places, even though it was promised that all the living and the dead had already been located and evacuated, I felt that the ground did not stop moving under my feet, rising and falling in panic as if struggling to regulate its own breathing.”²

Israeli journalist Amihai Attali put it another way:

“Their intentions were to kill and destroy every Jew. Not even just a Jew. Their hatred was so blind and insane that they also killed, sometimes with unimaginable violence, Muslims with Israeli citizenship, as well as members of other religions who have nothing to do with what is happening in the Middle East.”

“And all this, because in the eyes of the killer — these victims are identified with the Jews, with the infidels, the apes and the pigs. And now, imagine a fundamentalist Islam capable of mass destruction.”³

Indeed, October 7th is a direct continuation of the Holocaust, since Islamism (radical political Islam) is the post-World War II successor of Nazism, as historian Matthias Künzel has demonstrated.

“We will never forget” projected onto a wall of the Old City of Jerusalem (photo: Arnon Bossani)

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Israeli writer Avraham Gabriel Yehoshua once said that the Holocaust was a failure of the Jewish People. His intention was not to blame the victim, but to point to the Jewish consciousness that did not know how to recognize the disaster that was stirring over it.

As Israeli philosopher Shimon Azoulai posited, this consciousness was one of “passivity, inclusion, and irrational hope … that focuses on actions and not on the intentions and the annihilationalist fantasies of the Antisemite, until it is too late to defend yourself.”⁴

It is in this light that Yuval Elbashan and Amihai Attali did not just focus on the unthinkable calamities of October 7th, but on the bigger picture.

“Wherever the traces of the human animals were discovered, they butchered and raped, split and murdered, drilled and laughed at,” wrote Elbashan. “However, despite all of this — and in contrast to the feelings of bitterness and hatred that the land of Auschwitz evoked in me every time I set foot on it — I could not attach harsh words to this land. Because she is ours. Wounded, bruised, painful, but ours.”

Attali added: “The only difference between the Holocaust and the October 7th massacre is the ability of the Jewish People to defend themselves.”

Dr. Michael Milshtein, the head of the Forum for Palestinian Studies at Tel Aviv University, wrote:

“It is difficult to argue with feelings, but there is a fundamental difference between the Holocaust and the October 7th massacre.”

“Despite the massacre, rape, and kidnappings on a mass scale that were carried out on that tragic day, the State of Israel is still stable and stronger than all its enemies and the security system serves as an existential backbone that demonstrated the ability to quickly recover, promoted an attack against Gaza against the enemy and exacted a heavy price from it, things that could not be imagined in the Holocaust.”

And here we have to remember the most important fact since October 7th: We, the Jews, are no longer victims because today we have what our ancestors did not have 80 years ago, the State of Israel. On October 7th, our enemies managed to surprise us and inflict a kind of small Holocaust on us, but for one moment they did not endanger the very existence of the State of Israel, let alone the existence of the entire Jewish People.

“During the Holocaust, many Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter not because they were really sheep, but because they had no real way to resist and defend themselves,” wrote Israeli historian Dr. Nathaniel Walloch. “But thank God, this is not the case today. Today, whoever rises up and tries to harm the Jewish state — quickly finds out what mistake he made.”⁵

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1. “Understanding the concept of ‘never again’ through war against Hamas - opinion.” The Jerusalem Post.

2. “יש פשעים שאין להם עיתים: נמירוב, אושוויץ, כפר עזה.” Ynet.

3. “הכוונות שלהם לא היו שונות משל הנאצים, ההבדל הוא רק היכולת לממש אותן.” Ynet.

4. “השואה לא נגמרה. להפך: היא הפכה לנקודת המוצא של האנטישמיות על גווניה.” Ynet.

5. “דווקא עכשיו, דווקא השנה, לא ניתן להם לשכוח את השואה.” Ynet.