They remember the Holocaust, but forgot its lesson.

If the Holocaust cannot teach people to reject terrorism against Jews today, we need to ask what our societies are teaching. “Never Again” is a moral doctrine, not a slogan with political exceptions.

photo: Julia Taubitz/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Shane Shmuel, an opinion and political writer.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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There are places where history should impose a particular seriousness upon us.

Mauthausen is one of them.

A concentration camp is not merely a historical attraction. It is a place where human beings were stripped of their names, their dignity and, ultimately, their lives — because they were Jews, political opponents, Roma, prisoners of war, and members of other persecuted groups.

To walk through such a place is to confront what happens when hatred becomes ideology and when the humanity of an entire people is treated as expendable.

That is why the video gone viral showing students wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the Palestinian flag and the image of a Palestinian terrorist involved in the 1978 Coastal Road massacre in Israel is so morally jarring and repugnant.

In that attack, 38 Israelis were killed, including 13 children. It was the deadliest attack on Israelis until the Nova musical festival on October 7th. At the time, it was aimed at undermining the Egyptian peace talks between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

It raises an uncomfortable question: Have we remembered the Holocaust in a way that we have forgotten its moral lessons?

Holocaust memory was never meant to be simply about learning dates, visiting museums, or repeating the words “Never Again.” It was meant to teach something more demanding: that the murder of Jews is wrong regardless of the political circumstances in which it occurs. Jewish lives do not become less valuable because Israel exists, and terrorism against civilians does not become morally acceptable because its perpetrators invoke a political cause.

The State of Israel has made Holocaust remembrance an important part of education for its young people. Israeli students visit Holocaust sites and memorials, including former concentration camps in Europe, and are taught that the destruction of European Jewry carries lessons about human life, responsibility, and the protection of others. Those lessons form part of the broader values expected of Israelis, including those who serve in the Israel Defence Forces.

This is important because Israel’s wars are fought in the shadow of a history in which Jews were once almost entirely powerless to defend themselves. For many Israelis and diaspora Jews, the existence of a Jewish state and an army capable of defending its population is inseparable from the lesson that Jews must never again be entirely dependent upon others for their survival.

But there is another lesson: Power must carry responsibility.

During the Gaza war, Israel’s military took measures intended to reduce civilian casualties, including warnings and evacuation instructions, humanitarian coordination, and procedures intended to distinguish between civilians and combatants.

The issue is not whether those measures were sufficient enough, because those questions do not eliminate the underlying principle: A country can have a legitimate right to defend its citizens from terrorism while still having an obligation to protect civilian life. That principle should apply universally.

If only governments applied the same moral standard consistently — recognising that the protection of civilian life, the rejection of antisemitism, and the rejection of terrorism cannot depend upon political convenience or which side of a conflict one supports.

That is the moral consistency Holocaust memory should demand.

Yet Holocaust memory is increasingly being pulled into contemporary political battles in which historical suffering becomes a weapon rather than a warning. A simplistic “oppressor versus oppressed” narrative can reduce complex histories to a morality tale in which one side is automatically assigned virtue and the other guilt. When applied without moral consistency, it can even make violence appear legitimate simply because it is committed by those deemed “oppressed.”

We see that happening today — and that is where the lessons of the Holocaust become particularly relevant.

The Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers. It began much earlier: with propaganda, exclusion, discrimination, dehumanisation, and the normalisation of hatred. It became possible because ideas that once would have been considered abhorrent gradually became acceptable, and because violence against a particular group could be rationalised as necessary, deserved or inevitable.

That history should make us extremely wary of any ideology that dehumanises an entire population or excuses violence against civilians.

If young people can enter a concentration-camp memorial wearing symbols associated with a movement whose most extreme elements celebrate violence against Jews, we should ask what those young people have been taught about the meaning of the place they are visiting. Holocaust education should make it impossible to separate the memory of Jewish suffering from the moral rejection of antisemitism and the deliberate targeting of Jews and Israelis today.

The same moral standard must apply to everyone.

The Palestinian cause does not justify the murder of Israeli civilians. Palestinian suffering does not justify deliberately targeting Jews. Opposition to Israeli government policy does not require excusing Hamas or any other organisation that attacks civilians. Treating entire populations as morally responsible for the actions of others is precisely the kind of collective dehumanisation that Holocaust memory should teach us to reject.

Nor can the Israeli-Palestinian conflict be reduced to a simple story of one Israeli political ideology. The current Gaza war began under a Right-wing Israeli government, while the Second Intifada began during the prime-ministership of Ehud Barak, a politician from Israel’s Centre-Left. Israeli governments have changed; the underlying conflict and the violence have persisted.

The lesson, therefore, should not be partisan. It should be moral.

Holocaust education should not produce indifference to Jewish suffering. It should produce an absolute rejection of antisemitism, terrorism, and the deliberate targeting of civilians — whoever the victims are and whoever the perpetrators claim to represent.

The test of Holocaust remembrance is not whether we can mourn the dead. The test is whether we recognise the humanity of the living.

That includes the Jewish teenager learning about Auschwitz. It includes the soldier caught in the middle of a terrorist attack. It includes the family whose loved one is murdered by a militant. It includes the 15 innocent people murdered while attending a Hanukkah event at Australia’s Bondi Beach, a synagogue in Manchester, or a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires.

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