11 May 2024

For Israel, ‘Never Again’ Isn’t Just A Hashtag

DAVID HARSANYI

People love to bemoan the fate of dead Jews who were unable to defend themselves. They’re not too crazy about the living ones who do.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israel entered Rafa in Gaza to clear out remnants of a modern-day Nazi organization that’s embedded itself among women and children. Joe Biden, who is giving a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance ceremony in Washington today, tried to stop them.

Holocaust remembrances can often be little more than empty virtue signaling. It takes no moral courage to condemn crimes of the past if you’re not willing to stop the crimes of today. Save your sympathy.

Indeed, perhaps the most self-destructive myth within the modern Jewish American community is that the best way to temper hate is to fund more Holocaust education. It probably causes the opposite reaction. If the Holocaust taught us anything, it’s that Jews can’t wait for others — not even the most educated people in the world — to protect them. As Jeff Jacoby notes, “Israel doesn’t exist because there was a Holocaust. There was a Holocaust because Israel didn’t exist.”

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