In remembrance: Yom Hashoah

Today is Yom Hashoah -- the day to remember the Shoah, the Holocaust. On this day we remember the 6,000,000 murdered by the Germans and the failures of EVERY nation in the world that was otherwise of good will to act.

Caroline Glick's essay is eloquent on these points:

. . . We were not actors in the Holocaust. We were objects acted upon by the nations of Europe which, as [Saul] Bellow wrote, did in fact agree that it would not be too objectionable to anyone if the Germans were to go ahead and exterminate the Jewish people.

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the Holocaust, in and of itself, tells us nothing about Jewish identity. It only tells us about the rest of the world. The Jews of Europe did not decide to die. They neither seized territory nor did they plant bombs in German cafes. The Holocaust was a German initiative, carried out by Germans and millions of collaborators from France to Greece to Poland to Lithuania. The decision to prevent the Jews' escape from Europe to the Land of Israel belonged to Britain.

The group that really ought to be taking the Holocaust to heart is not the Jews, but the Europeans who two generations ago descended to the depths of human depravity by either conducting the extermination of European Jewry or enabling it.

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There is something deeply distasteful and viscerally disturbing about the spectacle of dozens of leaders of anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian governments coming together at Auschwitz or the UN General Assembly or Westminster Cathedral and self-righteously bowing their heads for our exterminated brothers and sisters. It is particularly odious given that the nihilistic moral relativism that played such a role in enabling the Holocaust remains the order of the day in the societies these leaders now govern.

Israel exists and Jewish communal organizations in the Diaspora exist both to cultivate Jewish life for the benefit of Jews, and to protect Jewish existence from manifestations of anti-Semitism. Jews cannot convince anti-Semites not to hate us anymore than a deer can convince a wolf not to hunt it. That work must be done by the societies that committed and enabled the Holocaust.

Israel has a duty to recall the Holocaust for what it means to the Jewish people to have lost a third of our members. But we have nothing to gain from joining the Europeans in their bizarre Holocaust rituals. It is neither our right nor our responsibility to wash Europe's hands of our brothers' blood.

Indeed, what that blood tells us most of all is that in the postwar world, we cannot allow ourselves to be enchanted by odes to brotherly love or utopian dreams. We can only defend ourselves, in our land, with our military and with our economic creativity, because the notion of trust perished at Auschwitz.


HT: LGF