Mick Hartley

Karen Pollock at the JC on the dangerous erasure of Jews from the Holocaust:

It is no secret that antisemitism has exploded. But this oldest of hatreds has now become so potent that this Holocaust Memorial Day was spent having to remind people that the Holocaust was the murder of six million Jewish men, women and children.

Jews are being omitted – accidentally or otherwise – from the narrative. Our national broadcaster, the BBC, referred to six million “people”, without being specific about who these people were. A council in Hampshire remembered the “12 million people killed in the Second World War” without mentioning Jews. A community event in Bolton opined about Gaza.

The BBC issued a belated apology but British Jews can’t shake the question – why is this happening so frequently?

The painful reality is that the Holocaust is being distorted, rewritten and universalised before our eyes.

It should go without saying that there is a clear consensus amongst leading historians, authorities and museums that the Holocaust refers specifically to the murder of six million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazis and their collaborators. The Nazis’ aim to wipe out the Jews was referred to as their “Final Solution to the Jewish question”.…

In a world where antisemitism is allowed to run rampant, it has somehow become controversial to tell the truth; to be honest that the Holocaust was the systematic and state-sponsored attempt to annihilate the Jewish people. It happened, and could only happen, on the back of millennia of antisemitism. We often hear well-meaning people talk about why the Holocaust is important, and one reason often given is “because it could have happened to me”. But the Holocaust was not an example of people against people, or an example of good vs evil. Jews were not crammed into gas chambers because they were people; people were crammed into gas chambers because they were Jews.

It matters not because it puts Jewish suffering above other suffering and not because Jews want sympathy. It matters because it is the truth.

Antisemitism festered for decades under the cover of anti-Zionism, coming originally from the Soviet Union but combining with anticolonial elements on the hard left. The October 7th pogrom suddenly allowed all that to burst out as naked antisemitism, as the old pieties were swept away. People – on the left, it has to be said – suddenly found themselves able to voice what they’d felt all along. They always resented having to bow before the suffering of the Jews, and at last they could turn the tables – with barely disguised glee. October 7th was like 9/11 in that way. The world changed.

The oldest hatred was back. We’d fooled ourselves into thinking it was dead and buried – but here we are.