Once a year, we are reminded with bowed heads and solemn rituals of a horror that should have ensured, once and for all, that the Jewish people would never again walk alone into the abyss. Yom HaShoah — Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day — stands not just as a commemoration, but as a warning. And yet, astonishingly, the warning is going unheeded.
It begins, as it always does, with words. The kind that blame. That isolate. That cast aspersions. “They control.” “They manipulate.” “They oppress.” From the university lecture hall to the social media echo chamber, from celebrity pulpits to parliament back benches, the language has returned. Not the German of the 1930s, but the rhetoric is chillingly familiar.
First, they are outcast — socially, intellectually, morally. The Jews, we are told today, are no longer victims but villains.
Their suffering is dismissed as passé, their history a tool of manipulation, their nation a “colonial project” unworthy of existence.
Then come the labels. “Zionist” no longer means support for Jewish self- determination — it is spat like an insult.
Synagogues require armed protection not because of geopolitical disputes in the Middle East, but because schoolchildren in London now chant for intifada in the streets of Hampstead.
And then — then come the so-called “positive actions.” Boycotts. Blacklists. “Diversity policies” that miraculously exclude only the Jewish state.
Conferences that refuse Israeli academics. Plays and exhibitions shut down if Jews refuse to apologise for existing.
And all of it, we are assured, is done in the name of “justice.” When, precisely, did we become so numb to history?
Because anyone who has studied antisemitism — really studied it — knows that it doesn’t leap overnight from graffiti to gas chambers. It evolves. It walks a deliberate path.
What begins as protest ends in pogrom. What masquerades as moral outrage becomes moral licence — licence to hate, to harm, to dehumanise.
The Holocaust was not an eruption. It was the consequence of a thousand tolerated slights, a million complicit silences.
And today, we are once again indulging in the fantasy that you can flirt with antisemitism without consequence.
Make no mistake: anti-Zionism has become the respectable face of this ancient hatred.
It provides all the old comforts — scapegoating, moral superiority, the thrill of righteous fury — without any of the shame.
It allows people to hate Jews not for their religion or their race, but for the country they built from the ashes of Europe’s ovens.
And what do we do? We march. We light candles. We make speeches about never again — while “from the river to the sea” echoes through London like a hymn.
This is the moment. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now. Because history never announces itself with fanfare. It moves in increments. It is built in the classrooms, in the editorials, in the public square — until one day, the unthinkable becomes inevitable.
We owe it to the six million who perished — not just to remember them, but to understand what made their deaths possible.
To see the trajectory of hate as it forms, not just when it ends in fire.
If we truly mean “never again,” then we must say it when it is still unfashionable.
When it costs us friends, followers, and favours. When silence is easier, but dangerous.
We must look not just to the past, but to our present. The signs are there. We’ve seen them before. And this time, we cannot claim we didn’t know.