Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It is not the day we commemorate the Holocaust in Israel. I find myself unable to comment on Europe commemorating the Holocaust while having the nerve to accuse us of genocide, or worse, using the history of the Holocaust as a moral comparison to what is happening in Gaza.
The President of Ireland did that and when a pregnant Jewish woman spoke out against the comparison, she was dragged out of the room…literally.
Ireland, perhaps the most antisemitic country in Europe today, or perhaps tied with Sweden, speaks of the Holocaust as if they learned some lessons.
We in Israel expect nothing from the Europeans and so we are not disappointed overly much. We expect nothing from the UN, from UNRWA and others. If October 7 cured us of anything, it was expecting the world to understand.
We stand alone, but we stand. We have sent a clear message to the world. Don’t mess with Jews. We will flatten your cities. Leave us alone.
Don’t bother remembering the Holocaust or commemorating it today while antisemitism runs rampant in your cities, when Jews are beaten in Amsterdam, London and P
aris. You were silent when the Nazis paraded through your cities; you are silent now.
Leave us alone. It is all we ask of you. In the name of the 6 million. In the name of little Gavriella, who was murdered in 1944 in Auschwitz, if you do not demand Kfir and Ariel back, it is as if you today are murdering Gavriella again.
Until October 7, we believed there would never be another mass killing of Jews; we thought you’d learned. And perhaps, if there was, we thought you would shake the world with your anger.
Never mind. Just stop the hypocrisy. You cared nothing for the 6 million murdered within your midst and you care nothing for the 7 million we have gathered in our homeland.
So stop commemorating a day that has no meaning to you. Just leave us alone to live in our land and grieve for the world you would build if for one day, we stop defending ourselves. It was the world Hitler wanted – a world without Jews.
To some extent, it is a world you deserve – a world without the innovations we share, the help we rush to give. A world where the life of one baby is so cherished it brings us to our knees. A world in which we would give 1000 to save one. A world you’ll never understand you’ve lost until it is too late for you.
Never mind. We will continue to fight for the world you don’t deserve because you may not have meant the words “never again” but we did, we do, we will.
We will flatten worlds to save our babies; we will obliterate cities to bring them home. And when they are all home, you will never again have the opportunity to kill another Gavriella, to abandon another Kfir.
Leave us alone.
