“NEVER AGAIN” – A solid promise?
85 years have passed since the Holocaust. We often hear: “Never again.” But hostility toward Jews is on the rise. What is our stance? Do we fill Holocaust Remembrance Day with meaning by standing up for Israel?
Supreme
Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and a group of high ranking officers, including Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton, are pictured looking at the charred remains of bodies at the Ohrdruf Concentration Camp.
The horror of the past
The United Nations (UN) introduced the International Day of Commemoration of the Victims of the Holocaust on January 27 in 2005, on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp by the Red Army.
This day should not only commemorate the horror, but also serve to prevent future crimes against humanity.
On this day, images, films and documentaries about the Holocaust are shown and the ghosts of the past are brought back to life – not only in the footage, but also in the minds and hearts of those who are dealing with these topics.
Who doesn’t have images of emaciated corpses as well as mountains of bones and ashes in his mind’s eye, when he hears the word Holocaust? Many died of disease and malnutrition or cruel human experiments, others had to work themselves to death or suffocated in the gas chambers of the industrially organized machinery of death and were incinerated in crematoria. Six million Jews!
The images of the survivors, human beings emaciated to skeletons, were no less horrific. These were crimes of an unprecedented nature and unimaginable scale.
Starting with Eisenhower (the American general and later president) himself, numerous members of Congress and American journalists also visited the site. Even the American soldiers stationed nearby were taken to the former camps to be confronted with the evidence and see everything with their own eyes.
These images that were published counteracted the inability to understand. They made the incomprehensible murders visible. They went around the world in films, books and exhibitions and gave a face to the horrific culmination of inhumanity and mass extermination. And they evoked something in the viewers: grief, guilt, compassion.
It can be assumed, that it was also the reverberations of these impressions, alongside the unwillingness of countries to take in the surviving Jews and the inability of Great Britain to find a solution to the conflicts in Palestine at the time, that led to the United Nations General Assembly voting in favor of the establishment of an independent Jewish and an Arab state on November 29, 1947.
Commemoration as a prelude to a new beginning: Am Israel Chai!
A decision as a glimmer of hope to emerge from the destructive darkness of the past into a future of light.
Israel has been celebrating Yom HaShoah in this spirit since 1951, almost 55 years before the international community. It chose a different day from the Jewish calendar, the 27th of Nisan. It was the day directly before the proclamation of the Jewish state by David Ben Gurion. The mourning and remembrance of the victims turns into jubilation and joy on the night of 27 Nisan, because the commemoration of the founding of the state on the 28th celebrates the life and survival of the Jewish people. Am Israel Chai!
Changes
But the reverberations faded, the eyewitnesses to the crimes died. The memories of shared responsibility and guilt were suppressed.
Israel was no longer perceived as a victim. The young state had seized its opportunity and built a flourishing country in the decades that followed. Against all odds, the survivors had succeeded in defending themselves against repeated enemy attacks. The only democracy in the region emerged, the only country in which the desert is in decline, a land of innovation and joy of life. Read more about this in the article “How we experienced the miracle of Israel” by B.B. Nussbächer.
But alarmingly, anti-Semitism began spreading again. This attitude imputes negative characteristics, intentions and actions to Jews in order to justify their devaluation, exclusion, discrimination and condemnation. The rejection, that had been previously felt by individuals in different countries, was now also directed at the Jewish state.
Many did not seem to notice how paradoxical it was to swear “never again” on the one hand, but at the same time to take a stand against Israel.
Classical and Israel-related hatred of Jews were disguised as legitimate social criticism or criticism of Israel and anti-Semitic stereotypes were transferred to Israel as a state. Anti-Zionism, which is also supported by the educated and elites, has developed into one of the most dangerous and effective forms of anti-Semitism today, especially as it unites left-wing, far-right, Muslim and Christian opponents of Israel. It poses a potential threat to all Jews, as its ultimate goals are the delegitimization and elimination of the Israeli state and the persecution and expulsion of Jews.
Current boycotts against Israel
In 1933, the first centrally controlled terror campaign in the German Reich was the boycott of Jews.
The contemporary equivalent: since 2005 there has been a transnational political campaign “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions”, abbreviated to BDS, which aims to isolate the state of Israel economically, culturally and politically. There are supporters in France, Great Britain, Spain, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Canada and also in the USA. Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden have recognized BDS as a legitimate civil society movement since 2016. Christians are also involved in the campaign.
In concrete terms, academic boycotts disrupt cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians on events, projects and publications; cultural boycotts force individuals and ensembles from other countries to cancel their performances in Israel; economic boycotts stigmatize products manufactured in Israel and companies that also manufacture their products in Judea and Samaria or sell them there.
Investment withdrawals, for example through the sale of shares, are directed against companies, organizations and projects that invest in Israel in any way or deliver their products there; ship and port blockades disrupt the loading and unloading of ships belonging to Israeli companies or whose cargo is destined for Israel.
Leading BDS representatives openly deny Israel’s right to exist and the goal of this organization is the end of the Israeli state. However, only a few governments, such as those of Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, have classified the BDS campaign as anti-Semitic.
United Nations (UN) resolutions against Israel
The role of the UN has changed as well. Between 2015 and 2022 alone, the UN General Assembly passed 140 resolutions that were critical of Israel. No other country has been pilloried so often. During this period, Israel was condemned more often than all other countries in the world combined – including autocracies and dictatorships. These were condemned just 68 times.
One of the reasons for this may be, that there are around 14 million Jews worldwide, compared to 350 million Arabs. There is only one state that represents Judaism versus 56 states in which Islam is the state religion, the religion of the majority of the population or the religion of a large minority.
The Arab states fought the existence of an Israeli state with all means at their disposal from the very beginning. Ninety percent of all Arabs are Muslims and enjoy the support of their co-religionists – especially when it comes to Israel.
This may explain why there are calls from many sides for the UN to condemn Israel. The fact that Iran, whose declared goal is the destruction of Israel, currently holds the presidency, certainly also contributes to this.
But it explains in no way, why the rest of the world does not oppose it. Why are there so often two-thirds majorities of the 193 states that condemn Israel? Of course, Israel should also be critically examined, like every other member state, but the country deserves equal rights and not ritualized, disproportionate and sometimes absurd condemnations.
Just few examples:
- Why is there a permanent agenda item 7 in the Human Rights Council that deals exclusively with the “human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories” and ensures that Israel is constantly discussed? No other country is treated in this way.
- Why was Israel even condemned for smuggling the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann, who had been hiding in Argentina, into Israel in 1960 to bring him to trial? It should actually have been a concern of the international community to hold him accountable for his deeds, like other criminals at the Nuremberg Trial.
- Why is Israel condemned more often in 2022
than Iran, which carried out 576 executions this year, brutally
suppressed the uprisings against the mullah regime and violently
implements the forced veiling of women?
And why was Israel denounced more often this year than Russia for its attack on Ukraine? - Why is Israel accused in 2023 of obstructing women’s rights in the Palestinian territories – without mentioning the women’s policies of the Islamists in the Palestinian territories? Why are there no such resolutions against other states, such as Afghanistan, Iran or Pakistan, which rank last in the world for women’s rights?
How can one explain these resolutions rationally?
The Black Sabbath
The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 proved that also today, anti-Semitism’s ultimate goal is the extermination of Jews. It was an ice-cold and meticulously planned attack at dawn, an unleashing of deadly hatred and an orgy of violence. More than 1,400 Israelis, children, elderly, women and men died that day, more than 230 were kidnapped and more than 20 villages were destroyed. In none of the wars in which Israel was involved after the founding of the state, have so many Jews died in one day. Only during the Holocaust was this sum exceeded.
But these figures are a sober description. They in no way capture the cruel joy of the abuse and torture that took place. They do not reflect the fact that babies were beheaded and people were burned alive. They do not show the carnage that ensued when Hamas terrorists gouged out eyes, bashed in heads, hacked off limbs, slashed bodies and removed organs. Nor does it mention the brutal rapes and psychological terror: parents who had to watch their children being tortured and vice versa.
They do not make visible how living and dead Jews were brought to the Gaza Strip to be received by a jeering crowd that beat or trampled on them.
The Hamas attack was not just about killing enemies. It was about causing the maximum amount of suffering by any means possible. It was a manifestation of bestiality par excellence, accompanied by an inhuman pleasure in the agony of the victims.
This massacre is far beyond the imagination of a normal person.
The missing pictures
But unlike after the Holocaust, there are hardly any images that make the incomprehensible comprehensible.
The Western media in particular have shown very little of what happened. Bodies were only shown covered and in bags, faces were grayed out during kidnappings, and there were no pictures of the atrocities. The one video that Gilad Erdan presented to the UN General Assembly in October was made unrecognizable. Only Al Jazeera left it unadorned. It showed a worker from Asia having his head chopped off with a garden hoe. The video was an important indication not only of how inhumanely, but also how indiscriminately the terrorists killed.
Even the Israeli media kept a very low profile. Only high-ranking politicians were presented with the true extent. Journalists, who were also given access to the crime scenes and the film material, were allowed to report, but not to show any pictures.
Furthermore, due to the shock and confusion immediately after October 7, many crime scenes were not closely examined and autopsies were not requested. The primary concern was to search for survivors, determine who had been taken to Gaza and identify the dead.
Nevertheless, there are hours of footage from Hamas body cameras, dashcams, security cameras and cell phones showing the terrorists killing civilians, as well as many images of mutilated bodies. Paradoxically, the perpetrators themselves posted their deeds on the internet and made them public. But who in the West looks at these sources?
And so the result was, that it was not easy to get a picture of the true evil that had happened.
This restraint may have been out of consideration for the psyche of the population, out of respect for the victims and their families or for reasons of data protection.
But this visual concealment of the horror has a fatal effect: particularly ignorance of the extent of the crimes and the suffering caused. This unawareness leads to a lack of understanding, compassion and solidarity, and ultimately to condemnation of Israel for its response to this attack.
Although attempts have been made to describe what happened, these descriptions evoke little response from many people. The average person has no prior thought or images of what has been described and therefore finds it difficult to classify and evaluate the horrors. What happened on October 7 is literally unthinkable for most people alive today.
It was not until January 11, 2024, and the indictment before the International Criminal Court, that Israel made some of the crimes committed on October 7 more visible on a website: https://saturday-october-seven.com, which can only be found by those in the know.
And of course there are also those, who deliberately do not want to deal with what really happened because it is too incriminating and they want to protect themselves.
Learning from the past, however, it becomes clear that the large crowd’s turning a blind eye and maintaining silence, consciously not wanting to notice anything, was also a passive contribution to the Holocaust.
Fatal Consequences
If you observe the reactions of the world public and countries to 7 October, this failure to see, understand and recognize becomes very clear.
- UN Resolutions
Between October and December 2023, the UN passed four resolutions regarding Israel. Not a single one mentions or condemns the Hamas massacre by name, and none acknowledges Israel’s right to self-defense.
- On October, 27, 2023, the General Assembly calls on Israel to improve the humanitarian situation and for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip (without any performance in return)
- On November 15, 2023, the Security Council demands that Israel institute longer humanitarian pauses in Gaza (as they already did before) and, in return, the release of hostages from Hamas
- On December 12, 2023, the General Assembly again calls for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza (again without any performance in return)
- On December 22, 2023, the Security Council calls for an increase in humanitarian aid for Gaza and for Israel to immediately allow humanitarian goods to flow into the Gaza Strip via all available border crossings. The 4 A4 page text also contains one (!) sentence demanding the release of the hostages from Hamas.
If you combine these facts, you could come to the conclusion, that for the UN the slaughter of 1,400 Jews is not worth mentioning. For the UN the only problem seems to be, that Israel has not simply accepted this and is fighting Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Is it truly inappropriate for Jews to fight back today instead of allowing themselves to be slaughtered without resistance, as they did during the Holocaust?
Israel bowed to the Security Council’s instructions, which are binding under international law, and there was a 7-day ceasefire during which some of the Israeli hostages (children and women) were released. In return, Israel had to release three times the number of convicted Palestinian prisoners. Large quantities of goods were delivered to the Gaza Strip during this time so that Hamas could replenish its supplies and reorganize itself. Hamas interrupted the ceasefire after a week and declared that the remaining approximately 130 hostages would only be released under completely different conditions: namely for the release of thousands of imprisoned Palestinian prisoners, including those who have committed murders against Israelis.
The question is: why didn’t all the resolutions condemn the massacre and hostage-taking and demand the release of all those kidnapped?
- Demonstrations
The failure to see, understand and recognize is also reflected in the reactions of the crowds. There are many pro-Palestinian demonstrations in which Jews are wished dead and the end of the state of Israel is demanded. The fact that so many Arabs and Muslims, former citizens of states that see Israel as their mortal enemy, live in every country in Europe and America contributes to this. The number of anti-Semitic incidents is rising meteorically and is now in the thousands.
The fact that even highly educated people, who grew up in Europe or in the United States set Hamas, a terrorist organization, equal with Israel, the government of a democratic country, can only go hand in hand with a complete fade-out of what happened on 7 October. And with a frightening willingness to ignore facts and repeat anti-Semitic slogans.
- Prosecution before the International Court of Justice
Since January 11, 2024, Israel has also had to justify itself before the International Court of Justice in The Hague due to a lawsuit filed by South Africa.
Israel’s fight in the Gaza Strip with the aim of defending itself against Hamas, in order to put an end to the rocket fire and to ensure that the terrible attack of October 7 cannot be repeated, is evaluated as genocide according to this lawsuit.
Israel is accused of inciting genocide, failing to punish incitement to genocide, attempting genocide and actually committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. (More details on the lawsuit in the addendum).
The term “genocide” was coined after the Holocaust and the Convention on Genocide was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Resolution 260 in December 1948. This defined the systematic and deliberate crimes of the German Nazis, who purposefully removed and rounded up six million Jews from various countries in order to exterminate them en masse – without having suffered any aggression from this ethnic group.
And today, the Jewish people are being accused of the same crime by South Africa, even though they are responding to one of the most inhumane attacks of our time, confronting an ongoing threat from a terrorist organization and taking targeted measures to prevent civilian casualties!
Although German and international experts in international law are convinced that this genocide charge will soon vanish into thin air, the fact remains that the unconfirmed charge alone exerts great pressure on Israel – and also on countries that wish to support Israel. The old recipe of anti-Semitism, to accuse and thereby achieve a devaluation and condemnation before the facts have been examined and proven, is still effective today.
January 27, 2024
In the midst of these areas of tension, crucial questions arise for International Holocaust Day.
Will the international community this year commemorate the crimes of the past, while ignoring the crimes of the present?
Will it mourn the dead Jews of the Holocaust, but condemn the living Jews from today, who are fighting to prevent such massacres from repeating again?
Or will we recognize the pain and suffering caused by this barbaric attack? Will we try to better understand the horror and Israel’s determination to ensure that it does not happen again soon – especially since it is known that there are still thousands in Hamas, who can only be prevented from continuing their attacks by force?
Will we stand by Israel for reasons of humanity and because we value them?
Will we remember what we owe them? I don’t just mean the spiritual heritage of Christians, but also all their achievements. This small people, who make up only 0.2 percent of the world’s population, have won around one in four Nobel Prizes ever awarded. These people have contributed so much to our current standard of living and deserve our respect.
Will Christians remember that Jesus – a Jew – opened the way to the Father through the new covenant for those, who were not part of God’s people? That they have thereby become “co-heirs” and, together with the Jews, the original heirs, belong to God’s people? That Jews are therefore their brothers?
Eighty-five years after the Holocaust: do we understand what the call of the hour is today?
Do we recognize our chance to show that we have learned from the past? Our second chance! (Read more about this in the article: “The Second Chance” by B.B. Nussbächer)
Will we keep our promise “Never again”?
Will we take up the legacy of the silent heroes of the Holocaust, the Righteous Among the Nations, and be the ones, who have the courage to take responsibility and make our own decisions in a world of moral decay? Are we among those who will make a difference?
Will we give meaning and value to Holocaust Remembrance Day by being willing to stand up for Israel? Do we show Israelis and Jewish people around us that we respect, love and stand with them?
We have the chance to do all this!
We cannot undo the past, but we can help shape the present and shape the future: through our words and even more through what we do and what our lives say.
Contents of the genocide lawsuit
The “intention to commit genocide” is justified with statements such as “to destroy Amalek,” which were not directed against the Palestinian civilian population, but against Hamas leaders and fighters.
Incomplete quotes taken out of context from Prime Minister Netanyahu are also used, although he has always emphasized that Israel is fighting exclusively against Hamas and that the war would end immediately if Hamas were to surrender and release the hostages. Netanyahu has also made it clear that Israel has no intention of expelling the civilian population from the Gaza Strip.
And simply ignored were the countless attempts by the Israeli army to show consideration for the civilian population, even if this was accompanied by a significantly increased risk to its own soldiers.
Israel is accused of “attempted genocide” due to the restricted access of the Gazan population to food, water and medical supplies – despite thousands of tons of aid reaching the Gaza Strip every day. In fact, it is not Israel that is preventing the civilian population from accessing these goods, but Hamas, which is seizing large quantities of these goods and thereby exacerbating the suffering of the civilian population.
Due to the tragic civilian casualties during bombings, Israel is accused of “committing genocide“, i.e. “the deliberate extermination or other forms of annihilation” of the population in Gaza. South Africa comes to this conclusion, although:
- Hamas has entrenched its fighters and military installations throughout the civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip, including hospitals, schools, mosques and houses, and is attacking from here. Therefore it is simply not possible to fight Hamas without affecting these buildings and areas.
- Israel has dropped millions of leaflets in the areas under attack and has made tens of thousands of phone calls and text messages warning the civilian population and urging them to evacuate areas because of the danger to their lives. To enable these evacuations Israel has also observed hours and days of “humanitarian pauses”.
- It has been Hamas who partially prevented the civilian population from leaving these endangered areas in order to use them purposefully as a protective shield for itself. This is the great tragedy in the Gaza Strip.
The facts that the abductees have not yet been freed and that Hamas and its allied organizations continue to have the destruction of Israel in their charter, as well as clearly and repeatedly expressing their threats and intentions, also seem irrelevant to the overall situation for South Africa.
The term “genocide” was coined after the Holocaust and the Convention on Genocide was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Resolution 260 in December 1948. This defined the systematic and deliberate crimes of the German Nazis, who purposefully removed and rounded up six million Jews from various countries in order to exterminate them en masse – without having suffered any aggression from this ethnic group.
Today, the Jewish people are being accused of the same crime by South Africa, even though they are responding to one of the most inhumane attacks of our time, confronting an ongoing threat from a terrorist organization and taking targeted measures to prevent civilian casualties?!
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