As Jewish communities gather to mark Kristallnacht (‘Night of Broken Glass’), the 1938 pogrom across Nazi Germany that many consider to be the start of the Holocaust, ‘never again’ is resounding.

The phrase, long associated with the Final Solution, is now spoken repeatedly as a vow by world leaders in the context of the October 7 massacre in Israel that left 1,400 people dead, thousands wounded, and 241 people – including 37 children – taken hostage by the Gaza-based Hamas terrorist organization that is dedicated to erasing the Jewish state and killing every Jew everywhere. 

But the destruction of European Jewry is also being used by another group of people. After decades of the Final Solution being universalized, Holocaust allusions and imagery are everywhere. The hijacking of this uniquely Jewish tragedy is glaringly obvious at mass pro-Palestinian demonstrations from Sydney to Los Angeles, London to New York, where the obliteration of Israel to prevent a ‘genocide’ of the Palestinian people is openly advocated.

Holocaust distortion is a type of antisemitism that according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “…acknowledges aspects of the Holocaust as factual. It nevertheless excuses, minimizes, or misrepresents the Holocaust in a variety of ways and through various media.”

Whether it is comparing meat-eating to the Final Solution as part of a campaign to promote veganism or likening abortions to the genocide of the Jewish people, the Holocaust has been manipulated for the purpose of political gain, social justice, and activist agendas across the ideological spectrum.

But when everything from climate change to COVID-19 vaccine mandates is a potential Holocaust, the actual plight of vulnerable people loses its unique sense of urgency. People who use Nazi symbolism and terminology as a shorthand to describe anyone they do not like or any policy they disagree with are massively ignorant about what made the Holocaust profoundly different: Nazi Germany’s actions against the Jewish people were fueled by an annihilationist ideology whose goal was to exterminate every Jew in every place.

So much so, that the term ‘genocide’ being bandied about today by people demonstrating for a free Palestine from the river to the sea (in other words, a Middle East without Jews) was coined in direct response to the Holocaust. A legal definition of the term was thereafter formulated and codified in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Mass atrocities such as genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur drive home the need to clearly identify annihilationist doctrines and to try and protect vulnerable populations living under annihilationist regimes.

Without such clarity, a second Night of Broken Glass seems inevitable. An arson attack on the Jewish cemetery in Vienna on November 4 left pieces of scripture in tatters, and swastikas sprayed on the walls. The building was left close to ruins. The last time the cemetery was set alight was 85 years ago, almost to that day, on Kristallnacht.

In Germany, the Holocaust began with the ramblings of a mad man. Today, what began as protests to ‘free Palestine’ has rapidly degenerated into an outbreak of violence, with antisemitic attacks soaring in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere.

But because the Holocaust has been thoroughly distorted, decent people are now blind to the growing demonization, intimidation, and abuse of Jews around the world.

Some may find such prognostications of doom to be hysterical. So be it. The arc of Jewish history is long, and bends toward tragedy. Jews have thus earned the right to take calls for their liquidation literally. All too often what was initially dismissed or downplayed, from Kristallnacht in 1938 to Hamas’s incessant vow to complete what Hitler started, turned into a living nightmare.

This piece was originally published in Israel Hayom on November 9, 2023.

Image: From an album of unpublished photographs once “in the possession of a Jewish-American serviceman who was deployed to Germany during the second world war”, and subsequently donated to Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial by his descendants. (Wikimedia)