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Toi Staff
Sabine Sterk
Gideon Levy
Mark Travers Ph.d
Waka Ikeda
Tarik Cyril Amar
Grant Arthur Gochin
Never again, except for Palestinians: The moral realignment
Western leaders readily rediscover moral language when horror arrives on their own shoreline. After the murderous attack at Bondi Beach, Australia’s political class, rightly, denounced terrorism and mourned the dead. A nation gathered. Candles were lit. The grammar of moral clarity briefly returned to public life.
That clarity evaporates the moment the victims are Palestinian.
On any given week, despite the so-called ceasefire, Gaza and the West Bank produce images so grave that they should end political careers and place their perpetrators behind bars. Hospitals are starved of fuel. Children are killed in places the world once called “safe.” Settlers drive civilians from their homes. Unlawful attacks and the use of starvation as a method of warfare, long recognised as grave violations of international law, continue with numbing regularity.
Yet much of the Western political and media establishment responds not with scrutiny, but with ritual. The ritual has a name: antisemitism and the Holocaust.
They now seek to criminalise criticism of Israel itself, deploying antisemitism not as a shield against hatred but as a weapon against accountability. No honest person diminishes antisemitism or the singular barbarity of the Nazi project. The Holocaust must not be weaponised as a rhetorical prop. It is a moral abyss that demands remembrance, education, and vigilance. Precisely because it is so grave, its instrumentalisation is so corrosive. In too many Western capitals, the Holocaust has been converted into an exemption card, a standing absolution for a state’s present conduct, even when that conduct is documented, litigated, and condemned by the most authoritative and mainstream human rights institutions in the world.
The argument runs as follows: because Jews suffered the ultimate crime, the Jewish state cannot plausibly commit atrocity. This reverence is a moral non sequitur. It converts memory into immunity. It also debases the lesson Western leaders claim to honour. “Never again” was never meant to mean never again, except when a favourite ally does it.
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