Today, we commemorate Yom HaShoah and return to a question that still haunts humanity:

How did the Holocaust happen?

How did an advanced, cultured Europe descend into industrialized murder? How did ordinary people participate, benefit, or remain silent? How did neighbors turn against neighbors, and how did hatred become normalized?

These are not only questions about the past. They are questions about human nature—and about the present.

There is also a part of the story that is often overlooked. When Holocaust survivors returned home after the war, many found their houses occupied. Some were attacked or even killed upon their return. Jewish property, wealth, and dignity were taken on a massive scale. Much was never restored. Much was never honestly acknowledged.

Beyond Europe, hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced out of Arab lands, leaving behind homes, businesses, and possessions, with little recognition and almost no justice.

When people speak today as if Jewish history begins in 1948, they erase this deeper reality—of exile, dispossession, persecution, and the repeated failure of the world to protect Jewish life.

Nazism was defeated militarily. But the hatred that drove it did not disappear. It adapted. It resurfaced in new forms, new ideologies, and new centers of power. It can be seen today in radical movements, in regimes like Iran, and in those who excuse or romanticize forces committed to Israel’s destruction.

For many years, I believed—like many others—that education would be enough. That museums, testimony, and the promise of “Never Again” would ensure that humanity had learned its lesson.

But over the past two and a half years, that belief has been steadily........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)