Yom HaShoah: The Lesson the World Has Still Not Learned

The pattern has not changed. Only the language has.

Every year on Yom HaShoah, we light candles for the six million Jews died in the Holocaust. We recite names. We say “Never Again.” And every year, the world moves on with a comfortable belief that what happened in Nazi Germany was a singular aberration, a historical accident, something that could never repeat itself.

It wasn’t an accident. It was a process. And that process is happening again.

A Warning Written 3,000 Years Ago

The Torah did not leave us without warning for this moment. In the Book of Shemot, Exodus, one of the most chilling verses in all of Jewish scripture describes how genocide begins. Not with violence. Not with camps. But with forgetting.

“And a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.” — Shemot 1:8

One verse. One generation. And everything the Jews had built, contributed, and earned was erased — replaced by fear, libel, and eventually enslavement and mass murder. The Egyptians did not suddenly become evil. They forgot. They chose a new narrative. They accepted a new libel about the Jews living among them that they were a fifth column, a demographic threat, a people whose loyalty could not be trusted. And a society that had benefited from Jewish contribution for generations said nothing, accepted the libel, and watched what followed.

This is not only the story of Egypt. It is the story of every society that has turned on its Jews, and it is the story unfolding in the Western world today. Canada did not suddenly become hostile. Europe did not suddenly turn. A new generation arose that did not know what Jews had contributed, survived, or built. A new libel was handed to them, and they accepted it without question.

The Torah warned us that this is how it begins. We were not listening then. We must listen now.

How Genocide Begins: Not With Gas Chambers, But With Words

The Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. It began with carefully crafted libels, socially accepted lies, that transformed Jews into something the public could hate without guilt. Racial polluters. Enemies of the volk.  Outsiders within.  Stab-in-the-back traitors. Capitalist manipulators. Bolshevik agitators. The Nazis did not invent these slanders overnight; they normalized them in baby steps, until society accepted Jewish dehumanization as simply the natural order of things.

And society did not resist. It gobbled the libels eagerly. The majority stayed silent. And silence, in the face of hatred, is not neutrality — it is permission.

The Nazis also used token Jews. There were Jews who supported Hitler, who believed that loyalty and assimilation would protect them. Who said: “We are Germans. We are not like those other Jews.” By the time they understood what was happening, they were already marching toward the camps.

This is not ancient history. This is a blueprint for Jew-hatred, and it is being followed again.

The Language Changed. The Target Did Not.

In the antizionist era, “the Jew” has been re-coded as “the Zionist.” The ancient libels have returned, laundered in the moral language of our time: genocide, apartheid, colonialism, ethnic cleansing. The demonization is identical. Only the vocabulary has been updated.

Antizionism presents itself as political criticism. But........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)