Every year on Yom HaShoah, Israel stops for two minutes when sirens sound, and the country stands still to remember the 6 million Jews murdered in the Shoah. This year, that silence carried a different weight. On October 7, 2023, the largest number of Jews since the end of the Holocaust were killed in a single day, and starting on October 8, much of Europe abandoned the Jews once again.
The measure of what followed was not abstract. Europe was being tested 80 years after the Holocaust on whether it had learned anything from the old cycle of demonization and abandonment, and the answer, in the view reflected here, was no. Before October 7, Europe was already experiencing a surge in antisemitism from the far right, radicalized segments of the far left, and Islamist networks. After the attacks, many European leaders traveled to Israel and saw the aftermath of the mass murder, rape, and kidnappings of Israelis. What came next was not moral clarity but retreat.
That retreat showed up across the continent in ways that were hard to miss. In the Netherlands, France, and Spain, language about Israel increasingly echoed narratives that distort reality and normalize hostility toward the Jewish state. Anne Frank was cast in keffiyehs. Nazi concentration camps were treated as potential venues for denouncing Israelis as genocidaires. The same pattern reached into the institutions meant to protect public life: British police and judges failed to provide adequate protection for Jewish citizens, while media outlets including Al Jazeera and the condemned Israel, Jews, and Zionists again and again.
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The violence did not stay rhetorical. There were shootings targeting Jewish schools in Canada and the US, and mass shootings of Jews in Australia. Those attacks underscored a hard truth: Jews are no longer defenseless or acquiescent. The State of Israel exists because history taught the Jewish people a brutal lesson over and over again, and that lesson remains central to why Yom HaShoah is observed as it is.
What happened after October 7 was not just a political argument over Israel. It was a cold war over memory, and over whether the lesson of the Holocaust still has force in Europe. The answer now is written not only in speeches and headlines, but in the way Jewish communities across several countries have had to reckon with fear again.
