Fewish history is blinding us Israelis to Gaza's suffering

“What should we learn from the murder of six million Jews?” my Israeli high school teacher asked each Holocaust Memorial Day.

- YANIV KORMAN

The response came like a liturgy: “Remember and never forget,” followed by the familiar chorus: “We must never let it happen again. That’s why we need a strong army to defend us.”

The post-Holocaust Jewish identity has been forged by millennia of persecution, where survival itself became a form of resistance. Almost every holiday retells the story: we were strangers, we were hunted, we endured.

Yet, in that classroom, I couldn’t stop thinking about my grandparents’ survival and how their suffering had been conscripted into a narrative of strength through force. Was the Holocaust’s greatest lesson that Jews must arm themselves, or that we, as humans, must protect the vulnerable and resist the comfort of looking away? The Holocaust didn’t happen simply because extremists wanted to kill Jews. It succeeded because ordinary people chose selective blindness when neighbours disappeared, focusing on their own wartime hardships, and insisting things weren’t as dire as they seemed.