Every year on Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), the State of Israel comes to a complete standstill. For two minutes, sirens sound, and an entire nation freezes, on highways, in offices, and in homes, to remember the 6 million Jews murdered in the Shoah. It is a moment of silence that carries the weight of history.
Today, that silence echoes differently. For Israelis, their world changed forever not only because of October 7, 2023, which marked the largest number of Jews killed in a single day since the end of the Holocaust, but also because, starting on October 8, much of Europe abandoned the Jews once again.
October 7 was the day of massacre. October 8 was the day of reckoning: the moment when Europe, 80 years after the Holocaust, was tested on whether it had truly learned anything from its past demonization and abandonment of its Jews, not only in the Shoah, but through centuries of expulsions, pogroms, ghettos, and blood libels.
Even before October 7, Europe was already experiencing a surge in antisemitism—from the far right, from radicalized segments of the far left, and from Islamist networks that openly demonized the Jewish state. Too often, the response was rhetorical at best: words without action, declarations without consequences. In England, it was often indifference and apathy.
What followed was not moral clarity but retreat
Initially, many European leaders said the right things after October 7. They traveled to Israel and saw the aftermath of the mass murder, rape, and kidnappings of Israelis. Traumatized Israelis took note and took heart from those expressions of solidarity.
What followed, though, was not moral clarity but retreat. Not solidarity but equivocation.
Rather than opening a new chapter of understanding between Europe and the Jewish people, what followed was a systemic moral failure across large parts of the continent. In some countries, including the Netherlands, France, and Spain, the language used about Israel increasingly echoes 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. British police and judges failed to provide adequate protection for Jewish citizens. In the media, including not only Al Jazeera but the BBC, many other outlets, and countless social media platforms, Israel, Jews, and Zionists were condemned again and again.
Beyond Europe, there were shootings targeting Jewish schools in Canada and the US, and mass shootings of Jews in Australia. The global campaign of incitement online and on the campuses of elite universities marched in lockstep with a Nazi-like drumbeat of antisemitic hatred and conspiracy theories that would have made Josef Goebbels weep with joy. This Yom HaShoah, the demonization of Israel has become acceptable, even fashionable, in mainstream culture, politics, and the specious halls of UN diplomacy.
Yet if little has changed in Europe, something fundamental has changed for the Jewish people: Jews are no longer defenseless or acquiescent. Europe may still be adjusting to a reality it has not fully internalized, but Jews will no longer seek or accept the few verbal crumbs tossed their way by authorities as a legitimate response to the cancer of antisemitism spreading across the continent.
The State of Israel exists precisely because history taught the Jewish people a brutal lesson over and over again. Their fate can never again be entrusted to others.
Those unfathomable horrors recalled every Yom HaShoah have seared that lesson into the collective soul of the Jewish people. Eighty years ago, the souls of 6 million Jews silently accused a world indifferent to Auschwitz, Majdanek, Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, and Dachau. Today, Israel ensures that the Jewish people will not be left to the mercy of history.
Israel, like all other states, is not immune to criticism. No democracy is. But criticism that turns a blind eye to the mass murder of Jews, that falls silent when Iranian cluster-warhead missiles descend on Israeli cities and terror proxies launch rockets at Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem—that criticism morphs into willful distortion. And when attacks against Israeli and Diaspora Jews are depicted as righteousness, distortion morphs into denial.
Many Europeans, since October 8, have hurled the accusation of “genocide” at Israel, willfully inverting reality. Israel’s military actions, tragic as the consequences of war can be, are aimed at ensuring that October 7 can never be repeated. To label the wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, and, together with the US, against Iran’s mass-murdering ayatollahs as “genocide” empties the word of meaning and, in doing so, betrays the very historical memory Europe claims to uphold.
This Yom HaShoah, Jews will remember the lack of outrage and the refusal of those democracies to help—or even to allow American overflights through their airspace carrying desperately needed munitions—forcing Israeli families to celebrate the Passover Seder in bomb shelters.
They will also remember the cultural elite who turned their creative talents toward defending and celebrating the murderers of Jews.
This Yom HaShoah, only those who work to stop the normalization of antisemitism, those who stop excusing incitement, those who refuse to indict the Jewish people for defending themselves, and those who understand that there is no neutrality when confronted by evil should be invited.
For those in Europe who stand with the Jewish people and with Israel, your solidarity matters. It is welcomed. For those who offer only verbal pablum while enabling Jew-hatred: spare us the crocodile tears and stay home this Yom HaShoah.
The Jewish people will continue to engage with the world, seek friends, and build alliances so that “never again” does not become “ever again.”
On this Yom HaShoah, Europeans are urged to internalize Winston Churchill’s warning that appeasing evil inevitably leads to destruction. Last time, Europe awoke when it was too late.
Finally, on this Yom HaShoah, Europe should remember that it too often started with the Jews, but it has never ended with the Jews.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of global social action. Daniel Schuster is the Simon Wiesenthal Center senior representative in Europe.