On this Holocaust Memorial Day, remembrance alone is not enough

We take stock of where we stand and of what kind of world we are handing to the next generation.

Eighty-one years after the liberation of Auschwitz, many believed the lessons of the Holocaust were permanently embedded in global consciousness. That the images, testimonies, and vows of “Never Again” had become an unbreakable moral firewall. October 7 shattered that illusion.

My grandparents were from Chemnitz and Leipzig. My grandfather escaped Germany before, and my grandmother during the Holocaust, leaving behind their home, their language, their memories and most of their family, who were murdered in Nazi death camps. They rebuilt their lives in Israel, carrying a pain that never faded. Their proudest moment was seeing me in an IDF uniform: proof that the next generation of their family could finally defend itself.

My saddest moment, as an Israeli, a mother, a lawmaker, and a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, came on October 7, 2023. On my generation’s watch, Jews were slaughtered in broad daylight for one reason alone: because they were Jews. I had promised my grandparents “never again.”

And yet, it happened again.

The return of the final hostage, Ran Gvili, to Israel this week was a moment of national mourning and moral closure. Bringing him home to burial in Israel was not only an act of compassion for his family, but it was a statement of who we are as Israelis. We do not abandon our dead. We do not forget our own. And we do not relinquish our responsibility to those who paid the ultimate price simply for being Jewish.

Israel will never apologise for defending its children. We will not apologise for fighting those who seek our destruction. For the first time in 2,000 years, the Jewish people are not defenceless, and that fact alone seems to enrage our enemies.

But the battlefield has not remained confined to Israel’s borders. Since October 7, antisemitism has exploded across the globe at levels not seen since the 1930s. Jewish schools have closed due to security concerns. Synagogues have been firebombed and barricaded. Jewish students have been harassed and assaulted on campuses. Holocaust memorials have been vandalised in the very streets where Nazi persecution once began.

And it has turned deadly.

In Sydney, Jews were targeted in the bloodiest terror attack on Australian soil that sent shockwaves through the community. 15 innocent souls murdered at a Chunnakah celebration, including a Holocaust survivor and a ten-year-old girl. In Manchester, another antisemitic attack reminded British Jews that history’s darkest chapters are not as distant as we once believed. These were not isolated incidents. They are part of a broader, organised wave of Jew-hatred, normalised, excused, and too often ignored.

This hatred is not spontaneous. It is ideological. The same worldview that butchered Israelis on October 7 fuels Holocaust denial, spreads blood libels online, and chants for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state in Western capitals. It is propagated by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian regime, and the global networks of the Muslim Brotherhood - groups that weaponise antisemitism as a tool of war.

We are now at a crossroads of generations. The generation of Holocaust survivors is fading. The next generation consumes history through algorithms, short videos, and curated narratives that can distort or even erase the truth. This collision between living memory and digital disinformation is one of the greatest challenges of our time.

Military victories alone cannot defeat an ideology. Hamas did not only build terror tunnels; it built classrooms, textbooks, summer camps, mosques, and media systems designed to glorify death and indoctrinate children. But the world has faced this before.

After World War II, the Allies understood that defeating Nazism required more than surrender; it required denazification: a long, painful process of dismantling an entire culture of hatred. The same clarity is required today. Gaza cannot have a future while Hamas’s ideology dominates every institution of life. Deradicalisation, re-education, and rehabilitation are generational tasks, but they are the only path to lasting peace for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, remembrance alone is not enough. We must act.

We must confront Holocaust distortion wherever it appears, online and offline. We must ensure that no Jewish child has to walk to school under police escort, and no synagogue requires armed guards to pray in peace.

The survivors entrusted us with their stories, but also with a responsibility. At this crossroads, we must choose memory over amnesia, courage over silence, and truth over distortion.

History is watching. And this time, we must not fail the next generation.

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Sharren Haskel is the Israeli Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.

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