Sunday night was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, here in Israel.

At Yad VaShem, switching from stentorian Hebrew to English, Prime Minister Netanyahu declared:

Eighty years ago, in the Holocaust, the Jewish people were totally defenseless against those who sought our destruction. No nation came to our aid.

Today, we again confront enemies bent on our destruction.

I say to the leaders of the world, no amount of pressure, no decision by any international forum, will stop Israel from defending itself.

As the Prime Minister of Israel – the one and only Jewish state – I pledge here today from Jerusalem on this Holocaust Remembrance Day:

If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone. But we know we are not alone because countless decent people around the world support our just cause. And I say to you, we will defeat our genocidal enemies.

Never again is now.

I must admit, I cringed as he said it. However, though I am a sharp critic of the Prime Minister, I agreed with every word. He is simply reading Jewish history correctly when he concludes that, at the end of the day, if the Jews do not defend ourselves, no one will.

This does not mean we are alone. We aren’t. (In a subsequent post, I will write about the Jews’ self-dramatizing instinct to think of ourselves as friendless, with “the world” standing on one side and us on the other.) It does mean, however, that we must be able to defend ourselves, and to do so without apology (though always within the bounds of morality).

That Israel and the Jewish people have failed “to learn the lessons of the Holocaust” — that we stubbornly misread the Shoah and abuse it in order to victimize others — is today perhaps the central article of faith of the anti-Zionist left.

It is the argument of this much-shared essay by Pankaj Mishra in the London Review of Books. Writes Mishra: “as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, razes their homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, bombs them into smaller and smaller encampments, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist, from the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to the Spanish, Irish, Brazilian and South African governments and the Vatican . . . Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945.” Only those jolted into consciousness by the calamity of Gaza,” (he means you, dear subscriber of the LRB), “can rescue the Shoah from Netanyahu, Biden, Scholz and Sunak and re-universalise its moral significance.”

The murder of 6,000,000 Jews, you see, has a “universal moral significance” which the Jews themselves are in the process of “dynamiting” along with “global norms.”

The Holocaust was, if you will, a revelation delivered to the Jews, a kind of anti-scripture with lessons for all of humanity. And the Jews, faithless readers that we are, use it as a license to kill.

This should sound familiar to students of Christianity. For the central claim of the early church against the Jews was just this: That God spoke not only to the Jews but to all of humanity, and for as long as the Jews understand God’s revelation to be addressed to us, we are faithless readers of scripture and history.

“Let us pray also for the faithless Jews [perfidis Judaeis],” Christian congregations intoned for centuries, “that Almighty God may remove the veil from their hearts; so that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord. Almighty and eternal God, who dost not exclude from Thy mercy even Jewish faithlessness [Judaicam perfidiam]: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness. . . .”

As the Jewish grandmother says in the joke: I’ll just sit here in the dark, thank you. Especially now that we’ve seen your light.

For the thing is, neither the Jews nor humanity needed the anti-revelation of the Shoah to learn that murdering millions of innocents was wrong. The idea that Jewish deaths might be redeemed by such a trite moral is an insult to their memory. As they say in Gemara, peshita! It should have been obvious to humanity before the Shoah that the premeditated slaughter of an entire people was evil. (FWIW, it is also obvious that as hideous as our war against Hamas may be, it is nothing like a genocide.)

The only sensible lesson to draw from the Shoah is not about “man’s evil to man” but about the Gentiles’ inclination toward doing evil to the Jews — or, toward extenuating the evil done to the Jews. While most may not themselves indulge in violence against the Jews, history teaches that violence and venom against Jews is treated differently than violence and venom against other groups. There is for many a nagging sense that, in some way, the Jews must have had it coming. The Jews of Brooklyn, clubbed over the head by their neighbors, are slumlords or “gentrifiers” or in some way not the innocent victims of hatred they might appear to be. (Please share with me again James Baldwin’s extenuation that they are hated not because they are Jews but because they are white.) The smolanim of Nir Oz and Be’eri were “settler-colonialists” you see, and their murderers “occupied.”

That Jewish death is either justified or possesses some universal redemptive significance is, in fact, the one point of agreement between those who differ over just about everything else.

For the Christians, Jews suffer as enduring witness to our murder of Christ and rejection of his divinity.

For the Muslims, we suffer because we reject Muhammad’s prophecy and message.

For traditional Jews, we suffer for our sins and for the sake of sanctifying God’s name.

For Hermann Cohen and his liberal acolytes (both those who acknowledge their debt to him and those who don’t), we suffer on behalf of the sins of the world.

Only one group of people denies that the suffering of the Jews has any redemptive meaning at all: the Zionists. For us, the Jews suffer only because people mean us harm, and because we are unable to defend ourselves. And therefore we must learn to defend ourselves.

This seemingly modest, rational demural of the Jews — our bowing out of the economy of suffering into which we had been conscripted — turns out to be one of the most radical revolutions in Western thought. We see all around us that it is unfathomable to the rest of the world — to Jew and gentile alike — that we are no longer willing to accept our suffering as the verdict of heaven and humanity, but intend instead to defend ourselves. B-b-b-but, they sputter, can’t you see that you are guilty? That you are deicides, kafirs, thieves, settler-colonists, guilty of apartheid and genocide and countless other inhuman crimes? That you deserve this — all of this — and more?

To which we Zionists reply: No more guilty than any human being. No, we will defend ourselves.

This is the only meaning of the Shoah for us. That we were murdered for no good reason, and that our murder has no redemptive meaning. None at all.