The nightmare is over. A week ago, the last living Hamas hostages returned home. Israel celebrated, and Jews around the world breathed a sigh of relief. A ceasefire had already been in place in the Gaza Strip, and there were celebrations there as well. It felt like a happy ending. But it isn’t. Even before the US president could sign the peace agreement in Egypt, Hamas began executing Palestinians and, by holding dead hostages, broke the deal with Israel.
A week of peace should have been behind us, but there is no peace: Hamas is not adhering to the ceasefire agreements – as it did in the first two hostage deals. As I write this, hundreds of thousands of people in Israel are waiting for the identification of the remains of a hostage just released by Hamas. Fifteen murdered people are still missing. In the Gaza Strip, Hamas is regrouping and harassing civilians.
And in New York, where the headquarters of the World Jewish Congress is located right next to the United Nations, a Democratic mayoral candidate has now accused Israel of genocide . Zohran Mamdani declared that he recognizes Israel, but not as a Jewish state. His words carry particularly heavy weight because activists in New York last week held a memorial service for top terrorists who plotted the destruction of the Jewish state and were killed by the Israeli army, including Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
No, there is no peace. The nightmare continues. In the Middle East and around the world. The World Jewish Congress represents Jewish people in 103 countries, and new cries for help reach us daily. Being Jewish is becoming increasingly dangerous, even in Western democracies. How did it come to this?
Auschwitz did not end with its liberation in January 1945; it became the greatest and never-ending trauma of the Jewish people. Nor does Hamas’s attack on Israel two years ago end with the liberation of the last hostages. The liberation of Auschwitz was a relief, but it came too late for the one and a half million who were murdered there. The hostage deal is a blessing, but it comes too late for the approximately 80 people who died in Hamas captivity. There is also no happy ending for the nearly 1,200 Israelis who were murdered on October 7, 2023, most with unimaginable brutality.
After Auschwitz, it became clear that there is no limit to human cruelty. Since October 7, we know that there is no moral progress. During the Holocaust, we Jews discovered that we were alone. No one came to our aid. At the Évian Conference in 1938, 31 of 32 states refused to accept Jewish refugees from Germany. Despite knowing about the Holocaust, neutral states like Sweden and Switzerland traded with the Nazis. And of the states that waged war against Germany, none did so to save the Jews. Many lamented the fate of the Jews, but hardly anyone did anything.
Since Auschwitz, we know: anything is possible. Antisemitism will not stop even at the complete extermination of all Jews. Since October 7, we know: if Israel is invaded, no one will come to the country’s aid. Many deplored the massacre, but hardly anyone did anything against the thousands of terrorists who triumphantly displayed their hatred of Jews.
After October 7, Hamas sympathizers celebrated the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust not only on Berlin’s Sonnenallee, but also at American universities. Among the revelers were highly educated professors. While most expressed their regret, even horror, too many immediately found apologetic words for the terror. Still others turned reality on its head, turning Israel, the victim, into the perpetrator. The longer the war against Hamas lasted, the more often we read the phrase « Israel’s war » in the newspapers. Instead of immediately intervening against the terror, the Israelis and the Palestinians were left alone.
No wonder that antisemitism around the world reached levels we had never imagined possible. At the same moment that Hamas destroyed our certainty that Israel was the safe home of the Jewish people, antisemites in every country made it clear to us that we are not safe anywhere. We feel alone again.
Certainly, many politicians visited the sites of devastation: the grounds of the Nova music festival, where young people had been celebrating peacefully when Hamas descended upon them with murderous attacks; the kibbutzim around the Gaza Strip, where unarmed people, women, children, and the elderly were massacred. But hardly anyone did anything to secure the release of the hostages. And the phrase « Never again is now, » repeated a thousand times, alone could not prevent the witch hunt against Jews in Amsterdam, nor the attack on the synagogue in Manchester.
Our loneliness in the face of worldwide Jew-hatred is terrible. It is not alleviated by the solidarity of our false friends: the Islamophobes who seek to instrumentalize us in their fight against Muslims; the cultural warriors who declare Israel the West’s outpost against a hostile Orient; the racists who, under the guise of combating antisemitism, restrict academic freedom and hunt down dark-skinned students. These false friends will turn against us Jews in the next moment, because we, too, do not conform to their image of a uniformly white, Christian culture.
The Holocaust destroyed the Jews of Europe. Antisemitism survived. The murder of six million people, while the world watched idly, was not enough to destroy forever even the absurd notion of Jewish omnipotence. When thousands of terrorists invaded Israel on October 7, the world waited to see how Israel would defend itself.
This reaction has shown us: Jews will always remain Jews, and Israelis will always remain Israelis. Even the brutality of Hamas wasn’t enough to make us see ourselves first as people deserving of compassion.
October 7th wasn’t Auschwitz. Rather, it’s part of a long line of massacres of Jews: the pogroms of Worms and Mainz, of Cisniau and Odessa. One could say that October 7th adds yet another to Jewish history, rich in trauma. Our painful history gives us hope: Israel will recover from October 7th. The Jewish people will live on.
But we Jews have finally understood something. We will never forget: We are alone.
This editorial was originally published in German in Die Zeit.
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