The history of anti-semitism
Ashley Church writes:
The Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers of Auschwitz or Treblinka. It began much earlier, with ideas, laws, exclusions, and the slow normalisation of cruelty. The part that history often forgets.
When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, there was no plan to exterminate the Jews. What did exist was a heavily racist worldview: that Jews were alien, that they were a corrosive presence within society – and that the economic hardship, moral decay, and national humiliation that the Germans were facing was their fault.
This was common in most of Europe. In many countries Jews needed a permit to marry, to try and prevent them breeding too much. Jews have been persecuted not for just 12 years of Nazi rule but for over 2,000 years.
The pattern is unmistakable: Jews tolerated when useful, vilified when convenient, attacked when politically expedient. As such, Germany did not invent antisemitism – it simply systematised it.
So, when Zionism arose in the 19th century, it wasn’t through an imaginary desire for conquest or supremacy. It was through exhaustion.
Zionism recognised the unavoidable lesson. That no matter how integrated the Jews became, no matter how loyal or assimilated, they were never truly safe. Rights could be withdrawn overnight. Citizenship could be revoked. Neighbours could become executioners.
So Zionism proposed a simple proposition: a people without safety needed a homeland. And not just any homeland. Their own homeland – on land which they had possessed for thousands of years and from which they had been expelled in relatively recent history.
Zionism is simply supporting the right of Jews to have their own country where they are safe. Any if any group has ever demonstrated the need for the safety of their own country, it is Jews.
So the State of Israel was declared in 1948. Not by military might – but by the agreement of the world community following a UN-backed partition plan. But the surrounding Arab states rejected coexistence and launched a war aimed at annihilation. Many Arab residents fled, expecting a swift victory and a return. That victory never came.
Israel survived. Barely.
If you support the role of the UN and international law, then you should be a Zionist. That doesn’t mean you support everything or even most things Israel does. It just means you support there being an Israel.
Holocaust Remembrance Day is not just about mourning the dead. It is about recognising the pattern that led to those deaths while there is still time to interrupt it.
Because the Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with the same things that we’re seeing, right now.
And history has a habit of repeating itself – first slowly, then all at once.
Sadly.
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