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Opinion

Real Holocaust remembrance requires standing up for Israel

You can’t really believe in the importance and implications of the Holocaust without understanding Israel’s essential legitimacy

January 15, 2025 09:16
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King Charles at Chanukah reception for Holocaust survivors at the JW3 Community Centre on December 16, 2022 (Getty Images)
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King Charles is to visit Auschwitz for commemoration events later this month, marking the 80th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation. He will meet local representatives in Krakow and back in Blighty, he will host an event to mark Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27 at Buckingham Palace, with no fewer than three Holocaust educational organisations, as well as Manfred Goldberg, a 94-year-old survivor of camps and a death march.

This seemly and dignified engagement with Holocaust remembrance, and the organisations committed to ensuring it is never forgotten, reflects well on the King, the Royal Family – who appear to share the monarch’s instinctive respect for Holocaust education – and much of Britain’s official class. The latter, after all, has for years been trying to get a big Holocaust memorial built right by the Palace of Westminster (to the dismay of some Jews).

Leaving aside the disturbing incursion of horrible woke ideas into the whole edifice of Holocaust education, such as the insistence on making it seem as if the (white) Jews were just one of many casualties, and that it is therefore racist to focus on them, there is, generally, a sense that the great and the good of Britain supports Holocaust remembrance.

The disconnect, therefore, with the public stance on Israel held by so many statesmen and grandees (although not, as far as one can tell, the King) could not be more jarring. It is totally unacceptable in the higher circles of Westminster and Whitehall not to wholeheartedly show your respects for the importance of Holocaust memorialisation and education. But it is entirely respectable, and even expected, to be openly scathing about Israel’s military campaigns, even though these are entirely waged in self-defence.