The silencing of Holocaust remembrance bodes ill for Britain

Does the Holocaust matter? An increasing number of people in Britain are drawing the conclusion that it doesn’t. Not unless it can be used to damage Israel, anyway.

Today, on Holocaust Memorial Day, it’s business as usual at most British secondary schools, with the vast majority not marking it at all. They have decided that two-and-a-half years after the worst modern massacre of Jews, it’s time to let bygones be bygones.

Before the atrocities of 7 October 2023, 2,000 out of the UK’s 4,000 secondary schools marked the commemorations. By 2025, that number had fallen to just 854. It is likely to have fallen even further today. And so arrives yet another signal that when faced with a stand-off between the only democracy in the Middle East and the forces of jihad, too many in Britain have plumped for the latter.

Let’s not be coy: if it hadn’t been for 7 October, many schools would still be marking the Holocaust. As Golda Meir famously remarked: ‘The world hates a Jew who hits back. The world loves us only when we are to be pitied.’ That’s always been our dirty little secret and, with their strategy of human sacrifice, the jihadis have taken full advantage of it. Hamas may have been defeated by the IDF in Gaza, but it seems to have won a different war in Britain.

In some ways, there is not one Jew but two. The first is the one who embodies the spirit of the Zionist, by which I mean not the ‘settler colonialism’ that our enemies have so cynically projected upon the word, but the instinct to throw off the shackles of victimhood and fight.

Those people, whether they live in Israel or the diaspora, understand that, in the final analysis, for schools to disregard the significance of the Holocaust is a mark of the corrosion of British society.

Your loss. We do not need your pity. We do not need your tears. We will defend ourselves with our own strength, both physical and emotional, and forge our own future, which is more than can be said for you right now.

The second group of Jews is scared. It’s not that they are unmoved by the spirit of defiance; or that their bolder brothers are not equally afraid. But this second group, which includes the elderly, families and people who are less able to stand up for themselves, see the world brushing aside the pledge of ‘never again’ which was made in 1945 and fears that the pages of history are turning backwards.

In both cases, however, the truth of the matter is that Britain is not debasing the Jews so much as it is debasing itself. As I argue in my new book, Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself, after three millennia, it is not the future of the Jews that hangs in the balance. 

In the moving conclusion to his 2010 book, Future Tense, the late chief rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote:

‘Yes, the Jewish fight is a losing battle. It always was. Moses lost. Joshua lost. Jeremiah lost. We have striven for ideals just beyond our reach, hoped for a gracious society just beyond the possible, believed in a messianic age just over the furthest horizon, wrestled with the angel and emerged limping.

‘And in the meanwhile, those who won have disappeared, and we are still here, still young, still full of vigour, still fighting the losing battle, never accepting defeat, refusing to resign ourselves to cynicism, or to give up hope of peace with those who, today as in the past, seek our destruction. That kind of losing battle is worth fighting.’

Can the same be said of Britain and the West? Are we fighting a losing battle or have we simply abandoned the battlefield? Our dismissal of the Holocaust and the moral instruction it provides is not a good sign. The lesson we are squandering is a crucial one, and it is simply this: evil exists and sometimes you have to fight it.

Look at us in Britain. Look at the state of our armed forces. Look at the state of our economy. Look at our welfarism, our suicidal indulgence of radical Islamism, our self-loathing, our narcissism. Look at the lack of resilience in our young, the collapse of social coherence, the fading of the natural sense of duty and patriotism that defined us for so many centuries. Look at how we have betrayed the Jews.

Yes, this is a problem for Britain. Where does this place somebody like me, whose support for the Middle East’s only democracy aligns with a love for the West and a hatred for our enemies, such as Putin’s Russia and the murderous theocracy in Iran?

Many people are asking this question, and not just Jews. Our culture, which was hijacked by centrist fundamentalists in the comfort that descended after the Cold War, has slowly been taken away from us.

We British used to be a people who stood on the virtues of easy patriotism, modesty, irony, self-sacrifice, courage and duty. Read the literature of the Second World War. Read The Worst Journey in the World, the 1922 memoir by Apsley Cherry-Garrard about Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. At one point, Cherry-Garrard’s teeth shatter from the cold. It is recorded in a single line before he goes back to the business of exploring.

Andrew Fox – my co-presenter on my podcast, The Brink – is a former parachute regiment officer who has doggedly, though not without fair criticism, stood up for Israel since 7 October. He is not a Jew but a Catholic. In our episode last week, a live recording with Brendan O’Neill of this parish, I asked Andrew what motivates him to take such an unfashionable position.

Two things, he told me. Firstly, one of the 12 friends he lost in Afghanistan was a Jew who fought bravely at his side and lost his life in Britain’s defence. Secondly, Andrew said, his grandfather had fought in the Second World War and played a part in liberating concentration camps.

How sad that men like Andrew no longer represent the centre of gravity of our country. The silencing of Holocaust remembrance represents that shift. We are no longer the people we thought we were. The centrist fundamentalists have seen to that.

I often think that the old Britain has more in common with modern Israel than it does with the Britain of today. The Jewish State has ‘drifted from the West over time by virtue of constant enemy pressure, meaning that citizens are still called upon to endure hardships for their people and if necessary sacrifice their lives in defence of their homeland’, I argue in Never Again?. That is a spirit our grandparents would have instinctively understood. By contrast, your average contemporary Westerner still inhabits what Simon Sebag Montefiore calls a ‘comfort democracy’, existing in a dreamworld of the ‘eternal Sunday’, as the 20th-century philosopher Alexandre Kojève described it. 

The result? Israel’s economy is booming, its demographics are healthy, its defence is strong, its culture is resilient and its population is happy. Britain? Not so much. 

‘The world may not necessarily like the fighting Jew, but the world will have to take account of him’, remarked Menachem Begin, Israel’s pugilistic eighth prime minister. What account is Britain taking? As a country that has forgotten how to fight for anything, we can only wag our fingers at the democracy on the frontline of jihad. Last year, our government banned the Israeli delegation from attending our flagship defence event. We’d rather be left alone to forget how to fight. We’d rather be left alone to forget the Holocaust. We’d rather pursue our own delusions to our doom.

Jake Wallis Simons is author of Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself.