The ghosts of thousands of Palestinian children crushed by Israeli bombs loomed over this year’s Auschwitz commemorations

Jonathan Cook – jonathan-cook.net Jan 31, 2025

An entirely mendacious message lay at the heart of this week’s coverage by the BBC of the 80th Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations.

The British state broadcaster asserted throughout the day that the voices of the few remaining survivors of the Nazi extermination programme were still being heard “loud and clear” in western capitals. Those survivors – now in their 80s and 90s – warned that the genocide of a people must “never again” be allowed to take place.

As if to bolster its claim, the BBC showed western leaders – from Britain’s King Charles III, to Germany’s Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron of France – prominently in attendance at the main ceremony at Auschwitz, the most notorious of the death camps, where more than a million Jews, Roma and other stigmatised groups were burned in ovens.

As a counterpoint, the BBC highlighted the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin had been excluded from the ceremony for ordering the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Steve Rosenberg, the corporation’s Moscow correspondent, underscored the irony that Russia, so visibly absent, was responsible for liberating Auschwitz on 27 January 1945 – the date that eventually came to be marked as Holocaust Remembrance Day.

But hanging over the proceedings – and the coverage – was a heavy cloud of unreality. Had those western leaders really heard the message of “never again”? Had media outlets like the BBC?

There was an unwanted ghost at the commemorations. In fact, tens of thousands of ghosts.

Those ghosts included the children shredded by US-supplied bombs; the children who slowly suffocated under the rubble of their destroyed homes; the children whose bodies were left to rot, picked apart by feral dogs, because snipers shot at anyone who tried to retrieve them; the children who starved to death because they were seen as “human animals”, denied all food and water; the homeless babies who froze to death in plunging winter temperatures; and the premature babies left to die in their incubators after soldiers invaded hospitals and cut off the power.

Those ghosts were every bit as present at the ceremony as the mountains of shoes and suitcases – separated forever from their owners – lining the corridors of the Auschwitz museum.

Western leaders were determined to look back at the crimes of the past, but not to look at the crimes of the present – crimes they have been so deeply complicit in perpetrating.

Wasteland of rubble

The BBC’s News at Ten, its main evening news programme, dedicated around 20 minutes of its half-hour schedule to the Auschwitz commemorations, and then immediately followed the segment – apparently with no sense of irony – with images from Gaza, now a wasteland of rubble.

Video footage, shot by a drone from high above, showed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians – the survivors, if Israel does not restart the slaughter – picking their way along the coast northwards. They were heading towards the ruins that had once been their homes, schools, universities, libraries, mosques, churches and bakeries.

Seen from so far away, they were reduced to a mass of “human ants”, just as Israel’s leaders wish them to be seen.

After all, who needs to protect a people so dehumanised, so demonised? A people whose resistance to decades of brutal oppression and dispossession is categorised simply as “terrorism”?

It was entirely of a piece that US President Donald Trump, who at least stayed away from the orgy of western hypocrisy at Auschwitz, called at the weekend for a programme to “clean out” the destitute, the maimed, the scarred from Gaza – as if this was just a matter of good hygiene, of eradicating an ants’ nest.

Media like the BBC reported his comments with faint distaste. But it was precisely the media’s disengaged treatment of the horrors unfolding in Gaza for the past 15 months – as if Israel was simply carrying out a routine counter-terrorism operation, “mowing the lawn” again – that made the horrors possible.

It was the media’s refusal to identify those horrors for what they clearly were – an incipient genocide, recognised by every major human rights organisation and suspected by the International Court of Justice in a ruling a year ago – that made the slaughter possible.

It was the media’s embrace of the preposterous narrative that former US President Joe Biden had “worked tirelessly” to restrain Israel, at the same time as he shipped to its military the most powerful bombs in Washington’s armoury, that made the genocide possible.

At least Trump, in his vulgar transparency, exploded the pretence of decency, making it impossible to take as good-faith the professions of “never again” paraded by western leaders.

Ideological zeal

But the Auschwitz commemoration also highlighted a much older lie than the West’s current, self-serving, mendacious claim to have internalised the central lesson of the Holocaust while assisting a present-day genocide.

This year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day starkly exposed the chief beneficiary of that lie: Israel.

For decades, Israel has traded on its self-declared status as guardian of the Holocaust’s memory, and as the Jewish people’s supposed solitary sanctuary from global antisemitism.

But Israel was never a real sanctuary for Jews. It was always another ghetto, this one a self-created fortress state antagonising and oppressing its neighbours in the oil-rich Middle East.

Israel was never a bulwark against genocide either. It was the bastard child of genocide – bitter, traumatised and driven by an ideological zeal to do unto others what had been done to it.

And Israel was never an antidote to antisemitism. It was always antisemitism’s junkie, needing another hit to give it the illusion of purpose and meaning, to rationalise its crimes to itself and others.

Israel did not learn the lesson of “never again”. It learned to view the world as a giant extermination-camp-in-waiting, where no one and nothing could be trusted; where life was seen as a zero-sum battle for survival; where wielding the biggest stick eased its fears a little; and peace was unattainable, so the state of war had to be permanent.

Touting itself as the realisation of a dream for the Jewish people, Israel offered only a nightmarish hellscape for the Palestinians it has ruled for nearly eight decades.

The nadir of that long process was the 15 months of genocide in Gaza.

Litany of tyrants

The remedy to all of this is not a mirage-like “two-state solution”, which could never be accommodated by Israel’s dog-eat-dog worldview. Rather, Israel must be weaned off its addiction to victimhood, its zero-sum logic.

But western politicians were never in a position to help. Instead, they endlessly armed Israel and encouraged its most dysfunctional behaviours.

In truth, even in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War, the West never learned the lesson it so keenly and loudly proclaimed this week at Auschwitz.

Just ask the Kikuyu people of Kenya, who were castrated, beaten, raped and murdered through the 1950s by British soldiers defending a dying empire from the Mau Mau uprising. Or the Algerians, colonised and brutalised until the early 1960s by French imperialists clinging on to one of their last significant colonial outposts.

Ask the Vietnamese, who were massacred in the service of a Cold War strategy by the US to bolster its expanding economic empire against the spread of a rival communism. Or the Iraqis and Libyans, who saw their countries bombed, and their peoples killed or ethnically cleansed as Washington and its Nato allies pursued the US military doctrine of “global full spectrum dominance”.

And those are only a handful of the post-Holocaust crimes committed directly by western states.

Even as the West pretended to bring independence to its former colonies, from the 1950s onwards, it propped up a litany of brutal tyrants and dictators: Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, Indonesia’s General Suharto, the leaders of apartheid South Africa, the kings and crown princes of Saudi Arabia – the list goes on and on.

The brutalities of western colonialism were veiled by outsourcing the crimes to local dictators and strongmen.

Glaring hypocrisy

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer made an address on Holocaust Remembrance Day that encapsulated how its message has been not only lost, but entirely twisted by western politicians.

Pointing to his country’s plans for a National Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre, Starmer vowed to achieve more than just remembrance. “We must also act,” he said. And with a hypocrisy so glaring it nearly snuffed out the many dozens of candles arrayed behind him, he listed the recent genocides the West failed to stop.

He solemnly intoned: “We say ‘never again’, but where was ‘never again’ in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, or in the acts of genocide against the Yazidi people? And where is ‘never again’ as antisemitism still kills Jewish people?”

Notice no mention of Gaza, where the destruction and slaughter has already happened on a far greater scale than in Bosnia. Starmer, like other western leaders, not only failed to act to stop the genocide in Gaza, but he had already forgotten it even while its survivors were on our screens, destitute and maimed, returning to the wreckage of their homes.

Starmer wants Holocaust education to become “a national endeavour”. But British children don’t need to hear about events 80 years or more ago to learn about genocide. They watched it unfold day after day, week after week, month after month on their phones.

And they watched Starmer and his counterparts across Europe not only do nothing to stop it, but actively assist Israel in committing those crimes. Children will not learn more about the dangerous world they live in from Auschwitz than they have already learned from Gaza.

Cover for criminality

But there is another lesson that young people – those not brainwashed by a lifetime of exposure to BBC news – might have understood from the commemorations at Auschwitz: that the message from Holocaust survivors of “never again” has been hijacked by western leaders to a quite different, cynical end.

The Holocaust has been turned into a shield that, rather than protecting others from becoming victims of genocide, is used to protect those in the West who wish to perpetrate it.

Over the years, the Holocaust has become the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for Israel – and for western leaders who can invoke it as cover for their support for Israeli criminality.

It was no surprise that, in rationalising its genocide in Gaza, Israel first spread wholly false stories that Hamas had baked babies alive in ovens, evoking the crematoria of Auschwitz. Or that Israeli soldiers, high on their conviction that they belong to an eternally victimised master race, repeatedly used vehicles to carve giant Stars of David onto Palestinian lands in Gaza.

It is no surprise that Israeli popular culture has so dehumanised Palestinians that report after report finds those imprisoned by Israel face systematic torture, sexual abuse and rape. Or that Israeli soldiers regard Palestinians as so vermin-like that, as western doctors who have volunteered in Gaza keep warning, Israeli snipers and drones appear to be shooting Gaza’s children for sport.

The truth is that the primary lesson of the Holocaust, like the reality of antisemitism, has been weaponised. It has been hollowed out of its true message – the message from the survivors – so that it can be cynically repurposed to justify the very crimes it should serve as a warning against.

We cannot unsee what has taken place in Gaza over the past 15 months. Holocaust Remembrance Day didn’t succeed in shifting our attention back 80 years, as western leaders hoped it would. Rather, it brought the present into much sharper focus.

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