Holocaust Memorial Day 2026 – Record Attendance For Our Call To DENAZIFY THE ISRAELI STATE

Not One Holocaust Memorial Organisation Worldwide Has Condemned the Genocide in Gaza or Said That 'Never Again' Applies to the Palestinians

Holocaust Memorial Day 2026 – DeNazify Israel

The Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration we have just held is the fourth to be organised by Jewish Network for Palestine.  It also had a record attendance. 624 people registered for the meeting and 420 attended with a maximum of 357 at any one time.

The meeting was chaired by Haim Bresheeth, an Israeli anti-Zionist academic and author of ‘An army like no other’. The speakers were:

Ø Rania Khalek, a Lebanese-American journalist who  hosts Breakthrough News.

Ø Ghada Karmi, the author In Search of Fatima and many other books. Ghada is one of the original 1948 Palestinians, who and Professor of History at Exeter University and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Ø Suzanne Weiss is a child  survivor who was hidden by the Communist Resistance in France. Suzanne’s memoir, From Holocaust to Resistance – my journey is well worth getting.

Ø Stephen Kapos is  a child survivor of the Hungarian holocaust who was hidden by the Holy Family Church in Budapest. Stephen is a well known figure on Britain’s Palestine solidarity demonstrations who was questioned by the Metropolitan Police about a public order offence!

Ø Lastly Tony Greenstein, is author of Zionism During the Holocaust and a long-standing Jewish anti-Zionist .

Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio) - The Fight Against ICE is the Fight for Palestine

The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day webinar was The Nazification of Israel. When I chose this title I wasn’t aware of an article by Orly Noy, in Israel’s +972 Magazine . Orly wrote:

Gaza City is engulfed in flames, as the Israeli army embarks on its long-threatened ground offensive after weeks of relentless bombardment.... I urge you to watch the footage streaming out of Gaza, and see what this euphemism really means.

Look into the eyes of people gripped by a terror unmatched even in the darkest moments of this two-year genocide. See the rows of ash-covered children lying on the blood-soaked floor of what was once a medical center — some barely alive, others wailing in pain and fear — as desperate hands try to comfort them or treat them with whatever medical supplies remain. Hear the screams of families fleeing with nowhere to run. Witness parents scouring the inferno for their children; limbs protruding from beneath the rubble; a paramedic cradling a motionless girl, pleading with her to open her eyes, in vain.

What Israel is doing in Gaza City is not the tragic byproduct of chaotic events on the ground, but a well-calculated act of annihilation, executed in cold blood by “the people’s army” — that is, the fathers, sons, brothers, and neighbors of us Israelis. 

How is it that, despite the mounting testimonies from Gaza’s concentration and extermination camps, no mass refusal movement has taken root in Israel? That after two years of this carnage barely a handful of conscientious objectors sit in prison is truly inconceivable....

Israel is unleashing a holocaust in Gaza, and it cannot be dismissed as the will of the country’s current fascist leaders alone. This horror runs deeper than Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, and Smotrich. What we are witnessing is the final stage in the nazification of Israeli society.

The urgent task now is to bring this holocaust to an end. But stopping it is only the first step. If Israeli society is ever to return to the fold of humanity, it must undergo a deep process of denazification....

Denazification must also include the recognition that what was cannot remain. It will not be enough to simply replace the current government. We must abandon the myth of Israel’s “Jewish and democratic” character — a paradox whose iron grip helped pave the way to the catastrophe we are now immersed in. 

This deception must end with the clear recognition that only two paths remain: either a Jewish, messianic, genocidal state, or a truly democratic state for all its citizens.

Orly concludes her article by saying that ‘Zionism, in all its forms, cannot be cleansed of the stain of this crime. It must be brought to an end.’ There is no room for accommodation with Zionism. There is no ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’ Zionism. They are the same creatures.

The process of deNazification must begin with the recognition that Israel does not inherit the memory of the Jews who died in the holocaust. On the contrary, Israel mirrors the Nazi racial supremacy that led to the holocaust.

We must stop bowing our heads in solemn acquiescence when the Zionists invoke the memory of the 6 million as justification for the annihilation of the Palestinians. We must not repeat the slogan ‘Never Again’ without emphasising that today this slogan applies to the Palestinians above all.

The Silence of the Holocaust Memorial Organisations

Yad Vashem is Israel’s holocaust memorial organisation. Yad Vashem’s purpose was never to draw universal lessons from the holocaust. For Zionism the Jewish holocaust was unique and if its unique then how can one draw universal lessons applicable to all?

Yad Vashem’s aim has always been to harnesses the memory of the holocaust dead to the Zionist project and the building of a ‘Jewish’ state. How could it therefore condemn that very state for perpetrating its own genocide?

Yad Vashem was never intended as an anti-racist or anti-fascist institution. It was a Zionist organisation. It has rebuffed many invitations in the past to widen its remit and condemn particularly flagrant examples of Israeli and Zionist racism.

Yad Vashem had no intention of changing its past practice now that Israel was becoming an openly genocidal state. So when 50 holocaust researchers asked Yad Vashem to condemn the genocidal statements made by Israeli politicians, military and other public figures, including Israeli government ministers and Prime Minister Netanyahu himself, its Chairman, Dani Dayan refused.

Where Yad Vashem led, the world’s holocaust memorial organisations followed. Not one holocaust organisation has condemned Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Not one has declared that the lesson of the Nazi holocaust was that the slogan ‘Never Again’ applied to all people, Jewish and non-Jewish, Palestinians included.

When the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum posted a graphic on Instagram with the message ‘Never again can’t only mean never again for Jews’ there was a backlash from Zionist organisations. Their complaint, that the statement might be interpreted as referring to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, resulted in the post being deleted. The museum issued a new statement:

We recently posted an item on social media that was part of a pre-planned campaign intended to promote inclusivity and community that was easily open to misinterpretation by some to be a political statement reflecting the ongoing situation in the Middle East. That was not our intent.

The LA Holocaust Museum promised to ‘do better’ next time. Thus proving that ‘Never Again’ in the eyes of Zionists excludes Palestinians and those that the West considers its enemies. Never Again is only applicable to the Jews.

Karen Pollock of Britain’s Holocaust Education Trust went even further. She condemned the ‘shameful’ comparisons between the holocaust in Gaza and the Nazi genocide.

We should take on board what Primo Levi and his interviewer concluded in an interview in 1982 after the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps.

Joan Acocella, writing in the New Yorker in April 2013 recalled how Primo Levi, the famous Italian Jewish survivor of Auschwitz told a reporter, Filippo Gentiloni, from the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, that

“Everybody is somebody’s Jew,”.... At that point in the interview, printed on June 29, 1982, Gentiloni closed the Levi quote and added a sentence of his own: “And today Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.” 

Although Primo Levi didn’t actually say the words they were clearly in accord with his views and he never raised an objection to them.

Today the Palestinians are suffering at the hands of Israel what Jews experienced at the hands of European anti-Semites.

Comparisons Between Nazi Germany and Israel

The IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism states that ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ is anti-Semitic.

It is instructive therefore to list a few comparisons between Nazi Germany and Israel today and then ask ourselves whether the truth itself is anti-Semitic.

1.          A good place to start with is Arwa Mahdawi article ‘Gaza must be eliminated’: Israel’s airwaves are filled with pro-genocide propaganda.’ She quotes Nissim Vaturi, the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset stating that

“The children and women must be separated and the adults in Gaza must be eliminated. We are being too considerate,” 

Vaturi said this during an interview with Kol BaRama radio in February 2025, when he also called Palestinians “subhumans” and said the West Bank would be turned into Gaza next.

Elad Barashi, a TV producer with Channel 14, wrote on 27 February 2025.

Gaza deserves death. The 2.6 million terrorists in Gaza deserve death! … Men, women, and children – in every way possible, we must simply carry out a Holocaust on them – yes, read that again – H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T! For me, gas chambers. Train cars. And other cruel forms of death for these Nazis. Without fear, without hesitation – simply crush, eradicate, slaughter, flatten, dismantle, smash, shatter …. Gaza deserves death. Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza 

2.          On 1 August 2025 Shimon Elkabetz, Chairman of the Israel Film Council, urged the extermination of the Palestinians ‘it’s just like using a lice comb’. Hitler in Mein Kampf compared Jews to lice.

Gallant on Palestinians as human animals

3.          Israel’s Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, on 9^th October 2023, described Palestinians as ‘human animals’. On October 4, 1943 Himmler had described the Untermenschen in exactly the same terms.

Heinrich Himmler Addressing the SS Generals

Gallant went on to say that

I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.

“That we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally,” Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, wrote in a diary entry. Today, more than two million Palestinians in Gaza are being forced, by design, into famine.”https://t.co/6ITI8Fh5Ih pic.twitter.com/OlEThwtEIM

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) June 3, 2025

In June 1941, as Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, began the Nazis implemented Der Hungerplan, the starvation of those they conquered.  4.2 million Soviet citizens died as a result.

In his diary Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor-General of Poland, wrote, that ‘we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally.’

Destroying food and the production of food was core to Israel’s strategy from the start. ‘Israeli bulldozers and heavy machinery have systematically razed fields, reducing them to dirt.’ See ‘How Israel destroyed Gaza's ability to feed itself’. More than 90% of cattle and more than half of sheep and goat herds in Gaza were killed whilst more than three-quarters of Gaza’s orchards have been destroyed. A UN survey in September 2024 found that 70% of agricultural land had been destroyed or damaged according to an analysis of satellite imagery.

4.          Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, head of the pre-military Bnei Moshe Yeshivah in Jaffa,  told a conference of yeshivas on 27 March 2024 that:

Today's terrorists are the children of the prior [military] operation that left them alive.... It's not only the 14- or 16-year-old boy, the 20- or 30-year-old man who takes up a weapon against you but also the future generation. 

5.          Tzemach Yehudah Richter wrote in the Times of Israel about Himmler’s second speech at Poznań on 6 October 1943 along exactly the same lines.

I ask of you that that which I say to you in this circle be really only heard and not ever discussed. We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth.

And so we see how the ‘logic’ of extermination in Nazi Germany has made its way over into the thinking of Israel’s rabbis and soldiers.

6.          The most popular car bumper stickers in Israel are those urging the IDF to ‘finish them,’

Friendship Song 2023 - Israeli Schoolkids Sing of the Annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza – Public broadcaster Kan TV Played the Video

7.          Israel’s public broadcaster Kan showed a video of a group of school children urging the ‘annihilation’ of the people in Gaza.

Israeli politician says ‘any child’ born in Gaza is ‘already a terrorist’

Nissim Vaturi, said every child born in Gaza is “already a terrorist, from the moment of his birth” and that Gaza must be erased from the face of the earth.

8.          Amichai Eliyahu, the Heritage Minister, openly called for the starvation of the population.

9.          Rabbis like Dov Lior, the spiritual mentor of Israel’s neo-Nazi Police Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, published a letter saying that Jewish law permitted destroying the entire Gaza Strip to bring peace to the south of Israel. Lior also praised the ISIS attacks on Paris in 2015 when 137 people died.

"Other findings were grim: A majority of 56% of Jews supported the "transfer (forced expulsion) of Arab citizens of Israel to other countries." To put this in perspective, a 2015 large Pew poll in Israel found 48% of Jewish Israelis supported expelling Arab citizens from Israel. https://t.co/wYCgDifERw

— Shibley Telhami (@ShibleyTelhami) June 4, 2025

10.    A poll Professor Tamir Sorek of Pennsylvania State University in May 2025 82% Israeli Jews supported the transfer (expulsion) of residents of the Gaza Strip, 56% supported the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel and nearly half, 47% supported killing all Palestinians in Gaza, rising to 60% when a further question about the relevance of Amalek was asked.

What are we to make of this? It is clear that all the holocaust education in the world has had no effect whatsoever in Israel. On the contrary, holocaust education has enabled Israelis to see themselves as victims at the very time that they are enforcing an apartheid system and committing genocide. Holocaust education has reinforced their sense of righteousness and entitlement. Israeli settler colonialism is unique in the settlers seeing themselves as the victims of those they are exterminating.

‘Never Again’ has enabled Israelis to see the Palestinians as the Nazis and to therefore justify all measures, including genocide, taken against them.

And this is the mark of the stupidity of left groups like the Socialist Workers Party who mouth the same slogans here without ever asking themselves why it is that the supporters of genocide in Gaza also mouth ‘never again’ and what that might mean in the mouths of racists and genocidaires. This why I have sent an open letter to the local SWP/SUTR.

I hope that Tuesday night’s HMD webinar went some way to helping people understand that holocaust memorial remembrance, which does not include the Palestinians and other victims of holocausts and take a clear position against Zionism, ends up reinforcing the Zionist victimisation complex that enables genocide to take place.

Tony Greenstein