From January 10 to September 1, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, Canada played host to an internationally travelling exhibition, entitled “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.”

Whenever I happened to pass the museum during my last sojourn in the city a few months ago, I would look at the oversized promotional banners that draped the Queen’s Park side of the building, featuring those exact same words, and think to myself: “What is less longer ago and less further away than Gaza?”

According to the museum’s website, the exhibition “underscores a critical need to understand the underlying conditions that allowed the Holocaust to happen.”

It goes on to say that “[b]y reflecting on the past, visitors are invited to consider their role in creating a more inclusive and tolerant society.

Despite admitting to historiography’s role as educator and preventative measure to break the cycle of repeating past mistakes, the exhibition webpage does not mention "Israel’s" ongoing western-backed genocide in Gaza once, thereby failing to live up to its own standard.

This refusal to include a reference to the Zionist entity’s extermination of the Palestinian people exposes the utter failure of Nazi holocaust remembrance to keep what the website entry calls “the borderless manifestation of hatred and human atrocity” from happening again.

Weaponising remembrance

This cognitive dissonance is not an isolated instance of short-sightedness, but part of a broader western behavioural pattern of diverting public attention away from a present in which Jews, once the victim of racial supremacist genocide, are now actively perpetrating one.

It is also part of a decades-old Zionist strategy of abusing “Holocaust remembrance” in order to give the Israeli conquistador the legitimacy it would otherwise never in a million years gain by virtue of its history of Jewish supremacist and settler colonial violence.

In his iconoclastic 2000 book The Holocaust Industry, Norman G. Finkelstein makes a distinction between the “Nazi holocaust” as an historical event of genocide and the capitalised, stand-alone term “Holocaust” as the “ideological representation” of the former.

Underlying this ideology is the dogma of non-comparability, that the Nazi holocaust is hierarchically unique and that only Jews are deserving of a gold medal in Oppression Olympics.

A key finding of the book is that American Jewish elites only “discovered” Nazi holocaust remembrance after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when a victorious "Israel" became a “strategic asset” for the United States and “American Jewry” alike.

After the June war, the latter immediately began refashioning the memorialisation of the Nazi holocaust, now “ideologically recast” as “The Holocaust”, into a “perfect weapon for deflecting criticism of Israel.”

This strategy persists to this day as "Israel" bombs, shoots and starves Palestinians in Gaza out of their homeland in what has been described as the “final solution” of an almost two-year-long genocide in Palestine, and Nazi holocaust remembrance is not above employing said strategy.

Related News

Ukraine and the 80th anniversary commemorations in Russia of the defeat of Nazi Germany

From Auschwitz to Gaza

In August, the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre in South Africa faced a barrage of criticism from human rights defenders for its failure to acknowledge Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and for its refusal to collaborate with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) on a Gaza-related exhibition.

“If a Holocaust Museum remains silent, or worse, goes into denial while Palestinians face extermination, what purpose does it serve?” the PSC’s Usuf Chikte said.

APR is the new antisemitism

For the longest part of the ongoing timeline of the world’s first livestreamed genocide, mainstream semi-critical discourse has attributed the failure of extending “Never Again” to include Palestinians to “Holocaust guilt”, believing this could explain away western inaction and gaslighting of Palestinian suffering.

Now that Omar El Akkad’s prophecy of “One day, everyone will have always been against this” has been fulfilled, many are waking up to the realisation that guilt has its limits and that anti-Palestinian racism (APR) may be the driving force behind western support for "Israel’s" genocide in Gaza, not atonement.

The Arab Canadian Lawyers Association defines APR as “a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives.”

Nazi holocaust remembrance sites are actively engaging in acts of APR. In April, the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial in the East German state of Thuringia barred a woman from entering because she was wearing a Palestinian koufiyyeh.

In August, the state’s Higher Administrative Court rejected the woman’s request to be allowed to enter the memorial site while wearing a koufiyyeh.

“It is unquestionable that this would endanger the sense of security of many Jews, especially at this site,” the court ruled, thereby prioritising Jewish feelings over Palestinian lives and basically saying that donning the koufiyyeh, a cultural symbol of Palestinian identity and resistance to Israeli settler colonialism, is antisemitic.

It is noteworthy that Thuringia is one of the most racist states in Germany: In the 2024 state election, the right-wing, anti-immigrant AfD party came out on top with 32,8 % of the votes.

Also, the state’s former long-term leader, Bodo Ramelow of the nominally left-wing party DIE LINKE, in a recent interview engaged in the most unabashed and vile anti-Palestinian racism when he dismissed images of slaughtered children in Gaza as “Hamas s***” and said that blaming the Israeli military for killing children was “antisemitism.”

The Palestine exception

The story of the Holocaust Museum LA’s self-censored Instagram post is exemplary of the utter failure of Nazi holocaust remembrance.

“Never again can’t only mean never again for Jews”, the initial post read before the cowardly museum, whose publicised mantra is “Inspire Humanity Through Truth”, suppressed the truth by deleting the post due to Zionist backlash, replacing it with a grovelling statement of regret that promised to “do better.”

So low is the bar to dehumanise Palestinians that even a lukewarm, nine-word post demanding justice for all which does not even mention “Gaza” or “Palestinians” by name manages to get cancelled and has the originators squirming in panic-stricken obedience to the Zionist lobby as they put out a verbose apology to appease their donors.

Employing a Palestine exception to human rights is already a heinous behaviour in itself. But to do so in the name of Nazi holocaust remembrance and “Never Again” amidst an ongoing genocide on “a tiny strip of land that Israel has converted into an open-air exhibition of some of the worst atrocities known to humanity”, to quote writer Belén Fernández, is particularly nefarious.

Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana famously wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Nazi holocaust remembrance and its failure to recognise the ongoing western-perpetrated genocide in Gaza has shown that it is possible to repeat the past even when spending considerable amounts of resources to remember it.