Tomorrow is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the future, Europe is going to need a day to remind itself of the existence of International Holocaust Remembrance Day—let alone the Holocaust itself.
There have always been additional purposes to the “genocide” libel lobbed against Israel. But in true Big Lie fashion, the most risible parts of the libel are the ones with the most staying power because they are the most useful to its propagators’ hidden agenda.
In this case, the hidden agenda becomes clearer as we get closer to marking remembrance of the Holocaust. The “genocide” accusation is a form of Holocaust revisionism intended to inflate Israel’s crimes while reducing those of the Nazis and have them both meet somewhere in the middle. But it turns out there is something darker at work here: The Holocaust itself—the reason we have the term “genocide”—is being replaced.
Amid the surge in anti-Semitism after October 7, we saw increased demand to skip Holocaust educational programs by activists and educators who insisted it was controversial or insensitive to focus, even for a day or a few hours, on Jewish suffering. This trend, appalling as it was, has exploded: British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis writes:
“According to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, in 2023, more than 2,000 secondary schools held commemorative or educational events to mark the day. But on October 7 that year, everything changed. In January 2024, just a few months after the deadliest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust, the number fell dramatically to less than 1,200. In 2025, just 854 schools chose to hold an event. I fear for what will happen this year.”
Those numbers are astounding. In the United Kingdom, the Holocaust is being memory-holed.
Why? Because you cannot have both the “Israeli genocide” and the “Nazi genocide”; they are incompatible and can’t coexist within a single category. So it appears enlightened Westerners are choosing the former and dispensing with the latter.
Accusing Israel of genocide is not merely an attempt to isolate the Jewish state diplomatically; it is part of an effort to erase the Holocaust from history.
Educators who want to continue marking the Holocaust are facing increasingly vicious resistance. Olivia Marks-Woldman, CEO of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, told the Telegraph that some teachers say they feel unprepared for what to do if (increasingly, when) attendees try to make the lesson about Israel’s supposed crimes. “But then there are people with their own agenda who want to use HMD to attack the memory of the Holocaust,” Marks-Woldman said. “We have had people write to us saying they will only commemorate HMD on certain conditions, for example, if we put out a letter condemning Netanyahu.”
Marks-Woldman told the Telegraph that Holocaust education “should not be conditional on anything.” Which is exactly right, of course. Unfortunately, in some sick sense, anti-Zionists agree: They are essentially pushing to retain Holocaust education as long as it is made entirely about Jewish crimes. When someone says “Holocaust,” these sociopaths want people to think Gaza.
It would be naïve to think this isn’t already progressing here in the U.S. as well. First, because it’s the exact same movement running with the exact same propaganda. Second, because according to some reports, it’s already happening.
The Jewish Journal reports that at UC-Irvine, the student government prepared a resolution for Holocaust Memorial Day. Jewish groups joined the others in backing the resolution, which originally said: “the world continues to witness a troubling rise in antisemitism, Holocaust denial, hate speech, and violence, both globally and within local communities, which reinforces the urgent need for education, historical understanding, and active resistance to all forms of discrimination.”
The student government apparently removed the Jewish sponsors and the particularist Jewish details, essentially confiscating the Holocaust from its victims. “What was originally a thoughtfully crafted Holocaust remembrance statement was fundamentally altered by ASUCI senators questioning established history, erasing Jewish authorship, and ignoring Jewish student voices,” one UC junior told the Journal.
Unless this trend is reversed, Holocaust Remembrance Day may soon have nothing to do with the actual Holocaust at all.
