https://quillette.com/2025/09/17/peace-and-appeasement-hitler-hamas-gaza/
After decades of ruthless militancy and terrorism that culminated in the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October, a Palestinian state will be recognised later this month by the governments of France, the UK, and Canada. These Western leaders are eager to appease those who perpetrate anti-Jewish violence because they believe that by doing so they can end decades of bloodshed and war in the Middle East. But this kind of thinking misreads the causes of hatred and aggression in pursuit of peace at all costs, and history demonstrates how dangerous this is.
On 1 April 1933, the Nazis declared a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses. Days later, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed, which forbade the employment of non-Aryan teachers, judges, or physicians. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were enacted, which proscribed intermarriage and stripped Jews of German citizenship. By 1938, Jewish children had been pushed out of schools and Jewish doctors were confined to treating Jews. None of these measures required war. All that was needed was ideology, will, organisation, and the silent complicity of observers.
The tightening of the noose during this period was administrative—a litany of forms, laws, decrees, notices, and slogans that turned ordinary doorways into uncrossable thresholds. The path to genocide began with incremental measures that felt reversible until they were not. And then came Kristallnacht, on the night of 9 November 1938, which ended the pretence that anti-Jewish persecution was only a matter of law. Around ninety Jews were murdered and about 30,000 men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Synagogues were set on fire and Jewish shops were reduced to glittering wreckage. The next morning, people stepped around the shards of broken glass littering the pavement as they walked to work.
And while all of this horror was unfolding, civilised Europe did nothing.
