International Holocaust Remembrance Day fell this week on Wednesday. If the day is supposed to serve an educational function, it has largely been a failure.
It was also reported this week that “More than 40% of European Union citizens hold anti-Semitic views and agree with the claim that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians and behaving like the Nazis….” The data come from Israel’s official anti-Semitism report for 2015.
The 40% figure is consistent with earlier findings. A 2011 study by the University of Beilefeld in Germany found 48% of Germans and 63% of Poles agreeing that Israel was carrying out a war of extermination against the Palestinians; the lowest figures were 38% and 39% for Italy and the Netherlands respectively. Polls of Germans in 2013 and 2014 came up with similar numbers.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day has been marked for about a decade, along with other commemorations and educational efforts. The upshot is that large numbers of citizens of Europe—the continent where the Holocaust occurred—are unable to tell the difference between the deliberate extermination of six million people and an armed conflict whose death tolls, on both sides, are in the thousands.
Even for many of those who seem able to acknowledge the nature and magnitude of the Holocaust, the notion that, seventy years later, Jews have transformed from victims to victimizers appears irresistible.