After the atrocity, the erasure

There are wounds that bleed. And then there are wounds that vanish from view, but whose phantom pain persists across generations, kept alive by the world’s refusal to acknowledge them.

The Jews know both.

At the twilight of the Second World War, when the death factories of Europe fell silent, the survivors emerged—starved, shattered, spectral. They emerged not to a world prepared to reckon with what had been done, but to one already eager to forget. In the great salons of Europe, the camps were spoken of in embarrassed murmurs. In bureaucracies and universities, genocide was reduced to a footnote, a regrettable “aberration.” As for the survivors themselves—those few who crawled back from the abyss—they were met with a coldness almost worse than cruelty: disbelief.

The tales they told—of mass graves, of babies torn from arms, of smoke that smelt of burning flesh—were dismissed as hallucination, exaggeration, Zionist fantasy. “Surely,” they were told, “you overstate.” Surely Europe could not have done this.

And so, the Jewish voice, so recently silenced by gas and bullet, was muffled once more—this time not by fascist boots, but by the civility of denial. It was deemed indecent to dwell on such horrors, impolite to name the neighbours who had become collaborators. In Paris, in Warsaw, in Vienna, the Jews were expected not only to forgive, but to forget.

They did not forget. But they learnt, painfully, the art of silence.

Fast forward to October 7, 2023.

A day that should have shaken the conscience of mankind. A day when Jewish children were butchered in their bedrooms, when women were raped and paraded as trophies, when entire families were burned alive by men intoxicated with hatred.

And yet, what followed was not the outcry of a world vowing “never again.” What followed was a grotesque encore of disbelief. The chant rose again—not from fringe lunatics, but from universities, trade unions, and pressrooms: It didn’t happen. They lied. They deserved it.

The old wound was reopened.

Not content with Jewish death, there are those now who demand the death of memory. They demand that the Jewish people justify their own trauma, that they footnote their grief, that they prove—over and over—that they suffered.

In the cafés of London, in the lecture halls of Berkeley, the pogrom of October 7 is sliced into semantics: “context,” “resistance,” “asymmetry.” Meanwhile, kidnapped children remain in tunnels. Women defiled before the eyes of the world are denied even the dignity of belief.

This is not mere ignorance. This is a metaphysical crime. A desecration of memory.

Why does this happen to the Jews—again and again?

Because Jewish suffering remains intolerable to the civilised conscience. It disturbs the moral order. It does not fit the template of fashionable ideologies. The Jew, once cast as subhuman, is now cast as too powerful to be a victim, too Western to be oppressed. And Israel—home of Holocaust orphans and Mizrahi refugees—has become, absurdly, the new colonialist.

To acknowledge Jewish pain would require the world to abandon its lazy binaries. It would demand that it see Jews not as metaphors but as people: fallible, vulnerable, mournful. That is a vision too complicated for an age addicted to Manichaean narratives.

And so, denial persists. Louder now. Harsher.

Today, it comes not in the language of “revisionism,” but of activism. Not from Nazi apologists, but from self-styled human rights defenders. They do not burn books; they tear down hostage posters. They do not wear brown shirts; they wear keffiyehs and quote Foucault. But their contempt is no less chilling.

They erase, invert, gaslight.

They tell the Jew that her rape was not proven, that his murdered child is a fabrication, that their very existence is the true aggression. They take the dead of Be’eri and reanimate them as propaganda. They spit on the graves and call it justice.

We must name this. This is not criticism. This is not dissent. This is not even antizionism, which is itself often a fig leaf for darker passions.

This is the denial of Jewish humanity.

And it is as old as Pharaoh, as vicious as Torquemada, as sophisticated as Heidegger. What is new is its volume, its speed, its cultural cachet.

But the Jewish people have learnt a bitter wisdom. They know that silence is complicity. They know that memory must be fought for. They know that the second death—the death of truth—is more dangerous than the first.

So we will not be silent.

We will write. We will speak. We will testify.

We will name October 7 not as a date, but as a scar.

And to those who deny, who equivocate, who wrap their hatred in theories and their cruelty in credentials—we say: we see you. And we remember.

Because, in the end, to be a Jew is to refuse to forget. To insist on truth even when the world prefers myth. To mourn in the face of mockery. And to stand, always, as witnesses against the erasure of pain.