Has Holocaust Memory Lost Its Moral Compass?
There are places where history should impose a particular seriousness upon us.
Mauthausen is one of them.
A concentration camp is not merely a historical attraction. It is a place where human beings were stripped of their names, their dignity and, ultimately, their lives because they were Jews, political opponents, Roma, prisoners of war and members of other persecuted groups. To walk through such a place is to confront what happens when hatred becomes ideology and when the humanity of an entire people is treated as expendable.
That is why the video gone viral showing students wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the Palestinian flag and the image of a Palestinian terrorist responsible with the Avivim school-bus attack of 22 May 1970 is so morally jarring and repugnant. In that attack, a bus carrying children from Avivim was attacked near the Lebanese border with RPGs and machine-gun fire. 12 Israelis were killed, including 9 children, and 25 were wounded.
It raises an uncomfortable question: have we remembered the Holocaust in a way that we have forgotten its moral lessons?
Holocaust memory was never meant to be simply about learning dates, visiting museums or repeating the words “Never Again.” It was meant to teach something more demanding: that the murder of Jews is wrong regardless of the political circumstances in which it occurs. Jewish lives do not become less valuable because Israel exists, and terrorism against civilians does not become morally acceptable because its perpetrators invoke a political cause.
Israel has made Holocaust remembrance an important part of the education of its young people. Israeli school students visit Holocaust sites and memorials, including former concentration camps in Europe, and are taught that the destruction of European Jewry carries lessons about human life, responsibility and the protection of others. Those lessons form part of the broader values expected of Israelis, including those who serve in the Israel Defence Forces.
This is important because Israel’s wars are fought in the shadow of a history in which Jews were once almost entirely powerless to defend themselves. For many Israelis and diaspora Jews, the existence of a Jewish state and an army capable of defending its population is inseparable from the lesson that Jews must never again be entirely dependent upon others for their survival.
But there is another lesson: power must carry responsibility.
During the Gaza war, Israel’s military took measures intended to reduce civilian casualties, including warnings and evacuation instructions, humanitarian coordination and procedures intended to distinguish between civilians and combatants. Whether those measures were sufficient, whether individual operations complied with international law, and whether Israel did enough to protect civilians are legitimate matters for investigation and debate.
But those questions do not eliminate the underlying principle. A country can have a legitimate right to defend its citizens from terrorism while still having an obligation to protect civilian life.
That principle should apply universally.
If only governments applied the same moral standard consistently — recognising that the protection of civilian life, the rejection of antisemitism and the rejection of terrorism cannot depend upon political convenience or which side of a conflict one supports. If only Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong learned that while representing Australia at the 80th anniversary since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 2025.
One can condemn Hamas’s deliberate attacks on Israeli civilians without denying Palestinian suffering. One can support Israel’s existence and security while demanding accountability where necessary. One can advocate for Palestinian rights without excusing terrorism or antisemitism.
That is the moral consistency Holocaust memory should demand.
Yet Holocaust memory is increasingly being pulled into contemporary political battles in which historical suffering becomes a weapon rather than a warning. A simplistic “oppressor versus oppressed” narrative can reduce complex histories to a morality tale in which one side is automatically assigned virtue and the other guilt. When applied without moral consistency, it can even make violence appear legitimate simply because it is committed by those deemed “oppressed.” We see that happening today.
That is where the lessons of the Holocaust become particularly relevant.
The Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers. It began much earlier — with propaganda, exclusion, discrimination, dehumanisation and the normalisation of hatred. It became possible because ideas that once would have been considered abhorrent gradually became acceptable, and because violence against a particular group could be rationalised as necessary, deserved or inevitable.
That history should make us extremely wary of any ideology that dehumanises an entire population or excuses violence against civilians.
If young people can enter a concentration-camp memorial wearing symbols associated with a movement whose most extreme elements celebrate violence against Jews, we should ask what those young people have been taught about the meaning of the place they are visiting. Holocaust education should make it impossible to separate the memory of Jewish suffering from the moral rejection of antisemitism and the deliberate targeting of Jews today.
The same moral standard must apply to everyone.
The Palestinian cause does not justify the murder of Israeli civilians. Palestinian suffering does not justify deliberately targeting Jews. Opposition to Israeli government policy does not require excusing Hamas or any other organisation that attacks civilians.
At the same time, opposition to Israeli policy is not synonymous with antisemitism. Palestinian civilians are not all Hamas, just as Israeli civilians are not the Israeli government. Treating entire populations as morally responsible for the actions of others is precisely the kind of collective dehumanisation that Holocaust memory should teach us to reject.
Nor can the Israeli-Palestinian conflict be reduced to a simple story of one Israeli political ideology. The current Gaza war began under a right-wing Israeli government, while the Second Intifada began during the prime-ministership of Ehud Barak, a politician from Israel’s centre-left. Israeli governments have changed; the underlying conflict and the violence have persisted.
The lesson, therefore, should not be partisan. It should be moral.
Holocaust education should produce neither indifference to Palestinian suffering nor indifference to Jewish suffering. It should produce an absolute rejection of antisemitism, terrorism and the deliberate targeting of civilians whoever the victims are and whoever the perpetrators claim to represent.
The test of Holocaust remembrance is not whether we can mourn the dead.
The test is whether we recognise the humanity of the living.
That includes the Jewish teenager learning about Auschwitz. It includes the Palestinian child growing up amid war. It includes the civilian caught in an airstrike. It includes the family whose loved one is murdered by a terrorist. It includes the 15 innocent people murdered while attending a Chanukkah event at Bondi Beach, a synagogue in Manchester or a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires.
Human life does not acquire or lose its value according to which national flag happens to be flying above it.
If Holocaust memorials are to remain places of moral education rather than historical scenery, visitors should leave them understanding that antisemitism is abhorrent, terrorism against civilians is indefensible, and the humanity of Jews cannot depend upon whether one approves of the policies of the State of Israel.
But they should also leave understanding that remembrance imposes obligations upon the powerful as well as the powerless.
Otherwise, “Never Again” risks becoming not a universal moral principle, but an empty slogan.
And that may be the most profound failure of Holocaust memory imaginable.