They Deny the Dead, Then Threaten the Living

“And, finally, have we not tried to dispose of them by declaring that they were ‘things of another time?'”– Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved.

As Israel marks Holocaust Remembrance Day in mid-April 2026, it does so in the shadow of another violent regional crisis, amid a fragile ceasefire and continued confrontation with Iran and its proxies. This timing is more than symbolic. It reminds us that antisemitism never concerns only the past. It wages war against memory and against the living simultaneously.

For decades, neo-Nazis, radical Islamists, and segments of the radical left have differed on many things, but some have converged on one poisonous point. The Jew must not be allowed even the dignity of victimhood. Holocaust denial was never merely an argument about archives, numbers, or historical interpretation. It was always a moral and political project to erase the dead, rehabilitate the persecutors, and prepare the ground for future hatred by portraying Jewish suffering as exaggeration, manipulation, or fraud.

But the corruption did not stop at denial. Again and again, antisemitic movements and voices went further. They justified the Holocaust, relativized it, inverted it, mocked it, or openly fantasized about another one. Such hatred does not merely reject Jews; it resents the very idea that Jews could be recognized as victims of evil. It seeks to strip them of memory, legitimacy, and sympathy all at once.

The reaction of extremists to October 7, 2023, revealed that this logic never disappeared. The massacre was documented in extraordinary detail. The evidence was immediate, overwhelming, and global. Images, testimonies, and forensic accounts spread rapidly across the internet, including social media, websites, and private groups. And yet almost instantly, familiar forces went to work. Some denied the atrocities outright. Some minimized them. Some claimed they were fabricated. Some justified them as “resistance.” Others openly celebrated them. The pattern was not new. The target was not new. Only the technology and speed were new.

This is what makes the connection between Holocaust denial and October 7 denial so important. The same moral mechanism is at work in both. First, the Jew is declared a liar. Then the Jewish victim is turned into a villain. Then violence against Jews is explained away as understandable, deserved, or historically necessary. Finally, what should be unspeakable becomes sayable; fantasies of another catastrophe, another expulsion, another mass slaughter, another world in which Jewish vulnerability is once again treated as a spectacle rather than a warning.

The confrontation with the Iranian regime is therefore not only a struggle over the present. It is also a struggle over memory and over the future. For years, the Iranian regime and its ideological ecosystem have trafficked in eliminationist hostility toward Israel and Jews, while cynical actors around the world, whether out of hatred, opportunism, cowardice, or ideological fanaticism, sanitize or echo rhetoric that would be recognized as genocidal in almost any other context. In moments of war and instability, those forces grow louder. They do not merely excuse anti-Jewish violence. They normalize the imagination of a future anti-Jewish disaster. What might happen if they have the upper hand, or a nuclear hand?

One can safely assume that they will be happy to contaminate the land, make it uninhabitable for all, as long as Jews don’t live on it.

This is why Holocaust remembrance must be more than ritual. It must be a form of vigilance. “Never Again” was never meant to be a museum slogan or a ceremonial phrase repeated once a year before the world moves on. It was meant as a civilizational commitment that the denial of Jewish suffering, the justification of anti-Jewish violence, and the open yearning for another Holocaust would be confronted early, seriously, and without apology.

To defend the dead is to defend historical truth. To defend the living is to recognize where lies, inversion, and incitement lead when they are indulged for too long. The lesson of our time is brutally clear: those who deny the dead are rarely finished. Soon enough, they threaten the living. And if decent societies do not stand together against those forces now, remembrance itself will become another abandoned promise.