To Blot Out and Not Forget: When Jewish Memory Is Put on Trial

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This week, as Israel prepares to mark its Independence Day, new hearings are being held at the International Court of Justice in The Hague — questioning the legality of Israel’s presence and cooperation with international actors in the territories beyond the Green Line.

A Monument Desecrated, a Memory Accused

Last Yom HaShoah, the day Jews around the world remember the destruction of European Jewry, wreaths placed at the Jewish monument on Rabbijn Maarsenplein (Rabbi Maarsen Square) in The Hague were torn down during the night. This square holds not one, but two Jewish memorials: the monument often referred to as the “Amalek monument,” and the Children’s Monument, built in remembrance of some 1,700 Jewish children from The Hague who were deported and murdered. The Amalek monument — a Star of David inscribed with the verse from the Book of Deuteronomy (Sefer Devarim), “Remember what Amalek did to you… do not forget” — has stood quietly for decades in the heart of the city that also houses the International Court of Justice. In early 2024, that verse — part of a long chain of Jewish ritualized memory — had been echoed not in a synagogue or a school, but in a courtroom. And that echo, misheard, had consequences.

The square bears the name of Rabbi Isaac Maarsen, who served as chief rabbi of The Hague until 1943. In April of that year, he delivered a final, dignified sermon to his congregation, knowing what awaited them. The next day, he and his family were deported. They were murdered in Sobibór on July 23, 1943. After the war, philanthropist Jacques Levi Lassen — who had survived in the United States — returned to a city where the Jewish community had been decimated. Driven by a sense of obligation to the dead and to memory itself, he devoted his resources to rebuilding Jewish presence in The Hague. In 1967, his vision led to the placement of what would become known as the “Amalek monument.” The square became a site of commemoration, not restoration. What remains there today is not grandeur, but grief inscribed in public space: a quiet assertion that memory, though wounded, will endure.

From Survival to Suspicion

In January 2024, during public hearings at the International Court of Justice, South Africa cited Prime Minister Netanyahu’s reference to Amalek — a name drawn from Jewish sacred tradition — as evidence of genocidal intent. While the Court did not include the reference in its formal ruling, it shaped the moral atmosphere of the case. What was presented as liturgy, as memory, as an enduring symbol of vulnerability and vigilance, was recast as military incitement.

That moment laid the groundwork for a frame: that Jewish religious language — even language drawn directly from Torah and liturgy — could be used as forensic evidence of genocidal will. The hearings in early 2024 thus introduced not only a charge against Israeli policy, but a broader suspicion toward the Jewish grammar of grief.

And now, in spring 2025, as Israel prepares to mark its Independence Day, the ICJ resumes hearings — this time considering the legality of Israel’s presence and cooperation in the occupied territories. The earlier framing remains unchallenged, and Amalek continues to echo in the courtroom, not as a theological concept, but as an accusation with legal weight.

But Amalek is not a threat. It is a memory. In Jewish thought, Amalek is not a policy. It is not a battle cry. It is a name that signifies unreasoning hatred: the kind that strikes the vulnerable without cause, that attacks from the rear, that despises survival itself. From Torah through midrash to modern liturgy, Amalek is remembered not as a person or a people, but as a recurring face of moral chaos.

It is not incidental that Amalek appears not only in Deuteronomy 25, but also in Exodus 17 and in the Haftarah for Shabbat Zachor, where Saul is told by the prophet Samuel to blot out Amalek and fails. The commandment to “blot out the memory of Amalek” is immediately preceded by “remember what Amalek did to you,” and immediately followed by “do not forget.” This paradox — to remember and to erase — lies at the heart of Jewish liturgy and ethics. The remembrance of Amalek is not a call to vengeance. It is a discipline of vigilance. It is the choice to preserve the knowledge of evil without becoming it.

That memory has never been violent. It is intergenerational, slow, encoded in stories, in silences, in seder plates and synagogue readings and in the trembling voice of survivors. It is an ethic of watchfulness, not warfare — an insistence that the world acknowledge that some forms of hatred do not negotiate, do not retreat, and do not die of their own accord.

What South Africa’s submission — and to some extent, the ICJ’s tolerance of its framing — allowed to happen was a shift from memory as sacred preservation to memory as criminal intent. The speech was not an operational order. It was not a doctrine. It was a line in a speech delivered in the wake of the October 7 pogrom, when Jews were burned alive, raped, mutilated, kidnapped — children, the elderly, whole families. The language of Amalek in that context is not strange. It is tragic. But it is not murderous.

What was placed on trial, more than Israel’s conduct, was the legitimacy of Jewish historical consciousness. In a court designed to weigh facts, metaphor became evidence; mourning became malevolence. No similar scrutiny has ever been applied to Christian references to martyrdom or spiritual warfare, nor to Islamic discourse on jihad as a personal and moral struggle. But when a Jewish leader references a word that Jews have whispered, sung, wept over for millennia — it becomes a liability.

The Courtroom and the Covenant

Just days after the desecration of the monument in The Hague, families across Israel stood in silence for Yom HaZikaron— Memorial Day for fallen soldiers and victims of terror. Names were read aloud. Graves were visited. Psalms and poems were spoken. And as sirens sounded across the country, at that very hour, in The Hague — just a few hundred meters from the desecrated Jewish monument — preparations resumed for further ICJ hearings, this time examining whether Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war. In this cconvergence of mourning and indictment, memory itself seems to stand accused.

It is a bitter irony that the figure of Amalek re-emerges not as a warning against those who prey upon the weak — as he did in the wilderness, when the people of Israel were famished and weary — but as a term now wielded in legal proceedings to condemn those who carry that memory. The shift is subtle but seismic: not Amalek is being judged, but the very act of remembering Amalek — and with it, the legitimacy of Jewish historical experience. Amalek, who once struck from behind, now returns — this time through accusation — in a courtroom just steps away from a desecrated Jewish monument.

In misreading Amalek, the ICJ does not merely misunderstand Jewish theology. It threatens to rewrite the very language through which Jews confront the past. A theology that teaches restraint through remembrance — that insists on preserving the knowledge of evil in order not to reproduce it — is turned into a threat.

To accuse a people of violence on the basis of how they remember being attacked is a grave inversion. And to do so while standing, literally and figuratively, in The Hague — a city with Jewish bones in its earth and Jewish prayers carved in its stone — is to participate in a long, cold tradition: the tradition of mistrusting Jewish speech, of putting Jewish meaning on trial.

The legal process must always concern itself with actions, with chains of command, with the treatment of civilians. It must ask difficult, empirical, moral questions. But when it begins to interrogate not only what a people does, but how it mourns, how it prays, how it remembers — it ceases to be impartial. It becomes a mirror of the world’s unease with Jewish distinctiveness.

To remember Amalek is not to call for genocide. It is to remember that genocide has touched us, more than once. And that we will not let the memory of that touch be erased.

What was placed on trial in The Hague was not only Israel’s policy. It was, more subtly and more dangerously, the Jewish grammar of grief.

And when memory itself is mistranslated as malice, we are no longer in the realm of justice. We are back in history’s long shadow, asking once again: must we forget, in order to be allowed to remember — and must we justify our survival, in order to be permitted to exist?

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