Greg Bouwer
IINZ
When Jews were hunted, raped and murdered in plain sight, too many institutions and societies responded with equivocation, celebration or silence. The promise of “Never Again” is at risk – and that should terrify us all.
Let’s stop pretending this is complicated.
On October 7, 2023, Jews were hunted, raped, burned alive, mutilated and kidnapped – not soldiers, not ‘combatants’, but civilians: babies, grandmothers, peace activists, Holocaust survivors. Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel, carried out a live‑streamed pogrom and celebrated the carnage. The world watched. And instead of universal horror and unequivocal condemnation, what followed was excuses, celebration, and silence.
This was not merely terrorism. This was Kristallnacht in our time.
Eighty‑five years ago, on November 9–10, 1938, the Nazis unleashed a coordinated orgy of anti‑Jewish violence: synagogues burned, Jewish shops smashed and looted, Jews murdered in the streets, tens of thousands rounded up and sent to camps. Kristallnacht was the signal that German antisemitism had moved from policy and rhetoric into brutal, public violence. It was not the end: it was the beginning.
October 7 was the same kind of signal. It was premeditated slaughter for being Jewish – a massacre carried out in the open, against civilians, with the deliberate goal of terror and annihilation. What should have followed was moral clarity: a global scream of horror and an immediate, unequivocal rejection of the ideology that produced this atrocity. Instead, we saw moral collapse.
Universities faltered, unable to find the words to condemn mass rape. Some human‑rights groups grew oddly quiet about hostages. Western cities held rallies that cheered the perpetrators. Posters of kidnapped children were torn down – by neighbours, students, even employees of the United Nations, who would likely be appalled at missing animal posters being defaced. People celebrated a pogrom. In 2023.
“We said ‘Never Again’,” we were taught. After the Holocaust the world built institutions to prevent just this: the United Nations, human‑rights frameworks, treaties and international law – an architecture erected from Auschwitz’s ashes to act as a firewall against genocidal hatred. Those institutions were meant to stand between hatred and extermination.
Instead, many now shield or legitimise the perpetrators.
Too many international forums have failed to denounce the most grotesque crimes. Some aid systems and agencies operate with alarming naiveté or worse; schools have been used to store weapons, and the suffering of Israeli Jews has been erased or minimised from the conversation. The very mechanisms created to ensure “Never Again” now risk becoming tools of obfuscation or even complicity. That is not just failure. It is betrayal.
The language of hatred has merely been relabelled. “Zionist” has become a socially acceptable slur. “Anti‑colonial” rhetoric is used to sanitise calls for the eradication of Jews. “From the river to the sea” serves the same purpose as the old genocidal slogans – different words, same intent. This is not academic debate. This is a movement that demands the removal, the expulsion, or the destruction of Jews as Jews.
There is, of course, one difference between 1938 and now: we have a Jewish state. Israel is not only a nation: it is a refuge – an armed, sovereign refuge built from the memory of failed safe harbours and closed borders. Israel defends its citizens not from abstract pride but from the bitter lesson of history: when the world refuses to act, you must act to survive. That is why the response to October 7 is not vengeance: it is survival.
If the world will not keep its promise, then Jews will no longer ask permission to protect themselves. If our grief is dismissed, our dead rationalised away, our suffering erased – we will remember. We will remember who stood with us and who stood by.
History is not a metaphor. October 7 was not “like” Kristallnacht. It was Kristallnacht – a coordinated, systematic attack against Jews met with justification, indifference and, at times, applause. If we do not confront that truth now, we are walking straight toward the same abyss the last generation failed to stop.
The world failed in 1938. It is failing again. This time, the Jews will not go quietly.
This article was originally published by the Israel Institute of New Zealand.
