The meanings of Never Again
Is it particular for Jews or is it universal?
The grimness of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel is twofold. One is that was the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history. The other is that it was the single deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. This must be foregrounded to fully understand Israeli and diaspora Jewish responses to the genocide in Gaza. A second key point is how the Holocaust instilled the lesson that a Jewish homeland was necessary for safety and to avoid being cast as victims.1
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu never misses an opportunity to remind the world about those first two details. Speaking at this year’s Remembrance Day (Yom HaZikaron), he compared Hamas to the Nazis.
“Indeed, they are exactly like the Nazis, just like Hitler,” Netanyahu says. “They wish to kill and destroy all of the Jews, and they openly declare their intention to destroy the state of the Jews. They say so out loud, but it’s not going to happen. We are determined to annihilate the monsters of Hamas, these monsters who committed the worst massacre that we’ve experienced since the Holocaust.”2
To be fair, Netanyahu has been trying to blame Palestinians for persuading the Nazis to kill Jews for a decade. Blaming the Palestinians for deeds real and imagined is on brand for the worst leader in Jewish history. But casting Palestinians as Nazis and “human animals” means there’s only one solution: their elimination.3
What’s also clear is how Israeli Jews and diaspora Jews have constructed a link between the Holocaust and the Oct. 7th assault. The Jerusalem Post reported this April on how two freed Gaza hostages — Moran Stella Yanai and Keith Siegel — spoke at the Majdanek concentration camp as a part of the World Zionist Organization’s delegation to March of the Living. (That march starts with concentration camps and death camps and ends in Israel, moving from death to rebirth.)
In her speech, Yanai said, "After a long struggle to escape, I stand here today at the Majdanek concentration camp, looking at the line of trees visible in the distance. I felt trapped in a field with nothing but those trees on the horizon. I thought that if I could just reach them, I might survive and escape. I think of those Jews who tried to flee from that camp, aiming to reach those trees, hoping to blend into the great forest and be saved."
She added, "My connection to the Holocaust didn’t begin with this trip. I’ve been studying it since I was a child. Something inside me drives me to understand, to learn, and to remember—not just the facts, but the people, and what was broken in society after I, too, experienced trauma myself."
"This place, this moment, carries a completely different weight now," she said. "I find myself endlessly reflecting on how such a tragedy could have happened, and how we, as a society, must never allow it to happen again—not to us, nor to any people anywhere in the world."4
In her comments, Yanai, whose trauma and suffering should never be minimized, highlighted the tension between the particular and universal understandings of never again within the Jewish and international communities.
Let’s first unpack the particularist perspective. A phrase that has been adopted by Israel and by diaspora Jewish communities is Never Again is Now because of increased antisemitism after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. Here’s the Australian version.
All around us the social cohesion of Australia is under threat. We need every person of goodwill to join us to work for a country where antisemitism is unthinkable.
The truth of the matter is this: if the Jewish community is safe and free in Australia, then every minority group will be safe and free.5
Ursula von der Leyden, the president of the European Commission, provided similar thoughts on the International Day of Holocaust Remembrance in 2024.
Following the despicable terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israel on 7 October 2023, remembering the Holocaust has taken on a new meaning. European Jews are living again in fear: no parent should be afraid to send their children to school. Jewish people are bullied, harassed, and attacked on the street, in school and university. Synagogues have been vandalised. Jewish cemeteries have been desecrated….
We must remember how it all started: antisemitism and hatred led to the Shoah. It is our duty, as Europeans, to build a European Union free from antisemitism and any form of racism and discrimination. If Europe fails the Jews, Europe will have failed us all. Never again is now!”6
In Canada, on Holocaust Memorial Day this year, the Conservative Member of Parliament Melissa Lantsman also said that never again is now.
Lastly, in the U.S., the Anti-Defamation League hosted a conference this year with the grammatically-confused title, Never is Now.
To summarize this perspective, the scourge of antisemitism is raging once again after Oct. 7, 2023. As a result, Jewish safety and security in diaspora communities is facing a significant threat for the first time since the Holocaust. Examples to support this perspective abound. Notable ones include the Colorado attack, the arson attack on Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue and the wilful promotion of anti-Jewish hatred in Toronto. To be direct, many diaspora Jews are fearful of this antisemitic surge. They say their lives in their countries completely changed on Oct. 7, 2023.7
However, while no one can dispute rising antisemitism in the diaspora, studies show a causal link between intensified Israel-Palestine conflict and anti-Jewish hatred. Also, a June 2025 poll from the Pew Research Center on global views of Israel confirms the country’s increasing status as an international pariah. It found that majorities in Western and non-Western countries view Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu unfavourably, including Canada, France, Germany and the U.S. The exceptions were Kenya and Nigeria, two countries with strong evangelical Christian communities. Approval is divided in India, where Hindu nationalists deeply admire Israel.8
Now let us consider the universal definition. It’s important to note around the same time Yanai made her comments, more than 50,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza. More than 27,000 of those victims were children, women and the elderly.9
“No one is spared — not the children, persons with disabilities, nursing mothers, journalists, health professionals, aid workers, or hostages…. This is one of the most ostentatious and merciless manifestations of the desecration of human life and dignity,” the experts said.10
Beyond mass killing, the International Crisis Group describes Israel’s approach to aid as the Gaza Starvation Experiment.
With Gaza’s local food production capacity nearly destroyed, controlling the crossings now means controlling survival itself. Israeli restrictions limited the World Food Programme (WFP) to delivering fewer than 1,600 calories per person daily, far below its 2,100-calorie target, from July 2024 until the January 2025 ceasefire. The GHF [Gaza Humanitarian Foundation] promises to bring in marginally more, with 1,750 calories, but only to the “fortified hubs”, which Palestinians must cross battlefields to reach.11
The United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said this month that the risk of famine in the Gaza is increasingly likely. It attributed that to Israel’s expanded military operations, continued mass displacement and the persistent inability of humanitarian organizations to access populations in dire need of assistance.12 The International Crisis Group, argue that Israel and its supporters see famine avoidance as diplomatic liability insurance. Israel views its starvation policy of Gaza is legitimate as long as sits below the level of international outrage.13
Planned starvation and genocide are two lessons from the Holocaust. So is the framework of international humanitarian law to protect civilians.14 This is why for Jewish Voice for Peace and other Jewish groups, never again does not belong exclusively to Jews.
We, the undersigned, survived the Nazi holocaust, or have parents, grandparents or great-grandparents who survived or perished in the Nazi holocaust. We grew up with the refrain “Never again,” and learned that in the face of injustice, there can be no sidelines, no silent neighbors who just stand by.
Today, we raise our voices to refuse to be silent as the Israeli military carries out mass atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza. Once again, we are seeing images of men, women and children being separated and lined up to march at gunpoint. We are seeing images of parents being handed the limbs of their slain loved ones in bags. We are seeing images of mass graves, of torture camps, of hospital patients burned alive.15
In their talk after receiving the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, M. Gessen discussed how it’s taboo to compare current events to the Holocaust. They compared Gaza to a Jewish ghetto in the Holocaust, writing that it was “being liquidated.”16 Gessen, for the record, is not the first person to compare Gaza to Ghetto. British politician Oona King in 2003 wrote in The Guardian that “the original founders of the Jewish state could surely not imagine the irony facing Israel today: in escaping the ashes of the Holocaust, they have incarcerated another people in a hell similar in its nature—though not its extent—to the Warsaw ghetto.”17
And yet, according to Gessen, comparison is the way humans understand the world. Holocaust comparisons are so fraught because they predict the worst.
And this is why we compare. To prevent what we know can happen from happening. To make “never again” a political project rather than a magic spell.18
But the path to implementing never again for anyone is extremely difficult because of its particularization. Consider the graffiti that defaced the National Holocaust Memorial in Ottawa. It said Feed Me, a cry to feed starving Palestinians in Gaza. But politicians and Jewish communal leaders have cast the vandalism as “brazen” antisemitism.
It is this primordial fear of antisemitism is inhibiting many Jews from engaging with critical questions, according to Omer Bartov.
How was it possible, well into the twenty-first century, eighty years after the end of the Holocaust and the creation of an international legal regime meant to prevent such crimes from ever happening again, that the state of Israel—seen and self-described as the answer to the genocide of the Jews—could have carried out a genocide of Palestinians with near-total impunity? How do we face up to the fact that Israel has invoked the Holocaust to shatter the legal order put into place to prevent a repetition of this “crime of crimes”?19
The answers lie with the particularist understanding of never again. It manifests itself in the dehumanization of Palestinians and the myopic view of Jews only as victims. On the first point, there’s direct evidence that the Nazi dehumanization of Jews disengaged their moral restraints. That made it easier to kill Jews. This equally applies to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians where soldiers filmed their crimes against humanity.
It is this sense of “never again” that permits most Jewish Israeli citizens to see themselves as occupying the moral high ground even as they, their army, their sons and daughters, and their grandchildren pulverize every inch of the Gaza Strip. The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.20
The second point misleads Jews to think that because of the Holocaust, then we can only be cast as victims. Thus, we are not capable of genocide. And yet, there’s ample evidence of genocidal rhetoric from Israelis and their politicians after Oct. 7th.
On Feb. 24, 2025, Nissim Vaturi, one of the deputy speakers in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, called for killing all Palestinian adults in Gaza….
Danny Neuman, a former football star and television commentator, said on TV in December 2023, “I am telling you, in Gaza, without exception, they are all terrorists, sons of dogs. They must be exterminated, all of them killed.”
Kinneret Barashi, a lawyer and a television host, tweeted in February 2025, “Every trace of the murderous mutations in Gaza must be erased, from the delivery rooms to the last elderly person in Gaza.”21
Then there is South Africa’s case in the International Court of Justice that accuses Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians. And the Book of Esther, read on the Purim holiday, shows that the victims can become victimizers.
To that end, less than a month after the Oct. 7th attack, Natasha Roth-Rowland of the Diaspora Alliance warned of the limitations of the particularism.
The irony is transparent and grotesque: the very kind of obscene propaganda that helped fuel unimaginable atrocities is being adopted to, ostensibly, ward off a repetition of that same history — and to justify ongoing ethnic mass killing and collective punishment.22
It is arguably the greatest horror of the last 18 months. A universal set of lessons about humanity has been deployed to decimate Palestinians in Gaza. What’s also incredibly sad is how major Jewish organizations have abandoned universal principles in favour of extreme tribalism.
For never again to truly matter, it must be more than an aspiration or a slogan. And it should never be zero sum. It must apply to anyone: Jews, Ukrainians, Rohingya Muslims and Palestinians. When never again is zero sum, then it endangers everyone because the end result suggests there’s only one solution: annihilation.
See Avner Cohen, The Conversation, Deadliest day…: https://theconversation.com/deadliest-day-for-jews-since-the-holocaust-spurs-a-crisis-of-confidence-in-the-idea-of-israel-and-its-possible-renewal-215507
Times of Israel, Netanyahu says Hamas exactly like the Nazis…: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-says-hamas-exactly-like-the-nazis-vows-israel-will-never-surrender/
See Infinite License, Omer Bartov, NY Review of Books: https://portside.org/2025-04-06/infinite-license; Natasha-Roth Rowland, 972 Magazine, When never again…: https://www.972mag.com/never-again-gaza-war-holocaust/
Jerusalem Post, Former Gaza hostages commemorate March of the Living…: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-851141
Never Again is Now: https://www.neveragainisnow.com.au/
Never Again is Now, President von der Leyen says: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/statement_24_409
Mark Sandler in Canada said this point. It is applicable to diaspora Jews everywhere. See House of Commons, Heightened Antisemitism in Canada and how to confront it, p. 17-18: https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/JUST/Reports/RP13248912/justrp27/justrp27-e.pdf
Pew Research Centre, Global Views of Israel: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/03/most-people-across-24-surveyed-countries-have-negative-views-of-israel-and-netanyahu/
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Reported Impact Snapshot April 15th: https://www.ochaopt.org/content/reported-impact-snapshot-gaza-strip-15-april-2025
United Nations, End Unfolding Genocide…: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/05/end-unfolding-genocide-or-watch-it-end-life-gaza-un-experts-say-states-face
International Crisis Group, The Gaza Starvation Experiment: https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/east-mediterranean-mena/israelpalestine/gaza-starvation-experiment
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Gaza Humanitarian Response Update: https://www.ochaopt.org/content/gaza-humanitarian-response-update-25-may-7-june-2025
International Crisis Group, The Gaza Starvation Experiment: https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/east-mediterranean-mena/israelpalestine/gaza-starvation-experiment
N+1, Comparison is the way we know the world: https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/comparison-is-the-way-we-know-the-world/
Jewish Voice for Peace, Never Again is Now: https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resource/never-again-is-now-speak-out/
NPR, Despite backlash, Masha Gessen says comparing…: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/22/1221128897/masha-gessen-essay-israel-gaza-germany-hannah-arendt-prize
Oona King, The Guardian, 2003: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/jun/12/world.comment
N+1, Comparison is the way we know the world: https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/comparison-is-the-way-we-know-the-world/
Omer Bartov, Infinite License, NY Review of Books: https://portside.org/2025-04-06/infinite-license
Ibid
Tamir Sorek, The Conversation, In Israel, calls for genocide have migrated…: https://theconversation.com/in-israel-calls-for-genocide-have-migrated-from-the-margins-to-the-mainstream-250010
972 Magazine, Natasha Roth-Rowland, When never again becomes a war cry: https://www.972mag.com/never-again-gaza-war-holocaust/