Jewish tradition is, at its core, an act of collective memory — an insistence that the past is not past, but alive and instructive. Across rituals, prayers, and texts, Jews are commanded not just to remember history, but to relive it.
Nowhere is this more vivid than during Passover, when the Exodus from Egypt is not recounted as a distant event, but experienced as if each person themselves has been liberated from bondage. Through story, symbol, and ritual, Passover transforms memory into identity, teaching that freedom is not inherited — it must be remembered, renewed, and defended in every generation.
This is what Jews worldwide did last night and many will repeat again tonight at the Passover seder table.
One of the lines expressed during the meal is, "In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us …"
They might add, "In every generation they rise up to rub salt in our wounds."
Among the countless appalling rhetorical assaults against Jews in the current generation is a weaponization of Jewish history against Jewish people. Knowing that Jews venerate history and that learning from experience is central to their identity, immoral people use that against them.
There is a phrase that appears with remarkable frequency in today's activist discourse about Israel.
You've heard it — or a variation of it. Sometimes it's not explicit but undergirds entire arguments.
"Jews, of all people, should know better."
Sometimes it's phrased slightly differently.
"Given their history, Jews should understand oppression."
"After the Holocaust, Jews should have learned the lessons of oppression."
The tone is always the same: moral disappointment, tinged with condescension.
The implication is clear. Jewish people — uniquely among the world's nations — have an obligation to behave better than everyone else.
And if they do not, their history may be invoked against them.
Let us begin with the most obvious problem.
The Holocaust was not intended as a moral seminar.
It was not a cosmic lesson delivered for the benefit of Jewish ethical development.
It was an attempt to murder every Jew on earth.
That fact alone should disqualify this rhetorical trick from polite conversation forever. Yet activists deploy it casually, as if six million murdered Jews are little more than an instructive anecdote.
The subtext is unmistakable: the Holocaust is not primarily remembered as a crime against Jews, but as a bludgeon with which Jews themselves can now be beaten.
Imagine saying this to any other people who endured genocide.
But when the target is Jews, the sentence slides effortlessly into respectable discourse.
Why?
Because the statement carries another implication.
Jews, having suffered genocide, are now morally obligated to behave with superhuman patience.
Not merely ordinary restraint. Infinite restraint. Restraint that transcends what any other people would ever be expected to demonstrate.
And if they fail to live up to that impossible standard, the punishment is swift: their suffering is thrown back in their faces.
If anything, the opposite argument could be made.
The pioneers of Israel — the generation that built the Jewish state 80 years ago — included survivors of the most sadistic genocide ever inflicted on humanity.
One might reasonably expect that people who had endured such horrors would be hardened, embittered, even vengeful.
And yet Holocaust survivors did not emerge from the camps as sociopathic monsters bent on revenge. They rebuilt families. They created institutions. They contributed disproportionately to medicine, science, law, and culture.
They built a better world. In Israel, they modeled postcolonial statecraft at its finest.
Despite this, the world seems to have concluded that, because Jews experienced genocide, they, of all people, should turn the other cheek, accept violence rather than respond to it.
This logic erases the premise that Jews possess the same rights as everyone else.
Every other nation on earth has the right to self-defense.
Israel does not.
Because for Israel to defend itself requires acknowledging a premise many activists are unwilling to grant in the first place: that the Jewish state has the right to exist.
Without that premise, Jewish self-defense, by definition, becomes aggression.
There is another grotesque asymmetry embedded in this (im)moral framework.
When Palestinians commit atrocities — baby beheadings, rape, torture, human immolation, mass murder — we are told by overseas activists that such violence is understandable.
Oppression breeds desperation.
Colonization breeds resistance.
Trauma breeds rage.
These explanations are offered not cautiously but enthusiastically. Every act of grotesque brutality is contextualized, rationalized, explained. The more venal the terrorist act, the more justifiable it is by very definition.
Resistance is justified when people are occupied!
When Palestinians act violently, it is entirely justified and understandable. (Always ignoring their own historical obstinacy, which has led to their oppression.)
But notice how this empathy flows in only one direction.
If oppression naturally and reasonably produces violent responses, then Israelis — whose national founders were genocide survivors, whose citizens include refugees ethnically cleansed from dozens of countries across Africa and Asia, and whose entire population for eight decades, including today have been bombarded by genocidal enemies — would appear to qualify for at least some similar psychological understanding.
Palestinian violence is contextualized, justified, even celebrated.
Israeli self-defense is condemned, pathologized, rubbed in Jewish faces as a cosmic proof of moral degeneracy.
Why the difference?
Because one group is permitted the full range of human emotion — anger, fear, vengeance, desperation.
The other is required to embody saintliness.
It is an astonishing piece of moral cruelty disguised as compassion.
The sentence pretends to hold Jews to a higher ethical standard.
In reality it denies them the same basic human rights granted to every other nation.
The right to fear.
The right to defend themselves.
The right to survive.
No other people are told that their past victimhood obligates them to permanent vulnerability.
And they are sure as hell not told that by people who themselves claim the moral high ground, declaring themselves antiracist, progressive, humanitarian.
No other people are informed that their dead must be repurposed as moral leverage against their living descendants.
Only Jews receive that lecture.
And it is delivered, with breathtaking self-righteousness, by activists who believe themselves to be champions of justice.
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