Guess who isn't invited to Europe's Holocaust memorials?

Does the European Commission think that one has to be a Zionist to remember the Holocaust? Apparently so.  

All of the 11 Jewish groups invited to Tuesday's (21 January) Holocaust remembrance conference in Brussels have lent political support to Israel and many work in close alliance with the Israeli mission to the EU, according to campaigners. 

Some, like the European Jewish Association, mobilised against the EU’s last foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, accusing him of stirring up antisemitism for his criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza. Others, like the Conference of European Rabbis, have slandered the EU as “new antisemites” for labelling products from the occupied Palestinian territories.     

Two of the invited groups – the American Jewish Congress and B'nai B'rith International – are not even based in Europe.  

Yet the EU’s apparent “open door” policy does not extend to non- or anti-Zionist Jewish groups.

At least one umbrella organisation of 30 Jewish peace groups – European Jews for Palestine (EJP) – say that they were snubbed by the EU’s antisemitism “tsar”, Katharina Von Schnurbein, after twice requesting an invitation, following a meeting with her last December. 

Von Schnurbein did not respond to a press request to explain what smells like a political decision.

The same could be said of the red carpet that the Polish EU Council presidency is preparing for Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a Holocaust memorial service in Auschwitz on 27 January, in defiance of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. 

Netanyahu is not just an indicted war criminal. He is scarcely able to brush his teeth without misusing, debasing or instrumentalising the Shoah. It is fair to ask what Europe has to learn about Holocaust memory from someone so forgetful that he blames the Palestinians for it.

Underlining this question is the way the EU Commission seems to see Zionism – even potentially genocidal Zionism – as a defining characteristic of Jewish legitimacy. This conflation of Judaism with Zionism is – ironically – deeply antisemitic, making racist assumptions about diaspora Jews and holding them accountable for the actions of a foreign state. 

It’s also untrue.

Questionable Poland

Many – if not most - Jewish victims of the Holocaust were not Zionists. As Hitler rose to power, the largest Jewish political party in swathes of pre-war eastern Europe was the socialist and anti-Zionist Jewish Labour Bund. On the eve of the Holocaust in 1938, it won 17 out of the 20 Warsaw city council seats taken by Jewish parties.  

How does the EU Commission’s exclusion of the Bund’s modern-day contemporaries – and its delegitimisation of their beliefs – help us to remember them? Why have the EU Commission and Poland's Tusk now taken it upon themselves to decide which Jews are worth remembering, and which should be honoured? 

Of course, the majority of diaspora Jews today are Zionists, in some shape or form. This is certainly the case among diaspora community leaders, among whom the priority of supporting Israel rose from 14th place to 15th place in one survey last year.

But that’s not the whole story. A survey of British Jews by the International Jewish Policy Institute shortly before the 7 October attack in 2023 found that just 60 percent self-identified as Zionists – a 10 percent fall over the last decade. The IJPR said that this suggested “a growth in uncertainty, discomfort or ambivalence on this issue”.  

Around 30 percent of British Jews surveyed felt no attachment to Israel, and did not see it as an important part of their Jewish identity. Some 79 percent disapproved of Netanyahu – most of them “strongly” – and 72 percent were pessimistic or very pessimistic about the future of Israeli democracy. Similar results would likely accrue across Europe. 

So why does the EU Commission judge this Jewish constituency undeserving of recognition or representation? Many of us believe that Netanyahu has tried to hide the abattoir he has created in Gaza over the last 16 months behind a bigger one built by the Nazis 80 years ago. 

In that context, it is hard not to see Poland’s memorial invitation to him as an insult to the Holocaust dead, as well as to international law, and a collusion in the use of past Jewish suffering to leverage present day war crimes.

Von Schnurbein and Tusk may be looking for transatlantic applause from US president Donald Trump with their skewed guest list, but they won’t find any from the 25 percent of American Jews who, polls indicate, see Israel as an apartheid state and the similar number who believe it is guilty of genocide. 

The truth is that there is a rich and deep vein of Jewish thought that sees human rights as universal and nationalism as a curse. 

The real lesson of the Shoah for this quarter is that all civilian life is sacred, and that “never again” must apply to everyone - Jews, Roma, disabled people, Tutsis, Armenians, Cambodians and even, should the International Criminal Court determine it, to Gazans.  

It's well past time for the EU to put aside their memorial day bromides and face Europe’s ugly legacy of racism and antisemitism, which stains even its attempts to memorialise the phenomenon.