Why Israel should have little to do with Holocaust Remembrance Day

Contributing Columnist
Emily Tamkin
January 27, 2025

On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, I have a proposal, one that gets to the very heart of what we’re remembering: that we take this somber moment to consider why it’s wrong to think of any single country as the rightful keeper of the memory of the Shoah.

Doing so is particularly important, given that one storyline seemed to dominate headlines in the lead-up to today’s ceremonies: Would Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be arrested under an International Criminal Court warrant if he went to Poland for a commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Nazi Germany’s most famous factory of death? The Polish president, Andrzej Duda, asked the government to assure that would not happen. “The authorities of Israel are the heirs of the remembrance of the Holocaust, and Poland is the guardian of this remembrance,” he told the Jerusalem Post.

In the end, Netanyahu didn’t even attend the event. But perhaps the fact that this brouhaha took up so much attention should lead us to ask whether any nation state can have — or should be seen as having  — a particular claim on preserving the lessons of an atrocity.

Questions on these lines have cropped up before. In 2023, the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum declined to invite officials from Russia to observe the official commemoration of Auschwitz’s liberation, even though the Soviet Union liberated the camp, because of Russia’s all-out war in Ukraine. The museum objected to the horrors that were (and still are) ensuing as a result of that war — during which Russia has repeatedly and baselessly accused Ukraine’s leadership, including its Jewish president, of being Nazis — and Russia said in turn that the museum was trying to “rewrite history.”

In both 2025 and 2023, the focus was on the wrong thing: The exact role of a single country, respectively Israel and Russia, in preserving the memory of the Holocaust.

In both scenarios, the controversy over how the Auschwitz commemoration involved (or didn’t) a single actor obscured the big-picture message of that commemoration. The Holocaust was a historic tragedy in which Germany invaded neighboring countries, killed people en masse and tried to erase a whole identity from the map in the process. If contemporary countries face consequences for actions that echo any on that list, maybe that’s part of what it looks like for the history of the Holocaust to really be understood.

After all, the history of the Holocaust is the history of nation states deploying their power against those they deem to be outsiders within and beyond their borders. Some 90% of those killed in Auschwitz were Jews, shunned by nation states around the world. The third-largest group killed were the Roma and Sinti, thousands of whom grapple with statelessness even today.

With that history in mind, a commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day is the exact right occasion to reprimand nation states that are today contributing to statelessness and persecution. President Donald Trump’s suggestion over the weekend that Palestinians leave Gaza for resettlement in Egypt or Jordan was a stark reminder that Palestinians have suffered the pain of being stateless for decades. Russia’s war in Ukraine has displaced more than 10 million people.

There are some who would argue that highlighting the ways in which the Holocaust exploited and weaponized statelessness is exactly why Israel should be represented at commemorations — as it was, today, by a cabinet minister. Once, Jews were stateless, condemned to be turned away by countries around the world, and hunted, rounded up and killed. Today, they have a state, one with a government and a military. There are many who believe, as former President Joe Biden put it in arguing for continued U.S. support of Israel, that it is the existence of a Jewish state that keeps Jews, not only in Israel, but all over the world safe.

But to me, the point of today isn’t, or shouldn’t be, that once Jews didn’t have a state to support and protect them, and today they do. The point should be to ask: How do those with power treat those stripped of or denied power? And if the answer is that the powerful in any given country, regardless of its history, treat the powerless with cruelty or malice; weaponize the law against them; or consider their very existence an abomination, what should the rest of us do?

I do not expect international politics to cease to influence Holocaust remembrance, any more than I expect borders to suddenly become meaningless, or all soldiers to lay down their arms.

But so long as Holocaust commemorations are interpreted through the prism of how they pay respect to nation states, which national leaders are there or are snubbed, I wonder whether the devastation of the Shoah is really being commemorated.

And perhaps, in one way, officials took a step in that direction this year, consciously or not. No politicians spoke at today’s ceremony; only Auschwitz survivors did.

“We want to focus on the last survivors that are among us and on their history, their pain, their trauma,” said museum director Piotr Cywiński, “and their way to offer us some difficult moral obligations for the present.”

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