On the day set aside to remember six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the occasion to shame Europe into supporting a war that has already killed over 2,500 Iranian civilians ad destroyed hundreds of civilian infrastructures. His speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day was not a meditation on loss. It sounded more like a recruitment pitch.
“Europe is infested today with a deep moral weakness,” Netanyahu declared. “Europe is losing control over its identity.” He called European leaders “ungrateful,” claiming that the United States and Israel are “defending Europe” by waging war on Iran. He invoked what he called “the sharp distinction between good and evil, which, in the moment of truth, requires us to go to war for the sake of good.”
He said Europe had “forgotten so much since the Holocaust.”
What Europe Actually Refused
The context for Netanyahu’s remarks is not ancient history – it is the present. The United Kingdom, France, and Germany have all rejected the Trump administration’s call to help unblock the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran closed to “enemy ships” following the joint US-Israeli attack on Iranian territory that began on February 28. After talks in Islamabad collapsed on Sunday, Trump ordered a naval blockade of the Strait. Europe’s three largest military powers declined to participate.
This is what Netanyahu calls moral weakness – the refusal to join a military escalation in one of the world’s most vital shipping lanes, an escalation that a United Nations report estimates could push 32 million people into poverty.
Invoking the Dead to Justify Killing the Living
There is a question that Netanyahu’s speech raises but does not answer. Is using the memory of six million murdered people to pressure nations into supporting a new war not itself a form of the moral erosion he claims to condemn?
Holocaust Remembrance Day exists because humanity committed an act so monstrous that the world collectively agreed it must never be forgotten. The day carries a moral weight that transcends politics. It belongs to the victims and their descendants. It belongs to the historical record. It does not belong to the foreign policy agenda of any sitting prime minister.
Yet Netanyahu has, once again, reached for the Holocaust as a geopolitical instrument. The implication of his speech is clear: anyone who does not support Israel’s current military campaign is complicit in the same moral failure that allowed the Holocaust to happen. It is a comparison that equates European reluctance to join a 21st-century war in the Persian Gulf with European complicity in the systematic extermination of Jews in the 1940s.
How many times can this comparison be drawn before it loses its moral authority entirely?
The War’s Toll
Since the US-Israeli strikes began on February 28, the conflict has killed over 2,500 Iranian civilians. Universities, schools, bridges, and energy infrastructure have been hit. Iran has described the war as “unprovoked aggression” and maintains that it has a sovereign right to enrich uranium peacefully under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The UN report warning of 32 million people being pushed into poverty accounts not only for direct casualties but for the economic devastation that a prolonged conflict in the Gulf would inflict on developing nations dependent on oil imports. The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s daily oil consumption. Its closure – and any military operation to force it open – would ripple through economies from South Asia to sub-Saharan Africa.
Europe’s refusal to participate is not, as Netanyahu frames it, a failure of courage. It is a calculation that the costs of this war – human, economic, strategic – outweigh whatever objectives Washington and Jerusalem believe they are pursuing.
A Pattern of Instrumentalization
Netanyahu has long drawn on the Holocaust to frame Israel’s security posture. It is a rhetorical strategy that carries enormous emotional weight, and for good reason – the trauma of the Holocaust is real, generational, and unresolved. But there is a distinction between remembering the Holocaust to prevent future atrocities and invoking it to justify current ones.
When a prime minister stands at a Holocaust memorial and calls nations “morally weak” for refusing to join a war that is killing civilians by the hundreds, the question is no longer whether Europe has forgotten the lessons of history. The question is whether Netanyahu is applying them – or exploiting them.
That is a question worth asking on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Perhaps especially on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
