https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/07/on-anti-semitism-and-delegitimization/
In the past, I have often cited George Santayana’s famous warning: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
It is sound advice for those not seeking to replicate past wrongs. Yet, what if someone seeks to weaponize the past to justify perpetuating and recreating its horrors? For such moral reprobates, there are unfortunately fertile fields of extant hate to sow and reap.
In former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Dr. Michael B. Oren’s authoritative history, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, one finds this heated exchange between the United Nations ambassadors for the Soviet Union and Israel:
American-Israeli differences, though sharpening, were minuscule compared to those between Israel and the Soviets. “Israel’s military hordes [are] following in the bloody footsteps of Hitler’s executioners,” ranted [Nikolai] Federenko, and Gideon Rafael responded in kind: “Neither Israel nor the Jewish people concluded a pact with Hitler’s Germany, a pact which encouraged Nazi Germany to unleash its aggression against the world.”
What is striking is how little has changed within the latest eruption of violent anti-Semitism spurred by the barbarous Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2024. And, in the above exchange, we can therefore glimpse the broad contours of how such anti-Semitism proceeds and is protested—if, however tragically often, in vain.