International Holocaust Remembrance Day: The moral link between Kristallnacht and October 7 ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

International Holocaust Remembrance Day: The moral link between Kristallnacht and October 7

International Holocaust Remembrance Day arrives this year with the return yesterday of the Ron Gvili's body from Gaza, fulfilling one major goal of the Gaza war.

IHRD is often hijacked to make offensive analogies between how Jews were persecuted by the Nazis and how Israel is acting when it defends itself. But there is a real analogy that we can make between the October 7 pogrom and the pogrom that was in many ways the beginning for the Holocaust: Kristallnacht.

Kristallnacht is often remembered visually: shattered glass, burning synagogues, smashed shops. But the psychology behind it and in the days afterwards is startlingly familiar to what we've seen since October 7.

The Nazi regime justified the pogrom by pointing to the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jewish teenager whose family had been expelled by the Germans. It was an excuse, not a reason.

Similarly, Hamas pretended the October 7 massacrewas a reaction to Israeli crimes, notwithstanding that more goods were coming into Gaza than before Hamas took over the enclave. The attack was planned, the justification was an excuse.

In both cases, the attacks were not isolated events. They were planned as the sparks for what came afterwards - the collective blame of Jews, the inversion of history and the weaponization of the fact that attacks on Jews prompts more antisemitic acts, not less.

Here is a news story describing how the Nazis blamed the Jews collectively for their own victimhood - and used Kristallnacht itself as an excuse to punish the entire Jewish community, forcing Jews to pay to clean up the debris from destroyed synagogues and confiscating their insurance claims.

Jewish suffering was no longer treated as morally relevant. It was treated as self-caused. Germany was reframed as the victim. Jews were reframed as the problem. The violence was not denied; it was morally laundered.

The violence of Kristallnacht itself was only the beginning of the persecution.

On October 7, Hamas planned and executed a mass atrocity. But Hamas had planned not only a kinetic attack, but a propaganda war as well. The inversion of the Jews from victims to criminals happened within hours of the attack - just as in Germany in November 1938.

The killings were explained as “resistance.” The victims were dehumanized into "settlers" and "occupiers" and "oppressors." The crime was reframed as consequence. Responsibility was shifted from the perpetrators to the existence of Jews themselves.

Attacking Jews was correctly understood by both the Nazis and the Islamists as the most reliable way to increase antisemitism, not decrease it.

After October 7, Jews worldwide were harassed, attacked, and told to answer for crimes they did not commit. Synagogues were vandalized. Jewish students were threatened. Jewish mourning was treated as propaganda. Jewish fear was dismissed as manipulation.

The brief world sympathy for Israel evaporated - just as Hamas knew it would. And guess who else made the same observation after Kristallnacht?

Joseph Goebbels mocked the world for its protests, saying that if they love Jews so much, let them allow Jews to immigrate. he predicted that the protests would die down - and he was right.

Both the Nazis and Hamas know that they can rely on latent antisemitism to support their aims worldwide. They both knew that they could count on Jewish victimhood not counting outside performative gestures. And they both had control of their media to shape what the world would see.

If Holocaust memory is to mean anything, it must train us to recognize the moment when violence against Jews becomes morally invisible, when Jews are no longer allowed to be victims, only causes.

That moment has come before. And we have seen where it leads.