Who opened the doors, and who slammed them shut

It’s hard to stomach the hypocrisy. The very nations and institutions that let Jews burn in industrial ovens now line up to instruct us on morality, restraint, and proportionality.

They want to teach Jews how to feel, how to grieve, how to respond to antisemitism, as if they’ve ever lifted a finger to stop it.

From the placards of self-righteous protesters and even a smattering of self-loathing Jews waving Palestinian flags down the avenues of London and Brussels to the graffiti-smeared walls of Ivy League campuses where Jewish students are treated as walking provocations, one thing is clear: the West has once again found a way to make Jews the villain.

No Israeli flags in sight; no nuance; no empathy. Just a screeching demand that we apologise for surviving.

And if we dare to push back, we’re told we’re overreacting. That we’re inflaming tensions. That we must understand “context”, even when it’s a genocidal death cult calling for our extermination.

Forgive us for not taking moral instruction from a world that stood by as our families were turned to ash.

Let’s dispense with the fairytales about Allied heroism. By the early 1940s, the leaders of the “free world”: Roosevelt, Churchill, and their contemporaries, knew exactly what was happening to Europe’s Jews.

And they did nothing.

Worse, they actively ensured our destruction. The United States maintained immigration quotas so tight that Jews couldn’t get in, even when their lives depended on it.

The MS St Louis, filled with nearly 1 000 Jewish refugees, was turned away from American shores. A quarter of those people were murdered in camps.

The United Kingdom sealed off entry to Palestine, the one place Jews might have reached, by enforcing the 1939 White Paper. Even Holocaust survivors were imprisoned in Cyprus.

They had intelligence. They had proof. They had means, but they didn’t act. Not because they didn’t know, but because they didn’t care.

Evian: where Western conscience was buried

In 1938, the West’s leaders gathered in Evian, France, to address the growing refugee crisis.

They dressed it up as humanitarian concern. In reality, it was a diplomatic shrug wrapped in ceremony.

One by one, each country said some version of, “We’re sympathetic, but sorry. No room. No visas. No Jews.”

Only the Dominican Republic, of all places, offered anything tangible. The rest applauded themselves for showing up, and left the Jews to rot.

Hitler was watching. He understood the message: “The Jews are alone. No-one wants them. Do your worst.” And he did.

Churchill, Roosevelt, and the rest of the West, we don’t forget that when you toasted liberty, we were being herded into ghettos; when you convened political-strategy briefings, our children were suffocating in cattle cars; and when you bombed oil fields and bridges, you never touched the single train track to Auschwitz.

Even after the war, when the world saw what was done to us, your sympathy didn’t extend to action.

British soldiers imprisoned Holocaust survivors – people weighing 40kg, tattooed, orphaned – for trying to reach the land that might finally offer them safety.

This isn’t ancient history, this is our living grandparents. This is the ashes still in European soil. This is the smoke still clinging to the rafters of human memory.

So no, we don’t take lessons from you. Because your record isn’t one of courage, it’s one of shame.

We were your surgeons, your teachers, your scientists

Before the gas chambers, we were the people who healed you, who educated your children, who pioneered your medicine, who filled your concert halls, and staffed your universities.

And you thanked us by looking the other way.

Now, once again, Jews are being hunted, this time on sidewalks, subways, and social media. This time in Sydney and San Francisco, not Warsaw.

And what do we hear? “Restraint”; “equivalence”; “both sides”; “We condemn all violence”; and “Don’t conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.”

Go f-ck yourselves!

You showed us exactly what you would do when Jews were in mortal danger: nothing. You have shown us, time and again, exactly where you stand. Not with us. Never with us.

No reason to trust

Your protests aren’t about justice, they’re about performance.

You wave Palestinian flags; chant revolutionary slogans; cry for “liberation”; and remain silent as gay people are thrown off rooftops in Gaza, as children are turned into suicide bombers, as Israeli civilians are raped and butchered.

You have no problem with brutality, just as long as it’s against Jews.

And then you tell us to be quiet. To be better. To play nice. That we mustn’t “fuel division”.

You don’t get to ask that of us. You lost that right. You never earned our trust, and you’ve spent decades proving we were right to withhold it.

This isn’t about “never again”, it’s about right now

We’re not invoking history as a metaphor, we’re invoking it as a warning. Because it’s not just that the world let us die before, it’s that you are letting it happen again.

When you excuse Hamas; when you platform hate; when you tell Jewish kids to take off their kippahs “for their own safety”; when you say “context matters” after civilians are slaughtered in their homes.

No. Context is this: we know who stood by before; we know who’s standing by now; and we see you.

Save your breath

We don’t need your concern. We don’t want your tolerance. We reject your gaslighting.

You betrayed us at Evian; you betrayed us in 1942; you betrayed us in 1973; and you’re betraying us again.

And we will not forget. We don’t trust you. We will not trust you. And we would be fools if we did.

So take your hollow lectures, your pious resolutions, your fake moral superiority, and shove them.

The world may have forgotten who it is, but we haven’t forgotten who we are.

Am Yisrael Chai.

• Ezra Stone was born in Natal, South Africa, and now writes from Buenos Aires. His work explores history, resilience, and identity, tracing the unbreakable threads between past and present.