Today is #YomHaShoah, the Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day. You're going to see many (rightfully) somber messages, but this is not one of them. Instead, I'd like to discuss popular memory.

Thread.

1) The somber Yom HaShoah messages are, when coming from Jews, sincere and often expressed from a point of grief.

If you know Jews of European descent, odds are they had at least one immediate ancestor in the Holocaust.

Our families are often still small, 3 generations later.

2) I qualified with 'when coming from Jews' because today you will see many others saying 'Never Again.'

I have a hard time not eyeing these statements with a deep sense of cynicism.

We live in a world that saw Syrians get gassed by their own government. A world where many societies are electing men who, at a minimum, share a sensibility with fascists, if not being outright their ideological heirs.

'Never Again'? Really?

Put simply, don't believe the cries of 'Never Again'

Don't believe them because of the actions people and governments take (and often fail to take). But also don't believe them because many countries who are not guilty but do bear responsibility speak out while repeating fiction

3) If you're familiar with these issues you'll probably expect me to discuss Eastern European nations, and Poland in particular, who are engaging in some awful historical revisionism. But those get enough coverage. I'd like to highlight another.

Here's a piece British Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote on International Holocaust Memorial Day this past January. Really moving stuff . Hits all the right notes. Indistinguishable from what many other British PMs have said over the post-war years. https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/opinion-boris-johnson-the-darkest-of-nights-must-never-again-fall/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1580121892

In the popular imagination, which is repeated at Holocaust memorials, the British role in the Holocaust is:

-Kindertransport
-Princess Alice sheltering Jews in Greece
-Liberating the camps

All good things! But like many countries, Britain's Holocaust legacy is more complicated.

The British, along with the other great powers in the form of America and France, knew long before the Nazis were shooting and gassing Jews that a crisis was brewing. In 1938 they were all participants in the Evian conference and all refused unrestricted migration for Jews.

But unlike America and France, the British had another option for migration. They controlled a territory which many Jews would be happy to flee to: British-ruled Palestine, where a thriving community of Jews already lived.

However, the British prioritized their empire over Europe's persecuted Jews. Anticipating a war with the Nazis, they did not wish to further antagonize Palestinian Arabs under their rule as well as the broader Arab world.

They slammed shut the gates to Palestine.

Should we focus only on those the British saved? Or should we examine the situation in its totality?

If you're British and getting angry or uncomfortable reading this, welcome to the feelings every Polish nationalist has when we bring this stuff up.

I'd like to say the story ends in 1945, but it didn't. There's a forgotten period of Jewish-British relations that isn't brought up that much because it isn't convenient for the Israeli and British governments to do so anymore.

It was when Jews took up arms against the British.

Holocaust survivors, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, remained displaced after the war. If you're Jewish and your parent or grandparent was born in a DP camp, that happened because even in the wake of genocide few wanted to take in the Jews.

The Jews living in Palestine, fed up with the British White Paper and continued blockade of Jewish migration, began a campaign of violent resistance that spanned from Palestine to Italy to the UK itself.

Jews who yesterday were partisans applied their skills to fight the British

It was a violent and bloody campaign. And as much as I sympathize with situation Jews were facing, I am not going to sugarcoat the actions of either side. The British engaged in rendition and torture. The Jews engaged in what we today would call terrorism.

As I said, it's not convenient for either the British or the Israelis to discuss anymore. But history is not just what's convenient. Or what makes us look good. We are the inheritors of legacies inspiring and sometimes dreadful. It's a package deal.

So this Yom HaShoah, remember the victims. But remember that the Holocaust did not happen in a vacuum. Many Jews were murdered by the Nazis not because of the actions others took, but because they failed to.

Never Again will Jews count on your good will.