Since the Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors three decades ago in Washington, once a year the president of the United States gives a speech on Capitol Hill to remember one of the cruelest episodes in human history, the systematic killing of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazi regime. This year, Joe Biden has coincided with what he has described as a “ferocious rise in anti-Semitism in America and around the world,” especially in the numerous university protests against the war in Gaza, which have expanded beyond the American border.
About 10,000 kilometers away, Israel began a bombing campaign on Rafah last night, ignoring the warnings of the president and the international community, in a war that has already claimed more than 35,000 Palestinian victims since October 7. Ten days after that date, on which Hamas militants entered southern Israel and killed some 1,200 people, Biden called it “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.”
This morning, the president reiterated those words from the Capitol and stated that on October 7 “he gave life” to anti-Semitic hatred. “We run the risk of people not knowing the truth” about what happened in the Holocaust: “This hatred continues to lie deep in the hearts of too many people in the world,” he lamented.
“Just seven months after” the incursion into Israeli territory, “people are already forgetting that it was Hamas who unleashed this terror, who brutalized Israelis, and who took and continues to take hostages.” Biden, whose political career supports his unequivocal commitment to the state of Israel, has assured that military and economic support for the main recipient of US aid since World War II remains “strong, even when we disagree.”
The differences between his administration and the war cabinet led by Beniamin Netanyahu have been evident long before this escalation. Last year, he called his government “the most authoritarian” in Israel’s history for its judicial reform aimed at centralizing more power over him. He set aside that disagreement when the conflict in Gaza escalated, but has recently increased pressure on him in the face of the humanitarian crisis and the high numbers of civilian casualties left by the incessant attacks on Tel Aviv.
The latest warning to Netanyahu came yesterday by phone, when Biden “made his position on Rafah clear,” asking the Israeli leader not to begin his announced invasion of this city south of Gaza. No effect: Rafah is currently under siege by the Israel Defense Forces, which have taken control of the border with Egypt.
The president has reiterated his words from last Thursday, when he stated that “neither anti-Semitism nor Islamophobia have a place in America.” “We are not a lawless country, we are a civil society,” he defended this morning. While the speech was taking place, his administration moved to “combat anti-Semitism”: the Department of Education sent all universities in the country a letter with examples of “anti-Semitism” and other expressions that could be prosecuted as crimes of hate.
Also participating in this Tuesday’s event was the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, who last month achieved approval in Congress of an aid package valued at $26 billion for Israel. The Democratic leader in the Lower House, Hakeem Jeffries, several Holocaust survivors and elected officials from around the country have also intervened. The commemorative event ended with the recitation of a series of Jewish prayers for those killed at the hands of the Nazi regime.
