Since the Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors three decades ago in Washington, once a year the President of the United States makes a speech in the Capitol to remember one of the cruelest episodes in human history: the slaughter systematic killing of six million Jews in the hands of the Nazi regime. Yesterday, Joe Biden agreed with what he described as a “ferocious rise in anti-Semitism in America and around the world”, especially in the many university protests against the war in Gaza, which have expanded beyond the border of the United States.
About 10,000 kilometers away, Israel had just started a bombing campaign on Rafah, ignoring the warnings of the president and the international community, in a war that has already caused more than 35,000 Palestinian victims since October 7. Ten days after that date, in which Hamas militants entered southern Israel and killed about 1,200 people, Biden described it as “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.”
The president reiterated those words yesterday from the Capitol and affirmed that on October 7 he “gave life” to anti-Semitism. “We run the risk that people will not know the truth” about what happened during the Holocaust: “This hatred is still present in the deepest part of the hearts of too many people in the world”, he lamented.
“Only seven months after” the incursion into Israeli territory, “people are already forgetting that it was Hamas that unleashed this terror, that brutally mistreated Israelis, and that took and continues to take hostages.” Biden, whose political career supports his unequivocal commitment to the State of Israel, assured that military and economic support to the main recipient of US aid since World War II remains “hard, until and everything when we don’t agree”.
The differences between his administration and the war cabinet led by Benjamin Netanyahu have been well known since long before this escalation. Last year he described his Government as “the most authoritarian” in the history of Israel for his judicial reform aimed at centralizing more power over his figure. Months later it put aside that discord when the conflict in Gaza escalated, but recently it has increased its pressure in the wake of the humanitarian crisis and the high numbers of civilian casualties caused by the incessant attacks from Tel-Aviv.
The latest warning to Netanyahu came by phone on Monday, when Biden “made clear his position on Rafah,” and asked the Israeli leader not to launch his announced invasion of this city in southern Gaza. It didn’t work: Rafah is currently under siege by the Israel Defense Forces, who have taken control of the border with Egypt.
The president reiterated his words from Thursday, when he stated that “neither anti-Semitism nor Islamophobia have a place in America.” “We are not a country without law, we are a civil society”, he defended yesterday. While the speech was taking place, his Administration was moving to “combat anti-Semitism”: the Department of Education sent a letter to all the country’s universities with examples of “anti-Semitism” and other expressions that could be prosecuted as crimes of hate
The president of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, also participated in Tuesday’s event, who last year secured approval in Congress for an aid package valued at 26 billion dollars for Israel. The Democratic leader in the Lower House, Hakeem Jeffries, several Holocaust survivors and elected officials from across the country also took part. The commemorative event ended with the recitation of a series of Jewish prayers for those who died at the hands of the Nazi regime.
