The Apartheid of Memory

Yom HaShoah, Genocide, and Historical Weaponization

Today is Yom HaShoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day. A date etched in memory to honor the lives stolen by the Nazi regime. A day intended to provoke moral reflection on genocide, violence, and silence. Yet across screens and ceremonies, it becomes clear: remembrance, in the hands of empire, has been weaponized. The sacred memory of genocide has been conscripted into the service of another.

We are asked to mourn genocide while funding one. To chant Never Again while watching Again unfold in Gaza. To speak of suffering only when it serves the colonizer's script.

Selective Memory Is Not Remembrance

The Holocaust was a genocide. A systematic, industrial-scale annihilation of Jewish life, language, spirit, and community. Six million Jews were murdered. And they were not alone. Between 11–17 million people were killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. These included:

• Over 500,000 Romani people, victims of the Porajmos.

• More than 250,000 disabled people, killed in the Aktion T4 “euthanasia” program.

• Thousands of queer people, primarily gay men, imprisoned, castrated, and murdered.

• Millions of Slavic people—particularly Poles and Soviets—deemed “subhuman.”

• Afro-Germans, political dissidents, communists, unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others.

Yet when the Israeli state and its global supporters commemorate Yom HaShoah, they center only one victim group. They elevate one memory while erasing others. They create a segregation of grief—an apartheid of historical remembrance—where mourning is rationed, where only certain deaths are deemed worthy of global outrage, and where the trauma of one community becomes a shield for the destruction of another.

Zionism’s Monopoly on Grief

This selective memory is not a passive oversight. It is a deliberate strategy. By monopolizing the memory of the Holocaust, the Israeli state has constructed a political mythology that frames it as perpetual victim—unassailable, beyond critique, above consequence.

Criticism of Zionism? Labeled antisemitism.
Demands for accountability? Branded as Holocaust denial.
Resistance from Palestinians? Equated with Nazism.

This is not trauma-informed remembrance. This is trauma-exploited propaganda.

Zionist institutions and Western governments alike invoke the Holocaust to silence any challenge to Israeli apartheid, military occupation, or genocidal acts in Gaza. They erase Palestinians from history—and then blame them for trying to survive it.

This weaponization of grief allows them to turn memory into a political cudgel. The same memory that once demanded we never let this happen again now shields the bombs dropped on Rafah, the starvation in northern Gaza, the massacres of entire families, and the killing of over 25,000 children.

From "Never Again" to "Unless It’s Gaza"

“Never Again” has become an exclusive contract—a phrase stripped of its universality. It no longer means “never again to any people.” It now means: never again to us. And if it’s happening to someone else—especially Arabs, Muslims, or Indigenous people—then the world looks away.

Israel has redefined genocide denial: not as denying mass slaughter, but as naming it when it’s politically inconvenient.

• Calling the starvation of Gaza a genocide? “Inflammatory.”

• Drawing parallels between apartheid South Africa and Israel? “Offensive.”

• Saying the Nakba was a mass ethnic cleansing? “Revisionist.”

But silence is complicity. Selective grief is complicity. Memory, when hoarded, becomes another weapon of domination.

The Manufactured Hierarchy of Victimhood

This is the heart of the problem: genocide remembrance, as it is deployed by Israel and its allies, creates a hierarchy of victimhood. Jewish suffering is hyper-visible, politically sacred, institutionally guarded. Meanwhile, Romani, disabled, queer, and Palestinian victims are footnotes—if acknowledged at all.

This isn’t just about the past. It shapes the present:

• Romani people continue to face racist policies, forced sterilizations, and segregated schooling across Europe.

• Disabled people are disproportionately murdered in armed conflict and denied humanitarian aid.

• Queer Palestinians are routinely outed and blackmailed by the Israeli regime as part of its surveillance apparatus.

• Palestinians are starved, bombed, and slaughtered—while the world debates whether it’s "genocide enough" to warrant concern.

To uplift one group’s trauma while using it to erase or brutalize others is not remembrance. It is genocidal revisionism in real-time.

Solidarity Must Be Universal, or It Is Nothing

If your grief has a passport, a religion, or a military alliance—then it is not grief. It is propaganda.

Yom HaShoah, if it is to mean anything, must be a day to mourn all who have suffered under genocidal regimes—past and present. It must include Palestinians killed by the Israeli regime. It must include Sudanese civilians bombed by RSF militias. It must include the children of Congo, of Myanmar, of Yemen, of Ethiopia, of every colonized and brutalized nation ignored by the West.

You cannot genuinely mourn genocide while rationalizing its repetition. You cannot honor victims while cheering for new ones. And you cannot weaponize grief without becoming a perpetrator of violence in the name of memory.

Remembrance Without Justice Is Betrayal

We must remember the Holocaust. Fully. Honestly. In all its breadth and brutality. But remembrance that excludes is not memory—it is mythology.

To truly honor the dead, we must break the monopoly on grief. We must reject the apartheid of memory. And we must name clearly: the genocide in Gaza is not in spite of the Holocaust—it is enabled by how the Holocaust is remembered.

“Never Again” must stop being a slogan used to justify genocide and start being a vow to stop it—no matter the target, no matter the state, no matter the flag.

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References & Further Reading

• Bauer, Yehuda. Rethinking the Holocaust. Yale University Press, 2002.

• Hancock, Ian. We are the Romani People. University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002.

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals.” ushmm.org

• Burleigh, Michael. Death and Deliverance: "Euthanasia" in Germany 1900–1945. Cambridge University Press, 1994.

• Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007.

• Erakat, Noura. Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Stanford University Press, 2019.

• Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Henry Holt and Co., 2020.

• B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid. (2021)

• UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Concluding observations on the combined seventeenth to nineteenth reports of Israel, 2019.

• Human Rights Watch. A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. (2021)

• Poole, Amelia et al. “Genocide as a Structure: Gaza and the Logic of Erasure.” Journal of Genocide Research, 2024.