The Holocaust Teaches Nothing. It Bears Witness.

Lesson, injunction, memory, dogma.
It is time to break with the reflex of using suffering as a weapon of justification.
The Holocaust is not a moral tool. It is a vertiginous fact that places every being at the edge of the abyss of a lost soul. The Holocaust is a universal testimony.

While a recent op-ed by the chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council,  Stuart E. Eizenstat, calls, today, m for drawing strength from survivors in the face of rising antisemitism, a great risk emerges — that this sacred trauma, instead of illuminating history, becomes an ideological shield against all forms of questioning.

But the Holocaust does not tell us what to do.
It tells us what happened.
And at that threshold, the silence of the dead is worth more than all the interpretations we impose upon them.

At the heart of this moral confusion, only a shared spiritual tradition of inner struggle — in both Judaism and Islam — can offer a path back.

—

At the very moment when Stuart E. Eizenstat, chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, publishes in the Jerusalem Post a call to stand firm in the face of global antisemitism — invoking the legacy of the survivors, “Never give in, never give up” — the message he carries, despite his intentions, exceeds its explicit scope.

For while the text refrains from directly endorsing Benjamin Netanyahu’s current policies, a significant part of public opinion reads it as a moral legitimization: that Israel’s current actions are the natural continuation of an unresolved historical trauma.

That is where the blind spot lies:

> The risk that the memory of trauma — instead of humanizing us — becomes the foundation of an unchallengeable doctrine, where every form of doubt is treated as betrayal.

This risk is not peripheral. It now overhangs the entire Israeli narrative since the disappearance of the Oslo signatories, and has devastated its spirit since October 7.
It seeps into political decisions, military reflexes, dominant narratives.
It turns the sacred memory of the Shoah into ideological armor, making a strategy untouchable — one that recognizes no compass but the absolute enemy.

This is no longer a policy. It is a narrative of perpetual exception.
A memory turned into an injunction, closed to all otherness.
And anyone who dares to question it is morally disqualified — as though committing, once again, the crime of denial.

—

Yet in both Judaism and Islam, there exists a deep, ancient tradition of a very different kind of struggle: the inner struggle.

The yetser hara, in Jewish thought, teaches that evil is not only external — it must be mastered within.
The greater jihad, in Islam, names the same effort: the struggle of the soul against pride, vengeance, and despair.

We must bring the synagogue and the minaret back to the heart of the Holy Land — not as monuments of domination, but as witnesses of inner clarity.

This is the path — vital — that both peoples must recover:
a path of lucidity, drawn not from the logic of war,
but from the sacred resilience of their texts and traditions.