Never again is happening again

After the Holocaust, we said we’d never look away again. But in Gaza, Western governments are doing just that

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After the Holocaust, the world swore it would never look away again. Now, as Gaza is destroyed and civilians are killed, that promise is being broken by the very countries that once made it.

Historian Tad Stoermer, who studies resistance to authoritarian regimes, calls this moment “a crisis for our frameworks.” He means the values and narratives we’ve used to understand the Holocaust—moral clarity, justice, the triumph of good over evil—no longer hold up when applied to the present. The stories we’ve built our understanding on are breaking down. We feel that shift, even if we struggle to put it into words.

My focus as a teacher is not resistance history but human rights, using genocide as a reference point. From this perspective, marginalization is one of the early warning signs on the path toward genocide. To prevent future atrocities, we must recognize our shared humanity and treat every person with dignity.

Our approach to Holocaust education has long emphasized antisemitism—how it led to the dehumanization and industrialized extermination of Jews—and celebrated the righteousness of the Allies who defeated the Nazis. But this framing often ignores a deeper truth: antisemitism was widespread not just in Germany, but across Europe and North America. The West was not as morally distant from the Nazis as we like to believe.

We also rarely confront how Hitler drew on Western colonialism to justify his actions. He admired how the United States displaced and decimated Indigenous peoples to seize land—and envisioned similar conquests in Eastern Europe for Germany. The Nazis adapted Jim Crow laws into anti-Jewish legislation. Their innovations in industrialized genocide were extreme—but the cruelty was not unprecedented. From Africa to Asia to the Americas, colonialism left a long trail of atrocity.

While genocide can occur outside the context of colonialism, it is difficult to find an example of colonialism that did not result in genocide.

The devastation in Gaza today forces us to confront our moral inconsistencies. If we can justify displacing Palestinians based on the forced exile of Jews from the same area two thousand years ago, why do Canadians respond to far more recent Indigenous displacement with little more than symbolic land acknowledgements?

Most Palestinians are descended from people who lived continuously in the region for centuries, regardless of changing empires, religions or borders. How can we claim a Jewish right to return while denying Palestinians the right to remain?

After the Holocaust, the world tried to ensure “never again” by establishing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, revising the Geneva Conventions and defining genocide. Yet many genocides have followed.

As a teacher, I face a choice. I can impose a colonial narrative and tell my students, “That’s just how the world works. Get over it.” That message may have passed in my day, but the students I teach today are less willing to accept contradictions and more likely to demand moral consistency. I respect them too much to offer anything less than an honest search for truth—even when it’s uncomfortable.

History is messy, filled with contradictions, like the people who live it. The destruction of Gaza has exposed the moral and historical inconsistencies we’ve long ignored. If we choose to keep looking away, “never again” will remain a broken promise.

Gerry Chidiac specializes in languages and genocide studies and works with at-risk students. He received an award from the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre for excellence in teaching about the Holocaust.