Lessons from 1938 and 2025

After decades of ruthless militancy and terrorism that culminated in the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October, a Palestinian state will be recognised later this month by the governments of France, the UK, and Canada. These Western leaders are eager to appease those who perpetrate anti-Jewish violence because they believe that by doing so they can end decades of bloodshed and war in the Middle East. But this kind of thinking misreads the causes of hatred and aggression in pursuit of peace at all costs, and history demonstrates how dangerous this is.

On 1 April 1933, the Nazis declared a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses. Days later, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed, which forbade the employment of non-Aryan teachers, judges, or physicians. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were enacted, which proscribed intermarriage and stripped Jews of German citizenship. By 1938, Jewish children had been pushed out of schools and Jewish doctors were confined to treating Jews. None of these measures required war. All that was needed was ideology, will, organisation, and the silent complicity of observers.

The tightening of the noose during this period was administrative—a litany of forms, laws, decrees, notices, and slogans that turned ordinary doorways into uncrossable thresholds. The path to genocide began with incremental measures that felt reversible until they were not. And then came Kristallnacht, on the night of 9 November 1938, which ended the pretence that anti-Jewish persecution was only a matter of law. Around ninety Jews were murdered and about 30,000 men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Synagogues were set on fire and Jewish shops were reduced to glittering wreckage. The next morning, people stepped around the shards of broken glass littering the pavement as they walked to work.

And while all of this horror was unfolding, civilised Europe did nothing. After the nightmare of the First World War, European leaders sought tranquility above all. They spoke about peace constantly, as if merely repeating that word could hold history at a standstill. So when Hitler violated the treaties of Versailles and Locarno by sending his troops into the demilitarised Rhineland in March 1936, Paris hesitated and London decided it was a local matter in Germany’s own backyard. The small German force of 3,000 soldiers had orders to turn back if they encountered resistance. Instead, the occupation confirmed Hitler’s willingness to defy international treaties and the allies’ unwillingness to punish him for it in the interests of avoiding conflict.

The prestige of the responsible peacemakers rose and the resolve of the genocidal administration hardened. In 1938, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich bearing a piece of paper which he held aloft before cheering crowds at Heston Aerodrome. During a press conference at Downing Street later that day, Chamberlain announced that the agreement he had signed in Munich allowing Hitler to annex the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia would ensure “peace for our time.” Upon hearing these words, people wept with relief.

But what must a Jewish family in Berlin have thought as they listened to this news on the radio? Appeasement did more than miscalculate, it inverted the scene. The aggressor became a reasonable statesman and those urging resistance looked like reckless warmongers. This was moral decay in the costume of prudence. In October 1938, Churchill warned, “You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.” But he was shouted down while the name of Chamberlain was carried through the streets like that of a hero.

Echoes of this story have become louder as the months have passed since 7 October 2023. When news first emerged of Hamas’s atrocities, Western governments stood united in condemnation. Israelis were assured that they had every right to defend themselves and do whatever was necessary to recover the hostages seized in Israel carried into Gaza. But as the war dragged on, the pitiless jihadist strategy of sacrificing Gazans for the purposes of propaganda began to tear at Western consciences. The radicals who condemned Israel’s retaliation before it had even begun were now joined by more moderate voices in the streets and op-ed pages of the Western press. Protesters, NGOs, and columnists cried “ceasefire now!” but without any reference to the program or intent of Israel’s enemies, and without any evident concern for the fate of the remaining hostages held in Gaza.

Many of the earliest protests were ostensibly dedicated to peace and mourning but they were carried along by the rhetoric of violence and hatred and death. Attendees at rallies and “vigils” held on the Columbia University campus displayed signs that read “Glory to Our Martyrs” and “Globalise the Intifada.” Marchers in London on successive Saturdays demanded an immediate and unconditional ceasefire as they called for Palestine to be liberated from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. In Berlin, someone yelled “Wir töten alle Juden” during a demonstration. Students in Tokyo carried signs calling for an end to genocide—a demand that was addressed to Israel, not Hamas. Tokyo has almost no Jewish population and only a small Muslim community, yet the peace slogans arrived intact, as if they carried their own authority and needed no local referent. Once an inverted moral vocabulary gains momentum, it can detach from facts and travel on its own.

In December 2023, the notion that Israel is perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinians moved from Western streets to the International Court of Justice. The South African filing itemises every allegedly genocidal utterance by an Israeli official since 7 October, but it mentions Hamas’s unambiguously genocidal program and charter not once. The 1988 Hamas Covenant opens by stating that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” Article 7 cites an apocalyptic Hadith enjoining Muslims to fight and kill every last Jew at the end of days. These are not marginal lines, nor were they revoked by the publication of Hamas’s “Principles and Policies” document in 2017. The atrocities of October 2023 are a testimony to this self-evident fact. And yet it is Israel in the dock.

Mindful of these voices, and of the growing agitation among their own Muslim populations, Western governments began to speak less about Israel’s right to self-defence and a lot more about what could be done to compel Israel to end its military campaign and to appease those whose brutality had provoked it. Moral unity was replaced by the language of euphemism and excuse—a surrender to fascism, or worse, a tacit endorsement.

Anyone considering peacemaking with the perpetrator of atrocities should complete this brief diagnostic questionnaire first: