There is one sentence Jean Améry wrote more than fifty years ago that still sounds like an alarm:
“Anyone who questions Israel’s right to exist contributes, consciously or not, to the rise of a new Auschwitz.”
Améry, a Holocaust survivor and a European humanist, was not a nationalist or a conventional Zionist.
He was a man who believed that after 1945 the world had learned something fundamental about morality.
But when he watched a new generation embrace anti-Zionism in the name of justice, he understood that the lesson had been forgotten.
Not much has changed since then.
The language has become more refined, the debates more academic, but the meaning remains the same.
When people say, “We’re against Israel, not against Jews,” it is the same old logic that once divided “hatred” from “criticism.”
Améry would have recognized it instantly. He knew that antisemitism always hides behind elegant words.
His idea of “Auschwitz on the Mediterranean” was not provocation. It was diagnosis.
He saw how the vocabulary of justice could once again become the language of destruction.
How calls to “liberate Palestine” could, in practice, mean the elimination of a country.
How the world, weary of moral effort, could once again stand aside and say, “This is different, it’s not the same.”
That is the frightening part.
Nothing ever repeats itself in the same form.
Hatred doesn’t return wearing uniforms. It returns wrapped in the flag of human rights.
And this time, it knows how to use our own words.
One can love or criticize Israel. That is not the issue.
But to erase its right to exist is no longer politics. It is geography of hate.
Those who believe that human rights allow them to deny an entire people are not enlightened. They are only more sophisticated in their cynicism.
Améry saw all this through the eyes of someone who had already been there.
He did not seek glory, only responsibility.
And perhaps this is the warning that still matters most:
to beware of the day when we once again stand by the shore and tell ourselves, “We did not know.”
For further reading: Essays on Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Left by Jean Améry
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