On July 10, 2025, participants in the annual commemoration of the Jedwabne massacre encountered something disturbing: seven newly installed stone plaques just outside the memorial.

Placed by far-right Polish nationalists, the texts denied Polish responsibility for the 1941 massacre and blamed it entirely on German occupiers. One read, “The crime was committed by a German pacification unit.” Another revived antisemitic tropes, suggesting Jews had “betrayed” Poland.

This act of historical sabotage preceded the ceremony. What followed was direct provocation: Grzegorz Braun, a far-right MP and MEP, arrived with supporters, blocked vehicles — including that of Poland’s Chief Rabbi — and harassed those in attendance. That same morning, Braun went on national radio to declare that Auschwitz’s gas chambers were fake, and to affirm the medieval blood libel as historical fact.

The backlash was swift. Polish prosecutors opened a criminal case. Yad Vashem called it a “dangerous distortion,” the Auschwitz Museum condemned it as a “conscious lie,” and Polish leaders across parties voiced outrage. So did EU figures, condemning Braun’s denialism and hate speech.

And yet here the standard shifts. Holocaust distortion, when it appears in classic denialist form, as with Braun, is rightly met with condemnation. But when the distortion wears new clothes, particularly in the context of Israel, it often passes unchallenged.

Within EU institutions, certain publicly-funded NGOs and elected officials promote the claim that Israel is committing genocide or even a new Holocaust against Palestinians. These statements are rarely contested. Organizations such as Al-Haq and others have received EU or member-state funding while using Holocaust-associated language to frame current conflicts. Groups like Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, though not funded by the EU, have contributed to the normalization of such terminology in European discourse.

This, too, is Holocaust distortion. To equate Israeli policy, however contested, with the industrial extermination of European Jewry is to trivialize the Holocaust. It dilutes historical specificity. Worse, it often turns victims into perpetrators in public imagination.

Irish MEP Clare Daly called EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen “Frau Genocide” — a sarcastic use of the German honorific “Frau” (“Mrs.”), meant to accuse her of enabling what Daly described as Israel’s genocide in Gaza. She also accused von der Leyen of supporting Israel’s “brutal apartheid regime.”

Former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell described Israel’s war in Gaza as “the largest operation of ethnic cleansing since the end of World War II.”

MEP Mick Wallace has repeatedly called Israel an apartheid state committing genocide.

These are not fringe voices. They sit in the European Parliament — or, in Borrell’s case, held the Union’s highest diplomatic office. Yet unlike Braun, they face no condemnation. Their statements remain in the official record and circulate .

Why this inconsistency? Why is Holocaust inversion condemned in Poland but tolerated — and sometimes even amplified — in Brussels?

Many such claims originate in NGO reports, some backed by EU funding. These groups frequently label Israel a “colonial,” “apartheid,” or “genocidal” state, often without legal or historical precision. Some circulate Holocaust analogies or imagery. Yet few EU leaders speak out when these narratives echo antisemitic motifs or weaponize Shoah memory.

Take the apartheid claim. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch assert that Israel enforces apartheid “from the river to the sea.” But Arab citizens of Israel vote, hold office, serve on the Supreme Court, and enjoy equal legal rights. Or consider the genocide charge. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese accused Israel of “one of the cruelest genocides of our time.” Some EU parliamentarians echoed her words. There is no evidence of a systematic plan to exterminate a people. Using “genocide” in this context is not forensic, it is rhetorical violence.

The most grotesque accusation is that Israel behaves like the Nazis. Across Europe, protesters chant that Israel is a “Nazi state.” Signs compare the Star of David to the swastika. Some NGO (including some that receive support from EU member states), refer to Gaza as a “ghetto” or liken it to a “camp.” These comparisons are not analysis, they are rhetorical shock tactics that erode historical understanding and hollow out Holocaust memory.

At Jedwabne, the newly placed plaques implied that Jews had brought violence upon themselves by siding with the Soviets. Today, that logic returns in inverse form: the descendants of those burned in barns are cast as the new perpetrators of genocide. What once accused Jews of being complicit in their own destruction now accuses them of repeating it. This is not remembrance. It is reversal.

The same Europe that prosecutes Holocaust denial and funds Shoah education stays silent when antisemitic analogies are repurposed against Jews today. That silence is not neutrality — it is complicity.

Jedwabne survivor Rivka Fogel described the hours before the fire: “They made us stand in the square, with brooms in our hands, in the heat. We swept dust that did not move. We knew what was coming. Then they took the children.”

These words were not written to flatter history. They were written to warn us. And now we are warned again.

Historical truth is indivisible. The standards we use to guard Holocaust memory must apply equally whether the distortion and trivialization comes from the far right or from those cloaking modern antisemitism in humanitarian language. You cannot mourn Jedwabne while tolerating new blood libels in Brussels or Geneva.

There is a difference between legitimate criticism of Israeli policy and the weaponization of Jewish history to delegitimize Jewish sovereignty. Terms like “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “Nazi state” have become political weapons, not analytical tools. And weapons cause harm — not just to Israel, but to truth itself.

As the Yizkor Book wrote: “There was no one left to say Kaddish. So we wrote their names. This book is their prayer.”

That prayer is now ours. To speak their names. To guard the truth. To call out distortion, not only when it comes from deniers, but also when it comes masked as justice.

Amanda Kluveld is a Holocaust historian and associate professor of history at Maastricht University.

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