Setonji David 
The world has set aside January 27 every year as International Holocaust Remembrance Day to recall one of the worst human tragedies of all times. The holocaust was a systematic genocide against the European Jewish population during the Second World War, carried out by the Nazi party of Germany as led by Adolph Hitler, the then Chancellor and Fuhrer.
To those who had never grasped the extent of the evil that was Nazi Germany and its hatred for Jews, the holocaust led to the persecution of about nine million Jews, leading to the forceful expulsion and relocation of hundreds of thousands from their homes into ghettos and the mass extermination of six million others, most of whom were innocent German, Polish and Russian Jews either rounded up and sent to forced labour camps to die from starvation, exhaustion, or used as guinea pigs for nefarious scientific experiments.
Others were murdered in poisonous gas chambers and through mass shootings in several concentration camps across the German-occupied territories. These atrocities were against the backdrop of the war in which Hitler and the Nazis sought to rule all of Europe and Russia in the quest for “living spaces” for the so-called “Aryan” race. That was the tragedy.
The world rejected anti-Semitism, Nazism and its leader Hitler then and has continued to reject and condemn any form of profiling or discrimination directed at the Jewish population anywhere as anti-Semitism. World leaders reserve the sharpest of criticisms for advocates of or perpetrators or supporters of such acts anywhere in the world. This situation of complete and absolute abhorrence for all forms of anti-Semitism is the upshot of the tragedy we have come to identify as the holocaust. The world has done better than condemn and halt the wrongful and evil persecution of the world population of Jews. The 1947 UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181) established the State of Israel, offering European Jews the option of being settled, rehabilitated and integrated in a homeland of their own.
Till this date, I believe, the world community is still grappling with the high moral cost of creating modern Israel; millions of native Palestinians were displaced and the settler-colonial enterprise of successive governments of Israel has caused such atrocious conditions of civil rights and non-existent liberties for Palestinians that political activists the world over have called to question the assumption that the international community has treated all parties —sides— equally and fairly.
It is often suggested that from surviving the pogrom through concerted global action, Jews in Israel have become the most privileged group of people in the world. The United States of America and the European Union nations bend over backwards to support Israel in most of its critical endeavours of politics, development and wars and they often pick a substantial portion of the bill, to boot.
These most-influential nations of the world routinely provide development aid, trade advantages, and scientific research funding to Israel. Apart from being the EU’s largest trade partner, Israel continues to enjoy preferential trade access to European markets.
The foreign aid and capital flowing into the Israeli military industrial complex and commercial economy dwarfed that of other countries of similar size and political importance by far. Currently, the US provides approximately $3.8 billion annually to Israel, in a 10-year MOU signed in 2016, making her the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign aid.
It is estimated that since 1948 the US has provided over $158 billion in bilateral assistance to Israel in military aid, primarily. It suffices to say that Israel could take its friendship with European countries and America for granted, and it might have done exactly so on occasions without consequences. All in all, the world has done well and good to have focused so extensively on the need of Jews and Israel to be, first, understood, resettled, and then pampered.
To state the obvious, Israel’s right to be paid reparations —after the holocaust— in so many guises in past and current world scenarios is fully recognised, respected and evidently deferred to. Germany has paid reparations to Israel, under the 1952 Luxembourg Agreement, to the tune of over €70 billion till date. The last may not have been heard of further transfers.
