How could anyone hate Lily Ebert? The 99-year-old from Golders Green dedicates her life to teaching younger generations about the Shoah. Lily survived Auschwitz, where her mother and two of her siblings were gassed, and she went on to found the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre. For her contributions to Holocaust education, she was awarded the British Empire Medal.

One of the tools she uses to reach young people is TikTok. Her account, managed by her 19-year-old great-grandson Dov Forman, has 2.1 million followers, drawn to educational videos from a woman who has lived some of the very worst of history. Then, one month ago, when Hamas murdered 1,400 Israelis in one day, things changed. Dov tells the Hampstead and Highgate Express: ‘Within days we started to receive thousands more antisemitic comments and messages than we usually do. It used to be a few hundred a day and now it’s a few thousand.’ In the main, the messages deny the Holocaust, call Lily a liar, and make threats against her.

How do you arrive at a point in your life where you’re trolling a Holocaust survivor on the internet, telling them the murder of their family never happened? You don’t get there overnight. You pick it up at home, online, in school, at university or from your social circle. This goes one of two ways. Some will absorb the poison and tend it across years of silent spite, muttered epithets and occasional outbursts in unguarded moments. For many more, it will lie dormant, coming to mind only every now and then when the prejudice is overtly confirmed.

Jews are the last minority it’s acceptable to hate

Then something happens, invariably something involving Israel, and suddenly the world is talking the way you think. Not just in the hundreds, but in the thousands — and many more. You no longer feel so alone. You can come out with it now.

There are Lilys and Dovs all across the world right now, Jews being reminded or learning for the first time that antisemitism is a small standing army but one whose ranks swell with volunteers at short notice. As Simon Wilder writes: ‘We are never distant enough from people who want to kill us, and are reminded of this too often.’

October 7 was a cathartic moment for Jew-haters. The most depraved could revel in the slaughter while baying that their god was the greatest, as though piles of dead Jews was terribly original or miraculous. (I’m not saying their god’s a hack but he needs new material.) For others too refined to celebrate openly, the massacres were a long-overdue black eye for the Zionists and Israel’s inevitably disproportionate response sure to broaden the perimeters of what was socially acceptable to say.

Even so, the volume and reach of antisemitism over the past month has been remarkable. It has easily dwarfed Operation Cast Lead, the Mavi Marmara, the Second Lebanon War and the Second Intifada. There was a brief moment, while the carnage was still raw, when it seemed as though the world had been re-sensitised to Jewish pain and suffering, but it proved to be fleeting. Antisemitism feeds on Jewish weakness and Jewish strength, taking sustenance from one while waiting for the other.

What marks out the current wave of Jew-hatred is its brazenness and its capture of the institutions. The streets of major cities resound with calls for jihad, intifada and the destruction of the Jewish state. Our social media feeds fill with a new sub-genre of horror movie, a video nasty in which people (being any more specific will get you in trouble) tear down posters of Israeli hostages. The very thought of Jews who are victims of Hamas being seen as such is unbearable to these individuals.

The United Nations still cannot bring itself to properly condemn the murder, rape, beheading and burning of Jews. Universities, where we send our young to be radicalised by third-rate intellects and second-rate extremists, are hotbeds of glorification, justification and minimisation of the 7 October massacre. The Hamas propaganda factory has made the world’s media, not least the BBC, its public relations plaything, while the police and government have stood by as Islamists have demonstrated the total failure of counter-extremism policies.

One month on from the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history, we are where we were always going to be. Nothing Israel could have done or refrained from doing would have changed any of this. That’s because it isn’t about Israel’s response, which far from disproportionate has been mostly restrained and precise in an especially challenging theatre of war. It isn’t about humanitarian concern for Palestinians killed or Muslims oppressed. Marches for the 4,000 Palestinians killed by Bashar al-Assad or the one million Muslims held in concentration camps by China have been rather more sparsely attended. We know what it’s about. If Israel was the national homeland of the Sunni people, it could kill 30 times as many Palestinians and get 300 times less news coverage.

The world — not all of it, but enough of it — doesn’t like Jews. It doesn’t like them when they’re being attacked and it certainly doesn’t like them when they’re fighting back. The same world that paused a pandemic to tear up its post-racial settlement in favour of grisly, crank doctrines because a police officer in Minneapolis murdered a black man managed three or four days of head-shaking at the murders of 1,400 Jews before pivoting to condemn reprisals against the murderers.

It’s not that the world is particularly woke to anti-black or any other form of racism, but that it is particularly unwoke to anti-Jewish racism. There is an empathy gap when it comes to Jews, a mental or emotional distance from their suffering that is either not present with other groups or not as respectable to let slip. This may be a generational phenomenon. In the world the baby boomers grew up in, the Holocaust was the recent past. The war loomed over the culture and, in the liberal West at least, the death camps became the ultimate symbol of evil.

The TikTok generation are coming of age in a world where Israel is no longer seen as the miracle in the desert, the return of a nation to its homeland in the shadow of its near-extinction, but the racist oppressor of the indigenous Palestinians. They have no frame for understanding antisemitism because they have been taught that the world is divided into white victimisers and black and brown victims. Jews don’t fit into that formula, Israeli Jews certainly don’t, and nor do the Palestinians, but as the formula is all they know, it must be made to fit. Jews are the last minority it’s acceptable to hate, and not just acceptable but progressive. That’s why your teen is on TikTok telling Lily Ebert the Holocaust never happened.