Yom Hazikaron and the dangerous illusions of the modern west

In 2026, Yom Hazikaron—Israel’s National Day of Remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terror—begins at sundown on Monday 20 April and ends at nightfall on Tuesday 21 April, immediately before Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day.

Most non-Jewish readers will not know the Hebrew term. They should. For Yom Hazikaron offers more than an insight into Israel; it may offer a warning to the country you call home. This is the day on which Israel stops to honour those who died so that the nation might live. Sirens sound. Traffic halts. People step from their cars and stand in silence.

It is the expression of a people who understand, through hard experience, that memory is not sentimentalism, but survival. Israel pauses not merely to grieve, but to tell itself the truth: that freedom is never free, that security is never permanent, and that a nation which forgets what it owes its dead may one day fail the living as well. Yom HaZikaron is therefore not only a day of mourning. It is a day of national honesty, and a rebuke to societies soft enough to imagine that peace, order, and civilisation sustain themselves.

That seriousness is difficult for much of the modern West to comprehend because much of the modern West has succumbed to dangerous illusions. We have grown used to comfort and mistaken it for permanence. We have grown used to institutions and assumed they can function indefinitely without civic courage. We have grown used to peace and persuaded ourselves that peace is the natural condition of civilised life rather than an achievement that must be defended. Israelis know better. Yom HaZikaron sits immediately before Independence Day because in Israel memory and sovereignty cannot honestly be separated. The state’s existence is celebrated only after the cost of defending it is recalled.

This is not theatrical nationalism. It is strategic memory. Israel is a country in which history has never truly receded into the background. The enemies of the Jewish state have not politely retired from the field because the liberal West finds old struggles exhausting or embarrassing. Israelis understand, almost instinctively, what many in the comfortable and complacent West have forgotten: evil does not disappear because prosperous societies stop believing in it. Hatred does not lose its lethality because intellectuals rename it. A civilisation that forgets what it is defending will not defend it for long.

That lesson was driven home with barbaric clarity on 7 October 2023, when Hamas and other armed groups launched coordinated attacks on Israeli communities and military positions, killing around 1,200 people and abducting 251 hostages. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry described the events as attacks on civilian targets and military outposts in Israel. Whatever language some have since used to soften, relativise, or contextualise that day, the underlying reality is plain: Israelis were reminded that genocidal intent was not metaphorical, and that the old hatred was not a museum piece.

Yom Hazikaron therefore has meaning well beyond Israel. It is a warning against civilisational amnesia. It tells us that remembrance is not merely ceremonial or therapeutic. Properly understood, remembrance is protective. It disciplines the mind against fantasy. It teaches that security is fragile, that courage is still necessary, and that self-defence is not an embarrassment but a duty. By contrast, many Western societies now prefer euphemism to clarity. They are more comfortable condemning strength than confronting aggression, more willing to explain away fanatical violence than to admit that some enemies really do mean what they say.

The United Kingdom offers one of the clearest examples of this malaise. Douglas Murray wrote in early 2024, “I’m not sure I recognise this country anymore,” and said he was “embarrassed by modern Britain.” More recently, in 2025, he described antisemitism as “an early-warning siren for a sickness in society.” Those two observations belong together. The first speaks to national disorientation; the second to the symptom that most clearly reveals it. Britain has shown repeated signs of a society losing confidence in its own moral vocabulary, especially when confronted by aggressive sectarianism, antisemitism, and imported ideological conflict. That erosion has not remained theoretical for British Jews. The Community Security Trust recorded 3,528 antisemitic incidents in the UK in 2024, the second-highest annual total it has ever recorded, and linked the persistence of that level directly to the aftermath of the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023.

Nor is Britain alone. In July 2024, Paris Chief Rabbi Moshe Sebbag said, “It is clear today that there is no future for Jews in France,” and advised young Jews to go to Israel or to a safer country. That is a devastating statement for any rabbi to make about one of Europe’s previously great nations. But its significance extends beyond the Jewish community. If Jews no longer feel safe in a Western democracy, then the problem is not merely Jewish. It is civilisational. What is happening to Jews in parts of the West is not peripheral to the health of those nations. It is existential to it.

Australia should resist the temptation to imagine that this is all happening somewhere else. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry recorded 2,062 anti-Jewish incidents in the year to 30 September 2024, up from 495 in the previous corresponding period—an increase of 316 per cent. In its 2025 incidents report, ECAJ said overall totals remained about three times higher than any year prior to the global wave that followed 7 October. This is not a minor fluctuation. It is a moral and civic alarm bell.

The horror at Bondi made that alarm impossible to ignore. The attack targeted a Chanukah gathering organised by Sydney’s Jewish community and left fifteen people dead. Authorities and community leaders treated it as a targeted antisemitic terrorist attack. Yet even after such bloodshed, the Online Hate Prevention Institute’s Bondi report, led by my friend Dr Andre Oboler, found that antisemitism intensified further online. It documented what the Institute described as an “all-out assault on the Jewish community”, including glorification of the massacre, justification, denial, minimisation, conspiracy claims, and broader antisemitic abuse in discussions of the attack and its aftermath. That should shame us. A decent society should respond to the murder of Jews with clarity and solidarity. Too many Australians responded instead with equivocation, denial, or moral inversion.

This is one reason Yom Hazikaron deserves the attention of non-Jewish Australians. It is not simply a Jewish day, nor only an Israeli one. It embodies a discipline of memory that free societies desperately need. It asks what happens when a people forget the price of its liberties. It asks whether national life can endure when citizens no longer know what previous generations sacrificed to preserve. It asks whether comfort has made us unserious, and whether historical illiteracy has left us unable to recognise danger until it is already at the door.

The current war with Iran sharpens that question further. At minimum, the legal foundation of self-defence is not controversial: Article 51 of the UN Charter preserves the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence. The harder legal debate concerns anticipatory self-defence. Here it is wrong simply to assert that every pre-emptive strike is unlawful. Serious legal scholars disagree. Michael Schmitt of the Lieber Institute at West Point has argued that Israel’s claim of anticipatory self-defence is at least legally arguable under a “last window of opportunity” approach, while other scholars have rejected that view and argued that such strikes fall outside the accepted law of self-defence. The point is not that debate is absent. It is that Israel’s position is not fanciful, and certainly not beyond the bounds of serious international-law argument when assessed against Iran’s capabilities, declared hostility, proxy warfare, and longstanding eliminationist posture toward the Jewish state.

What is most confronting, in Britain, France, Australia and elsewhere, is that many people remain blissfully unaware. They do not understand how thin the veneer of order can be. They do not see how quickly hatred can move from rhetoric to intimidation and from intimidation to bloodshed. They do not realise that memory is one of the few things that stands between a serious nation and a frivolous one.

That is why Yom Hazikaron matters to the wider West. It reminds us that memory is not passive. It is an active moral safeguard. Israel remembers because it must. The West, increasingly, forgets because it perceives that it can. But that luxury may not endure. Australians, like other citizens of the comfortable, complacent, and historically illiterate West, have much to learn from Yom HaZikaron.

A people that loses memory may eventually lose judgement. A people that loses judgement may one day lose far more. And by then, as Israel knows too well, the lesson will be no less true for having been learned too late

Colonel Michael Scott CSC retired from the Australian Army in 2026 after more than three decades of service. His career included operational deployments to East Timor, Bougainville, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a 27-month posting in Jerusalem as Head of Military for the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation, operating in Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt.

He is the founder of The 2023 Foundation, a non-Jewish-led initiative dedicated to combating antisemitism through education and lived experience. Michael is the author of A Light Still Burns: Israel and the Values Worth Defending, with his second book, When Our Light Is Tested: The Bondi Massacre and the Choices Ahead, to be released in April 2026.