Why is the 27th January an important date and why do we have to look at the Israel - Hamas war from the perspective of both parties? 

The term "holocaust" originates from the ancient Greek and means "COMPLETELY BURNT".

Before the 2WW, the term was used to describe the extermination of entire ethnic groups. During the 2WW, and since 1945, much of the world has often used it synonymously with the murder of Jews in Europe during the period of "National Socialism" [Nazism]. In Hebrew, this is specifically referred to as the "Shoah”, meaning "catastrophe".

The systematic marginalisation and persecution of Jews and other groups began after the National Socialism party seized power in Germany in 1933. The Jews were vilified as an inferior race, were disenfranchised and deprived of their property; from 1941 onwards, they were forced to wear the Star of David on their clothing. Many Jews were deported and imprisoned in ghettos or murdered in concentration camps.

The systematic genocide of Jews, along with the murder of Sinti (2) and Roma, politically persecuted individuals, and other groups, resulted in the killing of nearly six million people just between 1933 and 1945 of which nearly three million of them perished in the extermination camps. The biggest extermination camp was Auschwitz.

The 27th January is now recognised internationally as Holocaust Remembrance day.

This day reflects:

- 27th January 1945, the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated;

- 27th January 1996, Germany Nation Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialist introduced by the then president Roman Herzog; - 27th January 2005, the United Nations declared this day as the International Day of Commemoration of the victims of holocaust.

The education of the young generation about the holocaust, or Germany’s Nazi past, is still not a compulsory element of the schools’ curriculum in Europe. It is in the German federal states, and particularly in countries like Italy, Slovenia, Switzerland, ... Consequently, many of the young generation do not understand what happened to these minority groups before, after and during the 2WW.

Make no mistake, when Hamas - without any provocation and out of the blue - attacked Israel on 7th November 2023, killed over 1400 Israeli civilians and took over 200 hostages, this was the new Israeli 21st century holocaust. How many more need to die to annihilate Israel as a nation and rob them of their promised land.

Israel has wanted to make peace for decades, but this was thwarted by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. [But this is another story.]

Background information:

[1] The Nazi Holocaust

Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, disability or sexual orientation. 

Estimates of the number of Romani victims range from 250,000 to 500,000.

The European Jewish population was reduced from 9,740,000 to 3,642,000; the world's Jewish population was reduced by one-third, from roughly 16.6 million in 1939 to about 11 million in 1946.

 In Poland – home of Europe's largest Jewish community before the war – the Nazis murdered 3.3 million Jews, or 90 percent of its Jewish population.

 Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Lithuania, Bohemia, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Latvia lost over 70 percent of their Jewish populations; in Belgium, Romania, Luxembourg, Norway, and Estonia, the figure was about 50 percent. Over one-third of the Soviet Union's Jews were murdered; France lost about 25 percent of its Jewish population, Italy between 15% and 20%.

Its second goal was to eliminate Slavs from Central and Eastern Europe and to create a Lebensraum for Aryans. The Slavs were one of the most widely persecuted groups during the war, with many Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Slovenes, Serbs and others killed by the Nazis.

Between 1941 and 1945, approximately three million Ukrainian and other gentiles were murdered as part of Nazi extermination policies in present-day Ukraine.

The Germans killed an estimated 2.8 million Soviet POWs by starvation, exposure, and execution over an eight-month period in 1941–42. [4]

In 1995, the Russian Academy of Sciences reported that civilian deaths in the occupied USSR, including Jews, at the hands of the Germans totalled 13.7 million dead (20% of the population of 68 million). [Source: Wikipedia]

[2] The Sinti are a subgroup of Romani people mostly found in Germany. They arrived in Austria and Germany in the Late Middle Ages as part of the Romani emigration from the Indian Subcontinent, eventually splitting into two groups: Eftavagarja ("the Seven Caravans") and Estraxarja ("from Austria"). [Source: Wikipedia]