At the end of 1948, on the occasion of Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States, then leader of the Freedom Party (Herut), The New York Times published an open letter signed by Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, and other prominent members of the Jewish community in the United States. With reference to the massacre of the inhabitants of the Palestinian Deir Yassin village perpetrated by members of the Irgun, the paramilitary precursor of the Freedom Party, reported earlier that year also in The New York Times, the authors of the letter describe the organisation as ‘closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties’.
Fast forward to 2023 and the unconscionable massacre of 1,220 Israeli Jews in an incursion by Hamas militants on October 7. An attack that spawned the unprecedented retaliation that has unfolded in the two years since, with the Israel Defence Force (IDF) laying waste to the Gaza Strip and killing about 112, 000 people, according to the latest estimates by the renowned Max-Planck Institute. After almost two years of warfare, a United Nations Commission of Inquiry concluded that in all likelihood the attack on Gaza constituted genocide—a finding supported by, among other things, a pattern of casualties indicating that a staggering 27% of those killed are children under 15 and a further 24% women. Since the ceasefire agreement in October, there have been far fewer outright killings, but the death toll keeps rising from disease, exposure and the tactical withholding of aid.
Only five weeks after the October 7 attack, a group of prominent Jewish academics, including scholars of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, published another open letter, this time in The New York Review of Books. In it, they expressed their ‘dismay and disappointment at political leaders and notable figures invoking Holocaust memory to explain the current crisis in Gaza and Israel’.
The two letters perfectly illustrate the shift in discourse among voices critical of Israeli politics over the intervening 75 years. In 1948, a time much closer to the actual historical events, comparing Zionists to Nazis did not cause a major uproar. The decades that followed produced an extraordinary body of research into the Holocaust, which has since been canonised as the unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe of the 20th century, which makes using it for political analogies fraught. The letters also exemplify the futility of these public interventions (though that does not necessarily make them less meaningful). Menachem Begin became Israel’s prime minister from 1977 to 1983, and the genocide in Gaza continues to be freely referenced to the Holocaust by Israel and its supporters, as well as Israel-critical voices.
Not surprisingly, given that its very raison d’etre is the Holocaust and the desire to never again be a victim, Israel has a long track record of denouncing its Arab opponents as Nazis, from Menachem Begin comparing Palestinian Leader Yassir Arafat with Hitler to Benjamin Netanyahu calling Hamas ‘new Nazis’. It is a blunt but effective catch-all propaganda tool to justify the brutal oppression of Palestinians and smear opposing viewpoints, tapping into the deep, collective trauma of the annihilation of the European Jews. Not analogies as such, these statements create equivalences through a chain of associations. Israeli historian Raz Segal pointed out as early as October 2023 that ‘the fantasy of “fighting Nazis”’, the epitome of total evil, which cannot be restrained by normal rules of warfare, provides much of the rhetorical justification of Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
Yet comparing the Gaza genocide to the biggest, most iconic genocide in history is a temptation that many Israel-critical voices can also not resist. Raz Segal himself contends that Israelis view Palestinians in the same way Nazis saw Jews. Consider also the now infamous essay in the New Yorker, In the Shadow of the Holocaust, by Masha Gessen, published less than two months after Israeli forces started bombing Gaza, in which she compared Israel’s actions with the ‘liquidation’ of Jewish ghettos by the Nazis. These comparisons continue to shock and have consequences, such as rescinded job offers, withdrawn invitations and cancelled awards ceremonies. A reference to Gessen’s analogy by political philosopher Jason Stanley at a public talk, on invitation by the Jewish community in Frankfurt, for example, caused a major scandal only late last year.
Historical analogies are rooted in the belief that history, if it is not repeating itself, as in the famous dictum by Karl Marx, then it, at least, is rhyming with the present—a bon mot attributed to Mark Twain. Either way, we are asked to look at the past with the purpose of illuminating the now. The notion that historical precedents can explain the bewildering times in which we often find ourselves is a seductive proposition. A proposition, though, that begs the question: Are comparisons of Gaza with Nazism or the Holocaust an apt instrument to explain this historical moment?
Referencing Nazism to criticise Israel’s conduct in Gaza is problematic for both pragmatic and moral reasons, particularly if one accepts that what happens in Gaza amounts to an attempted genocide. Instrumentalising a unique catastrophe like the Holocaust for political gain doesn’t do justice to the victims of the Shoah, nor the victims of the current conflict in Gaza.
On a simple rhetorical level, while these analogies are obviously designed as provocations, the political stir they cause obscures the situation they seek to illuminate in the first place. The heated discussions about the validity of this or that Holocaust analogy can quickly become a navel-gazing exercise that deflects from the real suffering of the Palestinians rather than highlighting it. But there are also more fundamental problems.
Using the Holocaust as part of the criticism of the Jewish State is, in its simplistic role reversal of victim and perpetrator, deceptively appealing. Yet, given the overwhelming scale and multifaceted nature of the Holocaust, these analogies are necessarily reductionist. In his recent reappraisal of Theodor W. Adorno’s influential 1966 radio address, Education after Auschwitz, historian Dirk Moses contends that while for Adorno ‘the Holocaust was morally and historically distinct, he noted that barbarism—the old-fashioned term he used in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg (Socialism or Barbarism, she asked Europeans in 1915)—was far broader than Auschwitz alone’. Despite this broadening of the notion of the Holocaust, Adorno tellingly avoids direct comparisons. Instead, he sees an underlying structural interconnectedness and operates with terms such as ‘societal propensity’ when discussing the origins of the Armenian genocide or ‘historical context’ when linking the Holocaust to the danger of annihilation in the atomic age.
Direct analogies with Nazism tend to narrow a complex whole into a universalised part, which becomes code for evil without contributing to a deeper understanding of the complex societal causes of the situation. Gessen’s ghetto analogy is a case in point. The historical parallels seem obvious: both situations concern a comparatively small number of militants embedded in a civilian population imprisoned in an overcrowded urban environment and facing the onslaught of an overwhelming military force indifferent to the civilian death toll. However, does conflating the roles of Jewish resistance with Hamas and the Wehrmacht with the IDF further our understanding of either historical moment?
In the context of the purpose and motivation of the Nazi perpetrators and the Israeli state, the analogy suddenly does not work as well. The European Jews were pursued with a ferocious irrationality to the point that it was detrimental to Germany’s national interests and war effort at the time. The Holocaust did not yield a territorial advantage, and while there was some economic gain for the non-Jewish German population, this was not the driver of the genocide. The sole purpose of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, for example, was to deport the surviving Jews to the Treblinka and Majdanek death camps, where most perished.
Israel’s pursuit of the Palestinians, on the other hand, is not irrational. The country conflicts with an oppressed and disenfranchised people who wish to redress historical injustices and reclaim territory and political agency. Israel’s aim is to fully control or at least destroy the little that was left of the territorial integrity of Gaza (and quite likely the West Bank also). Genocide (if one accepts the UN Commission of Enquiry’s findings) is a means to an end.
Given the longstanding support of the Palestinians by the progressive West as part of global anti-colonial struggles, it is surprising that genocides that occurred in colonial contexts are still not more readily used as historical reference points. Much of the discussion about Gaza, if it does not refer to Nazism, seems to take place in a history-free environment, as if the nature of this conflict has been entirely unprecedented. Israel’s use of sophisticated AI-powered surveillance and target selection technology, highlighted by Paul James in this publication last year, certainly adds an untested level of dehumanisation to the conflict. The question is, though, whether this technology constitutes an unparalleled, new realm of violence or whether it can be understood as the latest high-tech iteration of instrumental reason, and as such is, in the words of Dirk Moses, summarising Adorno, another ‘pathological manifestation of a crisis of modernity’.
In that sense, history can still retain its explanatory power to highlight interrelated phenomena. One example is the anti-colonial struggle against the French in Algiers, the historical reference point in Avner Ofrath’s long essay Anatomy der Gewalt (Anatomy of Violence), published in 2024. Or, closer to home and more recent, the work of Jeff Sparrow, who has drawn convincing parallels between the history of genocidal settler-colonialism in Australia and the conflict in Gaza. It is this line of enquiry that, being closely related to the realities in Gaza, promises more perceptive insights than relapsing into weak Nazi analogies.