In recent months, a deeply troubling narrative has gained traction: the comparison of the Holocaust – the systematic genocide of six million Jews by Nazi Germany – to the current war in Gaza. This comparison is not only historically false but morally perverse.
There is no equivalence between the deliberate, industrial-scale extermination of an entire people and the tragic civilian casualties that occur as the consequence of war. The Holocaust was not a conflict; it was a genocide – an ideologically driven effort to erase Jews from the face of the earth. Civilians dying in Gaza, while heartbreaking, are casualties of a war that Hamas initiated. That distinction matters.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a brutal and unprovoked attack on Israeli civilians. It was the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Since then, Hamas has continued its campaign of terror – firing rockets at Israeli cities, using hospitals and schools as military bases, and holding Israeli men, women, and children hostage in Gaza, in violation of every moral and legal code. Hamas thrives on Palestinian suffering, embedding itself within civilian infrastructure to maximize both tactical advantage and media outrage.
Civilian deaths in Gaza not due to an Israeli 'genocide campaign'
Civilian deaths in Gaza are not the result of a campaign of genocide by Israel. They are the tragic byproduct of Hamas’s deliberate strategy to provoke war and shield itself behind its own people. To weaponize Holocaust memory against Jews and the Jewish state – by accusing Israel of perpetrating something akin to what we ourselves suffered – is a grotesque inversion of truth and morality.
If one must search for comparisons, Gaza is not Auschwitz. It is not the Warsaw Ghetto. A more fitting comparison would be to any modern war where civilians, sadly, pay a heavy price because terrorist groups and authoritarian regimes use them as pawns, whether in Syria, Yemen, or Afghanistan.
In each case, the loss of innocent life is devastating. But we do not call these events genocide. And we should not call what happened in Gaza one either.
To exploit the Holocaust as a political weapon is to desecrate the memory of its victims and insult the survivors who still walk among us. It is an affront not only to Jews but to historical truth.
Those who claim to care about Palestinian lives should focus their outrage on the regime that governs them with cruelty, endangers them with its tactics, and refuses to release the Israeli hostages whose continued captivity prolongs this war.
History deserves accuracy. And the Jewish people deserve better than to see the greatest tragedy of our past twisted into a weapon against our present.
The writer made aliyah from France in 2022. She currently works as the press and media coordinator for the Zionist Organization of America, where she advocates for Zionist values and supports pro-Israel initiatives globally.