The Holocaust deniers claim: “Israel is doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews. The walls, the checkpoints, the demolitions, the targeted killings, the imprisonment without trial: every feature of Nazi treatment of Jews has its Israeli parallel against Palestinians. The pattern is exact.”
This is the closely related sister claim to leaf 523 on Gaza-Holocaust equivalence and leaf 525 on the Einsatzgruppen comparison. The argument here is broader: not just that the current Gaza war is a Holocaust, but that the entire structural pattern of Israeli conduct toward Palestinians since 1948 reproduces the Nazi pattern toward Jews. The argument requires the listener to identify, point by point, structural parallels between specific Israeli policies and specific Nazi policies. When the parallels are examined point by point, the structural identities the deniers assert do not hold up.
The point-by-point comparison
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped German Jews of citizenship, prohibited intermarriage with non-Jews, and reduced the Jewish population to a status of subjects without political rights in their country of birth. The legal structure of Israel includes a Law of Return (1950) granting automatic citizenship to Jewish immigrants and a Citizenship Law (1952) granting Israeli citizenship to the approximately 156,000 Arabs who remained within Israel after the 1948 war and to their descendants. There are now approximately 2.1 million Arab citizens of Israel (about 21 percent of the population), with full voting rights, with parliamentary representation in the Knesset, with access to Israeli courts including the Supreme Court, with the right to speak Arabic in official contexts, and with the right to travel within Israel and abroad. They have served as Cabinet ministers, as Supreme Court justices, as ambassadors, as senior IDF officers. The Israeli legal regime towards its Arab citizens has serious problems (the discriminatory effect of various land, planning and admissions policies has been the subject of continuous criticism by Israeli human rights organisations), but it is not analogous to the Nuremberg framework. The two are different kinds of legal arrangement.
The Nazi ghettoisation of European Jewry from 1939 to 1941 forcibly concentrated Jews into closed urban districts, controlled their food supply at sub-survival levels, prohibited their movement outside the ghettos under penalty of death, and used the resulting concentration as the precondition for deportation to the killing centres. The Israeli system in the West Bank and Gaza includes a separation barrier (built principally between 2002 and 2010), a checkpoint regime, restrictions on Palestinian movement between zones, a partial blockade of Gaza (since 2007), and various administrative restrictions. The system is the subject of intense criticism, including by Israeli legal and human rights organisations; B’Tselem and other groups have characterised the cumulative effect as apartheid since 2021. None of this is analogous to the Warsaw Ghetto or the Łódź Ghetto in their structure or purpose. The ghettos were the way-station to extermination; the Israeli system, whatever its other features, is not such a way-station, since no extermination programme exists. The arrival of new Palestinian children at Israeli checkpoints does not lead to their deportation to a killing facility. The arrival of Jewish children at the Warsaw Ghetto entrance led, in 1942 to 1943, predominantly to that result.
The Einsatzgruppen and the Operation Reinhard apparatus were, as the previous leaf set out, dedicated killing organisations whose explicit purpose was the elimination of Jewish civilians. The IDF is a conventional military force whose operations have produced civilian casualties, sometimes in large numbers. The two are different kinds of organisation in different relations to their target populations.
The Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, Chełmno and Majdanek facilities were dedicated killing centres with gas chambers and crematoria, processing approximately 2.8 million Jews to their deaths. There is no Israeli analogue of these facilities. The Israeli prison system holds approximately 5,000 to 8,000 Palestinian prisoners at any time (the figure has risen since October 2023), some under administrative detention without formal charge, on conditions that are the subject of substantial criticism (by Israeli prison watchdogs, by international observers, by Palestinian advocacy groups). The criticism is legitimate and warrants attention. The criticism does not establish an analogue to the killing centres, which is a different kind of facility doing different kinds of thing.
The structural test
The structural test of any genocide claim is the test of specific intent: is the destroying actor seeking to destroy the targeted group, in whole or in substantial part, as such. The Holocaust meets the test definitively; it is the prototypical case. The Israeli policy regime does not meet the test on the standard reading; the substantial Palestinian population growth (from approximately 1.4 million in 1948 to approximately 14 million across the territories and the diaspora today) is itself one indicator that the regime is not pursuing population destruction in the relevant sense. This does not absolve the regime of its specific wrongdoings, including the war crimes that are the subject of the current ICC proceedings; war crimes are a real category of conduct that is not the same as genocide. The Genocide Convention’s careful definition is what allows international law to distinguish genocide from other serious wrongs; collapsing the categories blunts the legal tool.
Where the Genocide Convention test is being made in the current Gaza context (the South Africa case at the ICJ), it is being made on the specific evidence of the current Gaza war, not on the broader pattern of Israeli policy since 1948. The legal proceedings will turn on whether the specific intent is established for the current operation; the proceedings have not yet reached judgment as of the time of writing. Whatever they ultimately conclude, they do not retroactively turn the seventy-five years of Israeli-Palestinian relations into a Holocaust analogue. The wider equivalence claim is not a legal claim; it is a rhetorical one.
Why the claim is harmful
The claim is harmful for the same reasons as the related leaves: it serves to dilute the historical record of the Holocaust by making it just one instance of what state actors generally do; it weaponises the moral authority of the Holocaust against the Jewish state and (by implication) against the wider Jewish community associated with that state; and it degrades the analytical quality of contemporary criticism of Israeli policy by reducing it to emotional invocation. The proper criticism of Israeli policy is detailed, evidenced and conducted on the standards proper to the relevant body of law (international humanitarian law for the conduct of military operations; international human rights law for the treatment of civilian populations; international refugee law for the question of return). None of this requires the Holocaust analogy. The analogy adds rhetorical heat without analytical clarity, at the cost of degrading two important historical and political vocabularies at once.
What does the Genocide Convention actually require for a finding of genocide? Where in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship are the specific tests of the Convention being made? On what specific structural feature is the Holocaust comparison being drawn?
See also
Sources
- Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, United Nations, 9 December 1948, with the specific intent requirement (Article II)
- International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), proceedings from December 2023, https://www.icj-cij.org
- Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, updated edition, Penguin, 2014
- Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881 to 2001, Vintage, 2001
- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Metropolitan Books, 2020
- B’Tselem, “A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid”, 12 January 2021, https://www.btselem.org
- Amnesty International, Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity, February 2022
- Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, April 2021
- Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 2001, on the comparative analysis of genocide
- Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Arabs in Israel”, https://www.gov.il/en, on the legal status of Arab citizens of Israel
- Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, https://www.adalah.org, on the discrimination claims within the Israeli legal system
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “What is Genocide?” and “Nuremberg Laws”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org