The Holocaust deniers claim: “Israeli treatment of Gaza is equivalent to the Holocaust. The blockade, the military operations, the civilian casualties, and the displacement constitute a genocide of the Palestinian people that matches the Nazi treatment of Jews. The Holocaust frame condemns Israel by its own logic.”
This is the most live and the most politically charged of the leaves in this section. It is also the leaf most likely to be advanced by people who do not consider themselves Holocaust deniers and who would not subscribe to the right-coded denial elsewhere on this site. The claim sits in current political discourse, particularly since 7 October 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza, and has been variously made by serious political and legal actors as well as by less serious ones. The proper response is to take the claim seriously enough to examine what it does and does not assert, and to be clear about which questions it engages and which it side-steps.
The current Gaza war (since October 2023) has, as of the time of writing, killed approximately 50,000 to 60,000 Palestinians according to the figures of the Gaza Health Ministry, with substantial destruction of housing, infrastructure and the civilian fabric of the territory. The figures are contested at the margin (the Gaza Health Ministry’s methodology, the proportion of combatant versus civilian deaths) but the order of magnitude is settled. The civilian death toll, the destruction of Gaza, and the conduct of the Israeli military operation are subjects of legitimate political and legal debate, including formal proceedings at the International Court of Justice (the South Africa case under the Genocide Convention, brought December 2023) and the International Criminal Court (the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant issued November 2024). These are serious legal venues conducting serious legal analysis. The outcomes of those processes will be determined by the courts on the evidence presented.
What the comparison does and does not establish
The comparison between the Israeli operation in Gaza and the Holocaust requires the listener to compare structural features, not just casualty figures. The Holocaust killed approximately six million Jews specifically as Jews, with the explicit goal of eliminating the Jewish people from Europe and ultimately from the earth, through dedicated killing infrastructure (gas chambers, mass shooting sites, gas vans, deportation networks), with no military rationale (the killing accelerated as Germany was losing the war and could derive no benefit from it), over a period of approximately six years. The Israeli operation in Gaza is a war between a state and an armed organisation (Hamas) that operates within and from a civilian population, conducted in response to a specific attack (7 October 2023, killing approximately 1,200 Israelis and taking approximately 250 hostages), with stated military objectives (the destruction of Hamas’s military and political capacity, the recovery of the hostages), and with a chain of decision and accountability that includes Israeli courts, Israeli political opposition, US and other allied diplomatic pressure, and international legal bodies.
The two operations are different in structure regardless of the ultimate moral assessment of either. The legal question of whether the Israeli operation meets the Genocide Convention’s specific requirements (the proof of specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such) is being adjudicated by the ICJ; the moral question of whether the operation is proportionate, justified or restrained is debated globally. The historical comparison with the Holocaust is a separate kind of question. The Holocaust as historical event is the prototypical case from which the modern legal concept of genocide was derived; subsequent operations are measured against that prototype. Asserting equivalence as a starting point dissolves the comparison rather than conducting it.
The “by its own logic” framing
The denier framing of “the Holocaust frame condemns Israel by its own logic” deploys the moral authority of the Holocaust against the state most associated with its memory. The framing is rhetorically powerful and deliberately so. Whether it is analytically correct depends on whether the structural conditions for the comparison are met. Several features of the comparison are weak: the existence of a war initiated by an armed attack on Israel, the existence of military objectives, the reciprocal violence (Hamas’s continued rocket fire, military operations from civilian areas, hostage-taking), the international diplomatic and legal context. Several features of the comparison are stronger: the substantial civilian casualties, the destruction of housing and infrastructure, the displacement of much of the Gaza population, the partial blockade and its effects on food and medical supply. The honest engagement with the comparison addresses these features one by one, on the evidence, not by acclamation.
The Holocaust comparison has been rejected by many serious commentators, including many serious critics of Israeli policy, on the grounds that it muddles rather than clarifies the analysis. Norman Finkelstein and Avi Shlaim, both substantial critics of Israel, have at various points argued against the Holocaust analogy as a category error. Holocaust scholars have been particularly cautious about it. The proper distinction is that genuinely awful Israeli conduct can be condemned on its own terms without requiring the analogy to the Holocaust to give the condemnation force. The analogy is rhetorical leverage, not analytical clarity. Its use is also not generally productive in actually changing Israeli political conduct; it tends to harden positions on both sides rather than open the space for political resolution.
The denier-adjacent versus genuine criticism distinction
This leaf has to draw a careful distinction. Genuine criticism of Israeli conduct in Gaza, including criticism that uses strong language and serious moral charges, is part of legitimate political and legal discourse. The South Africa ICJ case is conducted by serious lawyers under serious international legal procedure. The criticism of Israeli policy by Israeli human rights organisations (B’Tselem, Yesh Din, the Israeli Section of Amnesty International) is informed and rigorous. None of this is denialism.
The denier-adjacent move is the use of the Holocaust analogy in conjunction with claims that diminish the historical Holocaust itself. The pattern often runs: “Israel is committing a Holocaust against the Palestinians; the Jewish people use the Holocaust to deflect criticism; the Holocaust narrative is itself a political construct of the Zionist movement”. The first claim by itself is contested but legitimate political discourse; the combination with the second and third moves the discussion into denial. The leaf addresses the combination, not the first claim by itself.
Why the claim is harmful
The claim is harmful, in its denier-adjacent form, because it uses the moral authority of the Holocaust as a weapon against the historical record of the Holocaust. The conduct of the Israeli state in Gaza, whatever it ultimately turns out to have been legally and morally, is a matter for legal and political adjudication on its own terms. Importing the Holocaust analogy serves to inflate the rhetorical case at the cost of analytical clarity, and in some hands serves the further purpose of diminishing the historical Holocaust by making it just another instance of state violence among many. The proper response is to keep the historical record and the present-day political-legal questions analytically separate, to use the Holocaust as a reference for understanding genocide as a category, and to assess present-day conduct on the standards proper to it.
What is being asserted: that the Holocaust is being repeated, that Israeli conduct meets the genocide definition, or that the Holocaust is irrelevant to present-day comparisons? The three claims have different evidence, different audiences and different consequences. Which is being made?
See also
Sources
- 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
- International Criminal Court, arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, 21 November 2024, https://www.icc-cpi.int
- Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, United Nations, 9 December 1948, with the specific intent requirement (Article II)
- Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944, with the original definition of genocide
- Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 2001, on the use of the Holocaust as a comparative reference
- Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, updated edition, Penguin, 2014
- Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, second edition, Verso, 2003
- 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
- Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, Cambridge University Press, 2005
- Omer Bartov, “Genocide and the Holocaust: Arguments and Comparisons”, in Journal of Genocide Research, 25:3 to 4, 2023
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “What is Genocide?” and “Antisemitism”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org