Why You Must Never, Under Any Circumstances, Compare Israel To Nazi Germany
In 2023, while accepting the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, Masha Gessen, whose grandfather was killed in the Holocaust, spoke about the difficulty of certain comparisons:
Comparison is the way we know the world […] and yet there is a rule — and it is certainly not unique to Germany — that you don’t compare things to the Holocaust […]
We imagine the Holocaust in great detail, but we conceive of it as fundamentally unimaginable […] But anything that happens in the present is, by definition, imaginable […] Anything that is imaginable by the very fact of being seen, heard, witnessed, strikes us as being incomparable to the Holocaust.
Roughly eight billion people agree that the Holocaust is a stain on human history. But only around 245,000 of them saw, heard and witnessed it. For the rest of us, the Holocaust, to varying degrees, is an abstraction, an atrocity-shaped hole in our collective consciousness.
As Arthur Koestler put it in 1944:
Seventeen is a figure which I know intimately, like a friend; fifty billion is just a sound. A dog run over by a car upsets our emotional balance and digestion; three million Jews killed in Poland cause but a moderate uneasiness. Statistics don’t bleed; it is the detail which counts.
Sane, well-adjusted people can’t imagine the hatred required to murder people by the millions. We’ve never been so twisted by rage and fear that we’d excuse an unlimited amount of cruelty. We’ve never been so warped by nationalism that we could treat millions of people as subhuman. So it’s hard to believe that the people who did these things were real in the same sense that you and I are.
Sure, we all know the Nazis and their crimes were evil. But we don’t seriously believe anybody today could compare, right?
Sadly, the answer to that question is “no.”
In 2025, Nazi comparisons have become so cliché that some people wouldn’t recognise a Nazi salute if it smacked them right in the inauguration.
Obama is Hitler, anti-smoking campaigners are Nazis, schmaltzy Hallmark movies are “fascist propaganda,” even the descendants of Holocaust survivors have been getting in on the action.
In 1948, with the horrors of the Holocaust fresh in their minds, a group of twenty-eight Jewish intellectuals wrote a letter to the New York Times warning about “the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of […] a political party closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”
In the 1980s, Yeshayahu Liebowitz, an Orthodox Jewish intellectual, argued that the president of the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to legalise torture specifically against Palestinian Arabs showed that “a Nazi-like mentality exists in [Israel].”
In 2011, Holocaust survivor Yehuda Elkana, explained that “Palestinians should be protected from Israel’s occupation as the violence is no less brutal than Nazi occupation.”
In 2025, protestors like Amram Zahavi and Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, the son of a Holocaust survivor, argue that “Israel has become a Nazi society.”
But fear not, comparisons like these are completely baseless.
Lest we forget, the Nazis justified murdering Jewish children by saying things like:
I did not consider myself justified in exterminating the men […] and then allowing their children to grow up to wreak vengeance on our children and grandchildren. The difficult decision had to be taken to make these people disappear from the face of the Earth.
Whereas people like Rabbi Yaron Reuven justify killing Palestinian children by saying:
You may think you’re being merciful to a child, but you’re not. You’re being vicious to the ultimate victim this child will grow up to kill […] erase every memory of “Amalek” — meaning men, women and children do not have the right to exist.
The Nazis committed unspeakable atrocities in concentration camps like Auschwitz. Whereas Israeli politicians only use Auschwitz as inspiration for the atrocities they hope to commit in Gaza, “the whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz.”
Hitler cruelly mocked the plight of the Jews in Germany, arguing that if European countries truly believed in the value of Jewish lives, they would be eager to accept them. Whereas Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said…well, you get the idea by now:
From Israel’s perspective, there is no objection to Gazans leaving […] but there are no countries in the world willing to accept them.
So please, make painstaking distinctions between the Nazis’ “Hunger Plan,” which systematically starved Jewish civilians, and the Israeli government’s longstanding efforts to put Palestinians “on a diet.”
Resist the temptation to compare the people who believed they were the master race to the people who boast about being the “chosen people.”
Avoid the nearly one-to-one similarities between the rhetoric of the people who tried to obliterate the Jewish people in the 1940s and the people trying to obliterate the Palestinian people today.
Because, as Western governments have reminded us time and time again, the way we speak about the people committing genocide is of far greater concern than the genocide itself.
Comparison is the way we know the world, so it’s natural to compare atrocities from our present to atrocities from our past.
But Godwin’s law aside, there’s good reason to avoid this barely avoidable comparison.
Because for anybody whose algorithms and influencers shield them from the crimes Israel is committing, for anybody who doesn’t understand that there is no such thing as a perfect victim, for anybody who still believes, despite all evidence to the contrary, that criticising the Israeli government has anything to do with hating Jews, the comparison sounds hateful.
It sounds like a vicious, mean-spirited exaggeration against a persecuted people, it sounds like attacking a victim with the worst crimes of their abuser, and this offers an easy way out for people who don’t want to acknowledge what Israel is doing now and has been doing for decades.
And as the acknowledgements of this genocide become louder and more common, as the crimes taking place in Gaza and the West Bank become too frequent and well documented to ignore, as the international community slowly but surely develops a moral backbone, it’s more important than ever to be as clear as possible.
The soldiers who fired on starving, unarmed civilians as they queued for food need no comparisons, the testimonies of healthcare workers who treated children with sniper wounds speak for themselves, and the reservists who were so traumatised by what they saw and did in Gaza that they have refused to return to duty, some even comparing themselves to Nazis, tell you all you need to know about what’s happening there.
Some crimes are easier to process through comparison, but the worst are heavy enough to stand alone.
I was beginning to wonder, until I reached the end.
In 1977 I had the privilege to travel in Europe and Israel. To walk through Auschwitz and Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Tel-Lakish. And Masada.
I understand the promise "Never agan." But why should it only apply to one group, one people? What about the Roma who also perished? I barely made it through "The Killing Fields," when it later came out about Cambodia. Angola, Rhodesia, Gaza, the the American Westward Expansion and Colonialism in general.
From ancient ruins created by Babylonian armies to mounds of debris from modern missiles, we humans insist on trying to destroy others, erase them from maps and consciousness. But as John Donne reminds us, we are all diminished by such efforts. The death bell tolls for us all.
Yup.