Recent commentary on the war between Israel and Hamas, including in the Listener, reaches selectively into Holocaust history to proffer two dismaying comparisons: the first, between Israel and the Hamas terrorists, whose October 7 campaign of murder, rape and torture caused the current war; and the second, between Nazi Germany and Israel.
These are false and dangerous equivalences that rest on partial narratives of a decades-old conflict and on selective historical analyses. Such analyses feed anti-Jewish conspiracies and effectively justify Hamas’s unspeakable and openly antisemitic brutality. These generalisations also essentialise Israelis and Palestinians, concealing the democratic diversity of Israeli society and infantilising Palestinians by replicating the paternalistic racism of colonial assumptions that denied entire groups of people agency and responsibility.
The 35 member countries of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), of which New Zealand is an observer member, devised a definition of antisemitism that includes “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”. This doesn’t mean stifling free and even jarring debate or neutering the precious universal conventions of international law.
It tells us that comparing Israel to Nazism is inaccurate because the parallel is forced and imprecise, and because antisemitism was a foundational ideal of Nazism, so the two cannot be uncoupled. It is also a soft form of Holocaust denial, because any such comparison can work only by taking out of context very specific aspects of Holocaust history, thus downplaying everything else. The comparison is dishonest, because it ignores other, more applicable comparisons, often in the pursuit of shock, gravitas or sensationalism, and it is malicious because it retraumatises Jewish survivors and their descendants by inverting the experiences of victim and persecutor. Comparing Israel to Nazism is also a form of cultural appropriation that makes Jews foreigners even in their own history. For all these reasons, it is antisemitic.
Such comparisons are unfounded historically and can only be political. In considering the dramatic question of statelessness or exile, why look to Nazi Germany, for whom the expulsion of Jews was only a briefly explored option? Why not look to 1290 England or 1492 Spain? Why call on the 1938 Evian conference without recognising that its most enduring and chilling legacy is still the fragility of Jewish people in the diaspora? Would it not be more appropriate to the historical and political context of the Middle East to reflect, for instance, on the forced exile of Jews from Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Egypt, Libya and many other countries, systematically enacted from the 1940s to the 1970s?
In 1999, historian Peter Novick lamented the abuse of the words “never again”, concluding that the expression had become “not an expectation, not even an aspiration [but] a ritualised reminder of expectations and aspirations now tacitly abandoned”. The decontextualised use of “never again” to draw false equivalences between the current conflict and wartime Europe is a rhetorical platitude that is disrespectful to the victims of the Holocaust and the current conflict.
The tragedy of what is once again unfolding in Israel and Gaza has many faces and voices. The sense of impotence and injustice, often of imminent existential threat, can make people turn inward, retreat into echo chambers, turn to simplistic explanations, even succumb to long-dormant atavistic prejudices. It is everyone’s job to resist these temptations, because the pursuit of a lasting peace cannot be served by gratuitously radicalising public opinion.
Giacomo Lichtner is associate professor of history and film at Victoria University of Wellington and deputy chair of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand.
