To describe the events of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 and its aftermath, many have turned to some of the darkest chapters in modern human history. In Israel, the attack in which 1,200 individuals—the vast majority of whom were Israeli civilians—were killed is consistently described as “the largest massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust” and has repeatedly been linked and likened to the Jewish genocide that took place during the Holocaust. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told U.S. President Joe Biden three days after the attack, Israel had “faced savagery [we have] not seen since the Holocaust.” The perpetrators of the attack, in line with this analogy, have frequently been cast as “modern-day Nazis.” Brandishing an Arabic copy of Mein Kampf, Netanyahu promised Israelis in January 2024 that the “Nie Wieder” burden would, once again, fall to Israel. The Israel Defense Forces’ retaliatory campaign to rid Gaza of Hamas, he pledged, would “ensure a protective force for the Jewish people” and prevent “the next massacre.”
The Holocaust’s Early Role in Israeli Society
The Holocaust, or Shoah in Hebrew, is no stranger to political invocation, as my 2021 book on memory politics in Israel and the Palestinian Territories in the post-Oslo era demonstrates. During the nation-building stage in the late 1940s, the Holocaust served as a heuristic device to support the validity of the Zionist prognosis that Israel was the only solution to the problems of Jewish existence in the diaspora. The Israeli state, in the words of the Israeli scholar Omer Bartov, became both “the consequence and the panacea.” Meanwhile, the post-mortem “Zionization” of all six million Jewish victims as lost nation-builders by Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion resolved that the Holocaust and Israel were inextricably linked; their death was cast as a national death— one which would continue to demand the utmost vigilance. During the tension-ridden three-week waiting period preceding the Six-Day War, the Holocaust was therefore summoned to validate demands for war. Israel, it was believed, faced the threat of annihilation, this time from Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser. A column written in Haaretz in late May 1967, bluntly titled “The Danger of Hitler”, argued that Israel “must crush the machinations of the new Hitler at the outset, when it still possible to crush them and survive.”
Yet Israel proved victorious against a coalition of Arab armies—in no small part due to a preemptive assault that destroyed much of Egypt’s air power. By the time the Six-Day War came to an end, Israel had doubled the amount of land under its control, gaining control over the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Gaza Strip. International attention quickly turned to a peaceful settlement and restitution of the territories. Only two years later, however, Israel’s foreign minister, Abba Eban, claimed that the “memory of Auschwitz” meant that a return to the pre-1967 borders was impossible. Some within the Israeli anti-peace camp have continued to invoke the importance of the so-called “Auschwitz borders”; during the U.S.-sponsored Camp David summit in July 2000, some 200,000 people demonstrated in Rabin Square, criticizing “the destruction of the state, [the] Auschwitz borders, [the] Holocaust that was and the Holocaust to come.”
The Holocaust as a National Trauma: The “Never Again” State of Israel
Indeed, even as Israel became more internationally secure and militarily powerful, the Holocaust has continued to loom large in Israeli consciousness, generating a heightened sense of collective transgenerational vulnerability and the need for preemptive defensive posturing. In the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, often regarded as the last Israeli war of necessity, Israeli scholar Gulie Ne’eman Arad notes that Israeli society adopted a power-based Holocaust culture. This mindset dictates that unless Israel is strong enough to strike back and crush its enemies, it is “repeatedly hammered into the collective psyche, what happened during the Shoah could happen again.” With that, most Israelis do not identify with the universalistic appeal that a Holocaust should never happen again. Instead, they identify with the Zionist lesson of the Holocaust which dictates “it should never happen to us again”—a vision that, in the words of renowned Holocaust memory scholar Marianne Hirsch, “fuels defensiveness and disavowal, paranoia, and renewed cycles of violence.”
Aware of this particular understanding of the Holocaust, Israeli politicians and the public alike have frequently turned to Nazi imagery and epithets to criticize domestic political opponents and events, thus highlighting the perceived national vulnerability stemming from their actions. Five years prior to the anti-Camp David demonstrations, in October 1995, anti-Oslo protesters flocked to Zion Square in Jerusalem, distributing a photomontage showing the prime minister in an S.S. uniform. Likud leader Netanyahu, meanwhile, accused then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of establishing a “Palestinian terrorist state” and compared Oslo to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler in 1938. Ariel Sharon, a member of the Likud opposition, was similarly disparaging, calling Rabin, who was later assassinated, a “traitor who was behaving like a Nazi.” Sharon later saw Holocaust rhetoric and symbolism used against him. Upon implementing Sharon’s disengagement plan in August 2005, many Jewish settlers adopted Star of David badges to protest the evacuation of Gazan settlements and equated Sharon’s plans with the forced expulsion of Jews during the Nazi era.
Then, as now, Holocaust and Nazi-era analogies and rhetoric have come under significant intellectual scrutiny. In the aftermath of October 7, genocide, antisemitism, and Holocaust scholars have publicly debated the applicability and deployment of Holocaust memory, both to describe the antisemitic drivers of the events on October 7 and to justify Israel’s military response in Gaza. What, for some, constitutes a false analogy and cynical abuse or “weaponization” of the Holocaust to promote “racist narratives about Palestinians” and justify a “collective punishment of Gaza,” for others serves as a useful historical continuum to discuss the Nazi connection to Hamas and a shared antisemitism—often without fully accounting for the highly diverging socio-political environment in which the identified antisemitism is nurtured. As the authors of a November 2023 letter on the “Misuse of Holocaust Memory” in The New York Review of Books argued, “appealing to the memory of the Holocaust obscures our understanding of the antisemitism Jews face today, and dangerously misrepresents the causes of violence in Israel-Palestine.”
The Holocaust and the post-October 7 Gaza Offensive
As highlighted above, Israel has deployed the memory of the Holocaust in its framing of its military response in Gaza as a casus belli—including to defend against perceived existential threats—and to deflect international criticism of the offensive’s impact on Palestinian civilians’ lives. As of early January 2025, over 45,000 Palestinians have been killed inside the Gaza Strip, according to the Gazan Health Ministry, with the majority of victims believed to be women and children. The toll is likely several times higher—in part due to the number of bodies still believed to be buried under the rubble (at least 151,000 structures, or 60 percent of buildings, have been damaged or destroyed since October 2023). Furthermore, indirect deaths resulting from destroyed healthcare and aid infrastructure, food and water shortages, and a rise in communicable and non-communicable diseases, will likely further increase the death toll.
The offensive’s physical and human toll has led Israel to face charges of genocide in the International Court of Justice for the first time in its history. In line with the 1948 UN genocide convention, the case centers on questions of intent and the evidentiary standards thereof. Meanwhile, in late November, the International Criminal Court, of which Israel is not a member, issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip, which included the alleged use of “starvation as a method of warfare” and “intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population” between October 2023 and May 2024.
Israel’s leadership has categorically rejected international accusations of war crimes and genocide, which have extended beyond the legal realm to international scholarship, human rights organizations, and global public discourse, as acts of antisemitism and hypocrisy. Framed as a military response forced upon Israel, Israeli officials claim that Israel has become engaged “in a war it did not start and did not want” and, as such, is “fighting a just war” in which the distinct legal—and moral—categories of victim and perpetrator have remained constant. The Israeli historian Amos Goldberg has pointed out that from a purely legalistic perspective, “an event cannot be both self-defence and genocide,” even though “historically, self-defence is not incompatible with genocide.” In his condemnation of the ICC and ICJ cases, Netanyahu cast Israeli military actions as an “inherent right of self-defense” and a fight “against genocide,” an argument repeated by many other Israeli politicians, including former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett.
Upon receiving the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in December 2023, The New Yorker reporter Masha Gessen reflected on humans’ proclivity for comparisons. We compare, they argued, including to what they termed the “fundamentally unimaginable” Holocaust, to “prevent what we know can happen from happening” and with the hope that the comparison is proven wrong—a type of conceptual hedging. Indeed, at best, we compare to learn and help contextualize the world around us. As evidenced by post-October 7 Holocaust analogies in Israel, comparisons can also help validate feelings, positions, and actions, including violent actions, relative to others. Scholars and educators are therefore not just encumbered with explaining the contemporary socio-political drivers of historical analogies, but also with identifying and challenging any misuse of the past.
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Dr. Grace Wermenbol serves as a Middle East Specialist at the Department of State. She is also an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center’s Middle East Program. Dr. Wermenbol is the author of A Tale of Two Narratives (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She received her DPhil and master’s from the University of Oxford, St Antony’s College. The views represented here are her own and do not reflect the views of the Department of State or the U.S. Government.
Image credit: Ri_Ya, Pixabay Content License, via Pixabay.
