Israel is doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews

The fuller answer

The first instinct is to say that the comparison is offensive. It is, and saying so achieves very little, because whoever made it knew that already. The offence is the delivery mechanism, not the point. What you can say instead, and support, is what the comparison does once it has been made.

What the comparison is for

Lesley Klaff, who wrote the standard short account, calls this Holocaust inversion and describes it as two moves at once. There is an inversion of reality, in which Israelis are cast as the new Nazis and Palestinians as the new Jews. And there is an inversion of morality, in which the Holocaust becomes a lesson aimed at Jews, or an indictment of them.

Klaff’s summary is worth carrying in your head. The Holocaust memory is abused to impose on Israel and on Jews a uniquely onerous moral responsibility in how they treat others. The compressed version people actually say is “the victims have become perpetrators”.

Now the second half, which is the part most people have never heard and which changes the conversation when you say it. Robert Wistrich spent a career on the question of why the Holocaust, which might reasonably have finished antisemitism off, instead produced new forms of it. His answer, which Klaff sets out, is that calling Israel Nazi performs a service for the societies where it happened. It works as an overcompensation mechanism for guilt.

Wistrich put it without decoration: what if the Jews were no better than the Nazis? Then one would no longer have to feel sorry for them. Gerstenfeld, working the same ground, quotes the Holocaust psychologist Nathan Durst saying that the comparison equalises everybody.

That is an argument about function, not about anybody’s private motives, and it is stronger for it. You are not claiming to know what somebody feels. You are describing what the sentence accomplishes the moment it is spoken. It relieves the guilt of the countries where the murder was carried out and tolerated. And it converts the memory that belongs to the victims into an instrument aimed at their descendants.

Where it fails, and stay specific

Refuse to argue about scale. Numbers invite a bidding war and the bidding war is the trap. The comparison collapses on the features of the thing it invokes. Yehuda Bauer set those out at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2006, and nobody has put them more clearly since.

Every individual, defined by the perpetrator. The Germans searched for, registered, dispossessed and murdered every single person they had defined as Jewish. Not people who identified as Jews. People they had classified.

Everywhere the writ ran. The intention was global, and Bauer’s judgement is that there had never before been a universally conceived genocide.

No aim underneath it. Bauer’s central point is comparative. Every other genocide he examined has something real beneath the ideology: land, resources, an empire coming apart. Nazi antisemitic ideology rested on no economic, social or political base. In 1942 the Germans took roughly 40,000 Jews from ghettos to build a military road. They killed them as the road was going up, and were then left with no labourers. They destroyed the Lodz ghetto while it was producing goods their own army needed. Bauer’s word for it is anti-pragmatic.

No terms, ever. This is the one to end on, because it is the feature that no political conflict shares. There was nothing a Jew could do. No concession, no surrender, no change of leadership, no change of conduct, no exile. There was no negotiation on offer at any point, because there was nothing to negotiate about.

Whatever you conclude about Gaza, the West Bank or the occupation, that argument is about territory, security and two national claims. It has produced negotiations that happened, failed and were resumed. A dispute with terms is a different kind of object from an extermination with none.

The ghetto and the camp

These words carry the argument on their own, which is why they get reached for. Klaff answers them directly, and her sentence is the model of restraint here. Set what is alleged at a checkpoint against what ran across Germany and eastern Europe from 1933. Klaff’s list is the denial of paid work, the Jew-baiting, the herding into ghettos, the incarceration, the disease and the starvation in labour camps. There is no equivalence, she writes, and there is no moral equivalence either.

One question does most of the work here, and it is better asked than asserted. The ghetto was a holding pen with one exit, and the exit was the transport. What, in the comparison, is the transport for? Where there is no answer, the word has been borrowed rather than used.

“So Israel is beyond criticism because of the Holocaust?”

No. Say the word, then explain, because this is the return you will get and walking into it undoes everything above.

Nothing here places any Israeli policy out of reach. The occupation, the settlements, the conduct of the war, the statements of ministers and the treatment of Palestinian civilians are all arguable. This site argues about them elsewhere. The claim being made is narrower, and it is about one comparison: that it is false, and that its falseness is doing work.

Answer the sharper version, because a briefed opponent will put it. Ruling one comparison out of bounds would give Israel a protection no other state has. So do not rule it out. Test it, on the features Bauer sets out, and it fails, which is the treatment every analogy gets. Call a law Orwellian and you are still expected to say which part of 1984 it matches.

That is the double standard worth naming, and it belongs to whoever made the comparison. This one arrives as a verdict that ends the argument rather than a claim its author expects to defend. Ask which part of it they mean and you have restored the standard, not suspended it.

The IHRA adopted its working definition in 2016. One of the eleven examples reads “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”. The same document says two further things. Criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. And the examples are to be read taking overall context into account.

Quote those two as readily as the first. Anybody briefed will have the full text, and half a quotation is how a good argument gets lost in a room. One practical note on citing it. The IHRA website blocks automated retrieval, so the reproduction cited here is the European Commission and IHRA handbook. That document prints the definition and all eleven examples in full.

Most people who say it have not thought about it

This matters more than the scholarship for the conversation you will actually have. Ghetto, camp and Nazi have become the vocabulary of “as bad as it gets”. Somebody who reaches for the worst thing they can name is not running an inversion. They have picked up the only superlative in general circulation.

For that person, leading with antisemitism ends the exchange and makes you the aggressor. Ask instead:

“When you say Nazi, which part of it do you mean?”

“I think the thing you’re describing is a siege. Say siege, because it’s what you mean and it’s harder to argue with.”

“That word does something you might not want it to do. It tells Jewish people that the thing done to their families is now the thing they are.”

For somebody deploying it deliberately, and you can usually tell by whether they reach for the swastika imagery, the move is different. Name the function once and decline to audit the analogy point by point. Working through it detail by detail concedes that it is an analogy worth checking.

“You know it isn’t accurate. It’s chosen because of what it costs us.”

The placards

The Star of David turned into a swastika is not an argument you rebut. Where one appears at a demonstration or online, photograph it and record the date and place. Then put it through whatever reporting route exists where you are. The guide on capturing evidence covers how to do that without putting yourself in the frame.

Where this backfires

Two ways, and both are common. If you name Holocaust inversion at somebody who was talking about a checkpoint queue, you will look as though you came prepared with an accusation. And some Jews, including survivors and their descendants, make this comparison sincerely and in grief. Calling it antisemitic in front of them costs you the room and is not what the argument says. The comparison can be false and damaging whoever makes it, without every person who makes it being an antisemite. Hold both, and say the second one out loud before anybody asks you to.