Stop exploiting the Holocaust as a weapon against Israel  

International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which will be observed Saturday, is about remembering the past. But this year it is hard not to think more about the present. The massacre perpetrated by Hamas and other Gaza-based terror groups in southern Israel on Oct. 7 was the most brutal attack against Jews since the Holocaust, and a painful reminder that genocidal hatred of the Jews persists.  

There is also another, more direct connection that deserves attention — the ever-expanding use of Holocaust terminology to delegitimize Israel. Shockingly, this disturbing phenomenon has been propelled by groups that claim to promote universal human rights. 

Since October, many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have distorted the memory of the Holocaust to wage political and economic war on Israel, thereby diminishing the scale and severity of the atrocities that were carried out by Nazi Germany. They have labeled Israelis as Nazis, transformed the Star of David into a swastika and held posters at protests in New York and other cities across the globe that read, “Well done Israel. Hitler would be proud.” 

For instance, on Nov. 14, U.S.-based NGO American Muslims for Palestine posted on X, formerly Twitter, “Gaza is most literally a concentration camp. Every single Gazan, whether a baby, a child, or a mother, is viewed as vermin that must be exterminated. #GazaGenocide.” Conjuring distorted Holocaust imagery and resorting to grossly simplified analogies to demonize Israel disgraces the victims of the Holocaust and dilutes its gravity and singularity. 

On Oct. 11, an official of the U.S.-based organization IfNotNow tweeted that “to compare Israelis to holocaust victims during this moment in time is to ignore the ghettos the Israeli government has put Palestinians in.” By portraying Israel as a perpetrator of a holocaust, IfNotNow is using rhetoric as part of its quest to deny Israeli victimhood and lays the foundation for Israel’s moral delegitimization. 

Jalal Abukhater, advocacy manager of Israel-based NGO 7amleh, has repeatedly used Nazi imagery in reference to Israel. He shared a video clip of a BBC comedy show featuring a Nazi doubting if the Nazis are the “baddies,” tweeting, “I wonder how many Israelis are having an ‘Are we the baddies?’ moment.” He also tweeted, “One would think Israelis are well-versed with the consequences for those who commit genocide.. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, etc … They act as if they are immune to similar consequence? As if genocide by some is wrong, but by others is okay? Genocide is Genocide.”  

Palestinian NGOs have participated in the campaign to hijack the memory of the Holocaust as well, trying to present Israelis as worse than Nazis. On Oct. 13, an official from the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, which has links to the outlawed PFLP terror group, posted on Facebook, “We are living through an action of ethnic cleansing and genocide accompanied by starvation and severing all capabilities of life from water to electricity and fuel…what we are living through is more powerful and stronger than the holocaust which the Zionists talk about.”

As long as these organizations continue to draw comparisons between Israelis and Nazis, horrific terrorist attacks like the one on Oct. 7 will be lauded as necessary and legitimate acts of resistance.  

The exploitation of Holocaust memory has not just been perpetrated by NGOs, but also by the United Nations.  

During a November meeting of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), Algerian diplomat Noureddin Amir stated that “six million Jews died in the Holocaust while Europe looked on. Today, there was a new holocaust and it was the Palestinian people who were paying the price. … Israel was a true terrorist State. This was truly a holocaust, and the international community needed to put an end to it.”  

In January, the U.N. special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, claimed in an interview that “what happened in the Holocaust, and the persecution of the Jews people in Europe, and the genocide that happened, must not be repeated by Israel against others. … What I am seeing today reminds me of that tragic experience … what we need to understand is that this is similar to what happened in the Holocaust.” 

These are only a small sample of the exploitation of Holocaust memory to demonize Israel. The international community must confront this reprehensible and offensive phenomenon that demeans the victims of the Holocaust.  

These comparisons are not only historically and morally invalid, they also incite anti-Jewish sentiment, which has been evident in the past 100 days.  

Enabling such antisemitic expression allows for the desecration of the memory of the victims of the worst tragedy to befall the Jewish people in modern history. NGOs and the U.N. must stop invoking Holocaust analogies. There are no comparisons. 

Ariella Esterson is a researcher at NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based research institute.