A man lays down the bodies of the victims of an Israeli bombing in Gaza during the funeral this Tuesday in Khan Yunis.MOHAMMED SALEM (Portal)
The Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss coined the idea that someone making a comparison to Hitler in an argument means that they have already lost it. Since the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel and the response with massive bombings in Gaza, the comparisons have multiplied. During the visit of French President Emmanuel Macron, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared this Tuesday: “Hamas are the new Nazis.” He also claimed that Israeli children had to “hide in attics like Anne Frank.” He had previously compared the crimes of the Palestinian Islamist militia to Babi Yar, the extermination of Kiev’s Jews by the Nazis, who murdered 33,771 people in a ravine near the Ukrainian capital on September 29 and 30, 1941.
Likewise, there have been numerous comparisons of Israel to the Nazis, at demonstrations, on social media and by leaders. The President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, he wrote on his X account on October 10th (the social network formerly called Twitter): “Gaza today appears destroyed or even more destroyed than the Warsaw Ghetto” after “the Jewish and socialist uprising, this concentration camp was destroyed by the barbarism of the Nazis.”
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What is happening in the Middle East is so serious, so terrible, the human casualties are so terrible – the Gaza authorities claim that 750 Palestinians have died from the bombing of Gaza in the last 24 hours alone; Hamas’ barbarism on October 7 demonstrated such profound dehumanization of its victims that any comparison to the Holocaust is not only wrong but seems to trivialize the current horror.
The Holocaust is a crime that cannot be compared, but unfortunately it is not the only genocide that occurred in the 20th or 21st century. In their murderous onslaught, Hamas fighters shot men, women and children, the vast majority of them civilians, and murdered people simply because they were Jews, simply because they were born. It is a crime against humanity. Why do we have to bring up the Holocaust?
The Shoah represented the first and only attempt to industrially murder an entire group of humanity, the Jews, and was the culmination of a project, National Socialism, based on racism and crime. Historian and BBC journalist Laurence Rees ended his 2018 book The Holocaust by asking the precise question: Is the Holocaust a unique event in history? His conclusion was clear. “More recently, I have come to agree with the late Professor David Cesarini, who put it very well in a conversation we had a few years ago: ‘Never before in history has a leader decided that in a spatially limited… Time a… “The ethnic or religious group must be completely eliminated and all the necessary equipment to achieve this goal must be created.” “This is unprecedented.”
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An Israeli soldier this Tuesday in front of the remains of the victims of the Hamas attack on October 7.ABIR SULTAN (EFE)
The Babi Yar massacre led by Netanyahu – the Israeli politician has manipulated history and the Holocaust on other occasions – is a clear example: for the first time it was neither a massive retaliation against civilians nor an open shooting of Jews , as had taken place in Poland and Russia since the beginning of the Second World War, but the Nazis wanted to systematically destroy all of Kiev’s Jews. The extermination camps such as Auschwitz or Treblinka were also unique: killing factories with gas chambers.
The Holocaust is a unique crime, but it also represents a lesson in how far human violence against people can go when a process of dehumanization is set in motion, assuming that the opposite is not worth living based on that fact alone exist.
Several jurists – including the former President of the UK Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger, and the lawyer and writer Philippe Sands – published a letter in the Financial Times expressing their horror at what was happening “as Jews, with family”. brought and friends who are directly affected by the tragedy that has befallen Israel.” They believed that Hamas had committed crimes against humanity and war crimes by violating the Geneva Conventions and that Israel had the right to defend itself , but expressed their “enormous concern” about the Jewish state’s response – more than 2,300 children have died from bombs since the offensive began. “In these times of pain and terror, the idea that there are laws we must all live by is challenging but important. “Jewish history teaches us that we cannot do without them,” his article concluded. The Holocaust is unique and therefore also represents a lesson: the abyss exists and has no end.
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