GenZedong

An article that seems relevant: https://metras.co/%D9%85%D8%AD%D8%B1%D9%82%D8%A9-%D9%88%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B2%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D9%84%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B0%D8%A7-%D9%86%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%A8-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D9%85%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%A8-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%AF%D9%88%D8%9F/

"The Holocaust and Nazism.. Why are we playing in the enemy's home court?"

For over two years, Palestinians in Gaza have been screaming, "We are being annihilated," as Israel’s war machine turned their bodies into a stage for the brutal theater of colonial violence. Meanwhile, the international community has deliberately plugged its ears against the Palestinian cry. Even after two full years of atrocities, numerous international institutions still hesitate to classify Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.

Thus, a Palestinian is not permitted to name their own death unless the international community grants approval. A Palestinian tragedy only becomes “real” after it passes through the ethical frameworks of international institutions—after these bodies assign it an appropriate label, which usually fails to reflect the full truth of what occurred, and which emerges only after a sluggish institutional process involving assessment, verification, data collection, waiting for the “right” agency, and reliance on the “credible source” or the “neutral expert” to finally study the case and decide what to call it. Only then might Palestinian suffering gain some measure of legitimacy.

In an effort to wage the media war and solidify the Palestinian narrative, Palestinian resistance factions—led by Hamas—have sought to frame events in Gaza by invoking one of the most powerful historical metaphors in the Western imagination: the Nazi Holocaust. Yet, within anti-colonial struggle, terminology itself becomes a battlefield laden with strategic challenges—a reality this article seeks to clarify.

Is it useful to compare our death to theirs?

At first glance, the resistance’s rhetorical approach seems logical: spokespersons aim to provoke the Western collective memory by invoking the privileged moral status the Jewish Holocaust and Nazism hold in Western ethical discourse. They hope this will translate into public pressure on Western governments to end the suffering in Gaza.

Two full years of genocide have passed—and this has not happened. Why?

World War II serves as a foundational reference point in Western liberal thought and forms the ethical bedrock of its moral discourse, with the Holocaust at its core. Through epistemic hegemony, the West has succeeded in imposing its own ethical standards, defining condemned behaviors, and establishing the very foundations of “humanity.” Consequently, our global conception of ethics has become distinctly Eurocentric. Despite the fact that the Holocaust is not an unprecedented event in history—given that the very same Western colonial powers have perpetrated countless genocides, famines, and massacres against colonized peoples—the Holocaust has been elevated as the ultimate benchmark for an atrocity that must “never happen again.”

Conversely, using the term “Holocaust” as a point of comparison reveals two key issues. First, it implies that Palestinians do not see their tragedy as self-evident, but only through the lens of another people’s suffering—and not just any suffering, but specifically the tragedy that Western powers have chosen as the archetypal “tragedy,” as if all others never occurred. This reinforces the authority of a moral order that deliberately turns a deaf ear to Palestinian pain and inherently privileges Western trauma.

In other words, invoking the Holocaust tells Western audiences: “Believe us, because what is happening to us resembles your own history.” This perpetuates the notion that Western pain is the universal reference for all suffering—and that any other pain must be measured against it to gain credibility, recognition, and empathy. At its core, this undermines the legitimacy of the Palestinian historical experience and subordinates it to the very Western moral framework that Palestinians claim to resist in both word and deed.

Second, using the Holocaust and Nazism to underscore the horror of Gaza and the crimes of the Israeli occupation automatically positions the Gaza genocide as “lesser.” This is because the comparison relies on a scale pre-engineered to ensure the Holocaust always surpasses any other atrocity. The resistance’s rhetoric, in this instance, overlooks the sacralized status the Holocaust occupies in the Western collective imagination—a status safeguarded by hundreds of millions of dollars invested in museums, stories, narratives, films, and other representations. This has rendered the Nazi Holocaust an event that nothing else can possibly equal. Thus, invoking the Holocaust as a comparison implicitly accepts an unspoken condition: that nothing can be worse than Nazi crimes—not even what is happening in Gaza—and therefore what occurs in Gaza cannot truly be “genocide.”