Comparing Gaza to the Holocaust exposes the hypocrisy of “never again” as Gaza’s horrors are largely ignored by those nations with the power to stop the sadistic brutality inflicted on Palestinians.
By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.
For decades the refrain of “never again” has rung hollow at
annual Holocaust commemorations, where Western nations—Germany, the
United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and others—solemnly
vow to prevent another genocide. Yet, as these ceremonies took place
over the past two years, a catastrophe of staggering proportions has
ravaged Gaza, surpassing the Holocaust, not in body count but in its
brazen visibility, prolonged generational agony, perverse
victim-perpetrator inversion, and the complicity of Israel’s Western allies.
The
Holocaust, a meticulously hidden slaughter of 11 million people,
including six million Jews, left an indelible scar on humanity’s
conscience. Gaza’s genocide, however, unfolds in real time, live
streamed for all to see, yet it has elicited apathy from the very powers
that defeated the Nazis and swore to uphold justice and prevent
atrocities like those that occurred in World War Two. This comparison
does not diminish the Holocaust’s horror but exposes the selective moral
outrage that normalizes Palestinian pain and suffering while elevating
Jewish trauma above that all of other peoples that have experienced
genocide. The horrors taking place in Gaza, fuelled by Western funding
and impunity, indicts our era more profoundly than the 20th century’s
darkest years ever could.
The first and most chilling distinction lies in Gaza’s visibility, a transparency the Holocaust lacked. The Nazi extermination of Jews, Roma, Slavs, political enemies, etc. relied on secrecy where death camps like Auschwitz operated in the shadows, their atrocities uncovered only after Allied liberation at the end of World War Two. In Gaza, the violence is broadcast live. Smartphones and social media flood the world with high-definition images--emaciated children, entire neighbourhoods reduced to a post-apocalyptic hellscape, families obliterated in so-called “precision” airstrikes that kill hundreds of civilians at a time. Viral clips on platforms like TikTok show Israeli drones targeting starving Palestinians, often shared by the perpetrators themselves. Yet this exposure sparks no meaningful intervention by the nations that have the power to stop the slaughter.
A study by Israeli professor Yaakov Garb, published by Harvard’s Dataverse, reveals the scale of Israel’s genocide that is beyond comprehension. Since October 2023, at least 377,000 Palestinians in Gaza—half of them children—have been “disappeared” by Israel and are presumed dead. Garb’s cross-referencing of satellite imagery, IDF data, and displacement patterns exposes systematic erasure—a mobile killing machine operating under global scrutiny, undeterred by the world’s gaze. This dwarfs the numbers provided by the Gaza Health Ministry--approximately 70,000 direct deaths, mostly women and children, as of September 2025. A separate study by Australian professors Richard Hill and Gideon Polya estimates a staggering 680,000 deaths, including 380,000 children, factoring in indirect fatalities from starvation and disease. Where Nazis feared exposure, Israel exploits it, confident that the global community will fail to take action despite the scale of the atrocities.
This visibility underscores a second horror. Gaza’s violence is a slow, generational grind, unlike the Holocaust’s compressed brutality. The Nazi genocide, a frenzied slaughter within the six years of World War Two, ended with Germany’s defeat in 1945. Gaza’s torment, however, stretches back to the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist militias—led by figures like Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, David Ben-Gurion, and Chaim Weizmann—ethnically cleansed over 750,000 Palestinians through terror and mass murder to create a Jewish-majority state. This was no anomaly but a blueprint, perpetuated through decades of planning, settlement expansion, military checkpoints, and, since 2007, a suffocating blockade that turned Gaza into an open-air concentration camp for more than two million people. This is a prison where food, water, and medicine have been rationed to inflict maximum death and despair. Today, famine grips Gaza with children being the primary victims, as aid sites become kill zones where desperate crowds are gunned down by the Israeli army and private contractors, while waiting to collect food rations.
What has been done to Palestinians is a structural genocide, spanning generations—people killed and grandparents ethnically cleansed in 1948, parents imprisoned and tortured under occupation, children bombed in so-called safe zones. Unlike the Holocaust’s finite crescendo, Gaza has suffered a 78-year dirge, escalating relentlessly, erasing a people through attrition. Amnesty International’s reports since October 2023 document deliberate intent—Israeli airstrikes on Gaza hospitals, blocked aid, and inflammatory genocidal rhetoric from Israeli leaders vowing to “erase” Gaza and its people, all normalized as a necessary to ensure the safety of Israeli citizens. Its banality, and prolonged, bureaucratic cruelty makes Israeli crimes all the more insidious.
Equally perverse is the third distinction, where Israeli leaders, claiming Holocaust victimhood, invert the narrative to justify their actions. Israel, born from the ashes of Nazi genocide, has weaponized that trauma, casting Palestinians as modern-day Nazis to excuse brutal settler-colonialism, apartheid, and Gaza’s siege. “Never again” has morphed into “never again to us” and “to hell with Palestinian suffering,” sanctifying policies that Israeli scholars like Raz Segal, Omer Bartov, and Amos Goldberg label as settler-colonial genocide.
A March 2025 Ha’aretz poll, conducted with Penn State University, also reveals a chilling consensus—82% of Jewish Israelis support expelling all Palestinians from Gaza, and 47%—nearly half—endorse killing every Palestinian, including children, with the views strongest among younger generations. This aligns with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s invocations of the biblical Amalek story, urging the destruction of Israel’s Palestinian enemies “from child to elder”.
Zionism’s pre-World War Two roots, articulated by Ben-Gurion’s call to “expel Arabs and take their places,” reveal an ethnic-cleansing ethos embedded in the foundations of Israeli society cloaked in Holocaust victimhood. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism exacerbates this, labelling criticism of Israel’s occupation as “antisemitic” while ignoring the denial of Palestinian self-determination through more than 700,000 illegal Jewish settlers on stolen land. This inversion—painting Palestinian victims as villains—fuels a genocide that surpasses the perversity of other genocides that have occurred in the 20th century.
A fourth dimension of horror is the global complicity that was absent in the Holocaust. The Nazis faced local resistance, supported by the Allies, which ultimately contributed to their defeat. By contrast, Israel’s military has been bankrolled by the West for decades. Since October 2023, the US alone has provided $17.9 billion in military aid, on top of the $3.3 billion it gives Israel annually. European allies like Germany, the UK, France and Canada have contributed further, while the US protects Israel at the UN with vetoes on resolutions that could hold the apartheid nation accountable and end the carnage.
However, the Western alliance, there is one nation above all others that has put its words in defence of Palestinians into action. South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) presents considerable evidence in its accusations Israel of genocidal intent, citing mass killings, deliberate harm, and conditions designed to destroy Palestinians, backed by official Israeli statements. Reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israeli human rights group B’Tselem corroborate this, labelling Gaza’s siege a crime against humanity and genocide.
Finally, the world’s inaction indicts the West more deeply than the Holocaust’s bystanders. No fog of war obscures Gaza’s death toll—more than 70,000 identified deaths, and potentially 680,000 if the recent Australian study is to be accepted. Satellite imagery, NGO reports, ICJ rulings, a UN investigation, reports by assassinated Palestinian journalists, videos and posts by Gazans, data from the Israeli military, and Israeli soldiers’ own social media posts lay bare the truth. And yet the nations with the power to halt the bloodshed still fail to act.
This partially stems from a moral hierarchy rooted in Western guilt when it refused to help Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis, and its helplessness in preventing the Holocaust, which has elevated Jewish suffering above others. However, consider history’s other overlooked atrocities: King Leopold II depravities in Congo Free State (1885-1908) which killed over 10 million Africans, with mutilations as punishment for failing to achieve quotas of extracted resources; Stalin’s Holodomor (1932-33) which starved 5-7 million Ukrainians; Churchill’s policies in colonial India fuelled Bengal’s 1943 famine, that killed 3 million Bengalis, whom he derided as “breeding like rabbits”; and the Khmer Rouge erased roughly 2 million Cambodians—25% of the population—in the 1970s. These horrors, affecting non-Western and non-white people, rarely merit annual memorials as does the Holocaust, and Gaza fits this pattern. Palestinians, a Semitic (and predominantly Muslim people), suffer while unfounded claims of “antisemitism” silences critics and shields Israel, conflating critique of the nation with Jew-hatred.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917, a colonial promise by the British, prioritized a Jewish homeland over indigenous Palestinian rights, a precedent cemented by post-World War Two Western guilt despite increasing Zionist violence against non-Jews in historic Palestine. Stifling criticism of Zionism, once called racism by UN Resolution 3379 before its repeal under American pressure, has allowed Israel to inflict violence in historic Palestine with impunity for almost eight decades. The Jerusalem Declaration, endorsed by 350 scholars, urges a redefinition of antisemitism to include Palestinians as Semites, separating anti-Zionism from anti-Jewish hatred to foster equality.
Gaza’s genocide, defined by intent and outcome, not mere numbers, matches the Holocaust’s evil in its deliberate erasure of Palestinians, and surpasses it in some ways. The Ha’aretz poll’s revelation—47% of Jewish Israelis backing total extermination of Palestinians in Gaza—mirrors the Nazi eras dehumanization of Jews. Comparing Gaza to the Holocaust exposes the hypocrisy of “never again” as Gaza’s horrors are largely ignored by those nations with the power to stop the sadistic brutality inflicted by Israel.
What is happening on the ground in Gaza demands action, not meaningless platitudes by Western leaders who cry crocodile tears for Palestinian suffering. The emaciated children on our screens plead for a universal “never again” that honours their humanity as fiercely as any other. Failing them renders the West as complicit in Israeli crimes as those who did nothing while cattle cars filled with concentration camp prisoners rolled into Auschwitz, Dachau, and other Nazi death camps.
An evil we hoped to never see again is taking place in Gaza as we breathe. It is a clear illustration of what Israeli philosopher Hannah Arendt described as the “banality of evil.” This genocide, live-streamed yet in many ways ignored by the powerful of the world, embodies Arendt’s warning, sustained by Western nations that arms the perpetrator and do nothing to stop it, while reciting hollow vows. Only by dismantling the moral hierarchy that privileges one people’s suffering over another can we ensure “never again” becomes a promise kept for all, including Palestinians who have endured the longest and most brutal occupation in modern history, and are now being subjected to the most heinous crimes imaginable under human law.
© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
The first and most chilling distinction lies in Gaza’s visibility, a transparency the Holocaust lacked. The Nazi extermination of Jews, Roma, Slavs, political enemies, etc. relied on secrecy where death camps like Auschwitz operated in the shadows, their atrocities uncovered only after Allied liberation at the end of World War Two. In Gaza, the violence is broadcast live. Smartphones and social media flood the world with high-definition images--emaciated children, entire neighbourhoods reduced to a post-apocalyptic hellscape, families obliterated in so-called “precision” airstrikes that kill hundreds of civilians at a time. Viral clips on platforms like TikTok show Israeli drones targeting starving Palestinians, often shared by the perpetrators themselves. Yet this exposure sparks no meaningful intervention by the nations that have the power to stop the slaughter.
A study by Israeli professor Yaakov Garb, published by Harvard’s Dataverse, reveals the scale of Israel’s genocide that is beyond comprehension. Since October 2023, at least 377,000 Palestinians in Gaza—half of them children—have been “disappeared” by Israel and are presumed dead. Garb’s cross-referencing of satellite imagery, IDF data, and displacement patterns exposes systematic erasure—a mobile killing machine operating under global scrutiny, undeterred by the world’s gaze. This dwarfs the numbers provided by the Gaza Health Ministry--approximately 70,000 direct deaths, mostly women and children, as of September 2025. A separate study by Australian professors Richard Hill and Gideon Polya estimates a staggering 680,000 deaths, including 380,000 children, factoring in indirect fatalities from starvation and disease. Where Nazis feared exposure, Israel exploits it, confident that the global community will fail to take action despite the scale of the atrocities.
This visibility underscores a second horror. Gaza’s violence is a slow, generational grind, unlike the Holocaust’s compressed brutality. The Nazi genocide, a frenzied slaughter within the six years of World War Two, ended with Germany’s defeat in 1945. Gaza’s torment, however, stretches back to the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist militias—led by figures like Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, David Ben-Gurion, and Chaim Weizmann—ethnically cleansed over 750,000 Palestinians through terror and mass murder to create a Jewish-majority state. This was no anomaly but a blueprint, perpetuated through decades of planning, settlement expansion, military checkpoints, and, since 2007, a suffocating blockade that turned Gaza into an open-air concentration camp for more than two million people. This is a prison where food, water, and medicine have been rationed to inflict maximum death and despair. Today, famine grips Gaza with children being the primary victims, as aid sites become kill zones where desperate crowds are gunned down by the Israeli army and private contractors, while waiting to collect food rations.
What has been done to Palestinians is a structural genocide, spanning generations—people killed and grandparents ethnically cleansed in 1948, parents imprisoned and tortured under occupation, children bombed in so-called safe zones. Unlike the Holocaust’s finite crescendo, Gaza has suffered a 78-year dirge, escalating relentlessly, erasing a people through attrition. Amnesty International’s reports since October 2023 document deliberate intent—Israeli airstrikes on Gaza hospitals, blocked aid, and inflammatory genocidal rhetoric from Israeli leaders vowing to “erase” Gaza and its people, all normalized as a necessary to ensure the safety of Israeli citizens. Its banality, and prolonged, bureaucratic cruelty makes Israeli crimes all the more insidious.
Equally perverse is the third distinction, where Israeli leaders, claiming Holocaust victimhood, invert the narrative to justify their actions. Israel, born from the ashes of Nazi genocide, has weaponized that trauma, casting Palestinians as modern-day Nazis to excuse brutal settler-colonialism, apartheid, and Gaza’s siege. “Never again” has morphed into “never again to us” and “to hell with Palestinian suffering,” sanctifying policies that Israeli scholars like Raz Segal, Omer Bartov, and Amos Goldberg label as settler-colonial genocide.
A March 2025 Ha’aretz poll, conducted with Penn State University, also reveals a chilling consensus—82% of Jewish Israelis support expelling all Palestinians from Gaza, and 47%—nearly half—endorse killing every Palestinian, including children, with the views strongest among younger generations. This aligns with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s invocations of the biblical Amalek story, urging the destruction of Israel’s Palestinian enemies “from child to elder”.
Zionism’s pre-World War Two roots, articulated by Ben-Gurion’s call to “expel Arabs and take their places,” reveal an ethnic-cleansing ethos embedded in the foundations of Israeli society cloaked in Holocaust victimhood. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism exacerbates this, labelling criticism of Israel’s occupation as “antisemitic” while ignoring the denial of Palestinian self-determination through more than 700,000 illegal Jewish settlers on stolen land. This inversion—painting Palestinian victims as villains—fuels a genocide that surpasses the perversity of other genocides that have occurred in the 20th century.
A fourth dimension of horror is the global complicity that was absent in the Holocaust. The Nazis faced local resistance, supported by the Allies, which ultimately contributed to their defeat. By contrast, Israel’s military has been bankrolled by the West for decades. Since October 2023, the US alone has provided $17.9 billion in military aid, on top of the $3.3 billion it gives Israel annually. European allies like Germany, the UK, France and Canada have contributed further, while the US protects Israel at the UN with vetoes on resolutions that could hold the apartheid nation accountable and end the carnage.
However, the Western alliance, there is one nation above all others that has put its words in defence of Palestinians into action. South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) presents considerable evidence in its accusations Israel of genocidal intent, citing mass killings, deliberate harm, and conditions designed to destroy Palestinians, backed by official Israeli statements. Reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israeli human rights group B’Tselem corroborate this, labelling Gaza’s siege a crime against humanity and genocide.
Finally, the world’s inaction indicts the West more deeply than the Holocaust’s bystanders. No fog of war obscures Gaza’s death toll—more than 70,000 identified deaths, and potentially 680,000 if the recent Australian study is to be accepted. Satellite imagery, NGO reports, ICJ rulings, a UN investigation, reports by assassinated Palestinian journalists, videos and posts by Gazans, data from the Israeli military, and Israeli soldiers’ own social media posts lay bare the truth. And yet the nations with the power to halt the bloodshed still fail to act.
This partially stems from a moral hierarchy rooted in Western guilt when it refused to help Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis, and its helplessness in preventing the Holocaust, which has elevated Jewish suffering above others. However, consider history’s other overlooked atrocities: King Leopold II depravities in Congo Free State (1885-1908) which killed over 10 million Africans, with mutilations as punishment for failing to achieve quotas of extracted resources; Stalin’s Holodomor (1932-33) which starved 5-7 million Ukrainians; Churchill’s policies in colonial India fuelled Bengal’s 1943 famine, that killed 3 million Bengalis, whom he derided as “breeding like rabbits”; and the Khmer Rouge erased roughly 2 million Cambodians—25% of the population—in the 1970s. These horrors, affecting non-Western and non-white people, rarely merit annual memorials as does the Holocaust, and Gaza fits this pattern. Palestinians, a Semitic (and predominantly Muslim people), suffer while unfounded claims of “antisemitism” silences critics and shields Israel, conflating critique of the nation with Jew-hatred.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917, a colonial promise by the British, prioritized a Jewish homeland over indigenous Palestinian rights, a precedent cemented by post-World War Two Western guilt despite increasing Zionist violence against non-Jews in historic Palestine. Stifling criticism of Zionism, once called racism by UN Resolution 3379 before its repeal under American pressure, has allowed Israel to inflict violence in historic Palestine with impunity for almost eight decades. The Jerusalem Declaration, endorsed by 350 scholars, urges a redefinition of antisemitism to include Palestinians as Semites, separating anti-Zionism from anti-Jewish hatred to foster equality.
Gaza’s genocide, defined by intent and outcome, not mere numbers, matches the Holocaust’s evil in its deliberate erasure of Palestinians, and surpasses it in some ways. The Ha’aretz poll’s revelation—47% of Jewish Israelis backing total extermination of Palestinians in Gaza—mirrors the Nazi eras dehumanization of Jews. Comparing Gaza to the Holocaust exposes the hypocrisy of “never again” as Gaza’s horrors are largely ignored by those nations with the power to stop the sadistic brutality inflicted by Israel.
What is happening on the ground in Gaza demands action, not meaningless platitudes by Western leaders who cry crocodile tears for Palestinian suffering. The emaciated children on our screens plead for a universal “never again” that honours their humanity as fiercely as any other. Failing them renders the West as complicit in Israeli crimes as those who did nothing while cattle cars filled with concentration camp prisoners rolled into Auschwitz, Dachau, and other Nazi death camps.
An evil we hoped to never see again is taking place in Gaza as we breathe. It is a clear illustration of what Israeli philosopher Hannah Arendt described as the “banality of evil.” This genocide, live-streamed yet in many ways ignored by the powerful of the world, embodies Arendt’s warning, sustained by Western nations that arms the perpetrator and do nothing to stop it, while reciting hollow vows. Only by dismantling the moral hierarchy that privileges one people’s suffering over another can we ensure “never again” becomes a promise kept for all, including Palestinians who have endured the longest and most brutal occupation in modern history, and are now being subjected to the most heinous crimes imaginable under human law.
© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
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