This week, leaders and citizens around the world marked the memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This year, however, after Israel has been accused of extermination, starvation and genocide in a massive international campaign, it is hard not to wonder how many of them thought, even fleetingly: maybe they deserved it, after all, they are Nazis themselves.
Over the past two years, the comparison between Zionism and Nazism has become wildly popular, almost banal. At demonstrations in Sydney, London and New York, placards declaring "Zionists are Nazis" and graphics fusing the Star of David with a swastika have become fashionable. Influencer Tucker Carlson has claimed that Zionism resembles Nazi racial theory. In the diplomatic arena, the comparison has been voiced repeatedly by figures such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has proclaimed from major stages that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government are "the Nazis of our time."
The masses have not resisted the idea. Social media content accusing Zionists of Nazism racks up hundreds of thousands of likes, sometimes millions.
Accusing Zionism of Nazism amounts to three charges: genocidal racism, unrestrained murderousness and absolute evil. Such evil invites no dialogue, no understanding and no sympathy, even when its babies are kidnapped and its elderly are murdered in captivity. Evil of this kind invites only annihilation.
How did this horrific idea take hold so easily? Why is it so easy to convince the average Westerner that Zionists, meaning Jews, are the Nazi monster that conquers, abuses and kills on a daily basis?
Diminishing the Holocaust
For many Europeans, for whom the Holocaust effectively destroyed their capacity for self-love, turning Jews into Nazis is the ultimate way to stop feeling like monsters, by minimizing the evil of the Holocaust itself. Antisemites such as Nick Fuentes and his circle, alongside pro-Palestinian activists, mainly of Muslim background, explain the Holocaust through the claim that the evil Zionists are allegedly committing today was already identified by Hitler in the past.
It is that evil, not Nazi evil, that explains the mass extermination. The Holocaust, then, was not so horrific after all, and the Western sin of murdering Jews or abandoning them to their fate was not so terrible. Thus, in the struggle against the Jewish state accused of Nazism and post-colonialism, the Westerner gains a second chance and a path to atonement for the sins of his fathers and mothers.
That is why, precisely in the week when International Holocaust Remembrance Day was marked, and as the next phase of President Donald Trump's plan was launched, it is impossible not to think that the great Palestinian victory of October 7 lies in the associative transformation of Zionists into Nazis. Say Israel and you say genocide. The narrative of the Jew as the source of evil is restored, and outrage at that supposed evil becomes the moral badge of honor of the age.
It is a tremendous victory, though not an unexpected one. Powerful forces are working to entrench this narrative. Along the way, it offers a response to Western collective trauma and creates a reality in which Gaza and other terror enclaves, such as Jenin and Ramallah, are granted immunity from defeat in war, because they are portrayed as victims of so-called Zionist Nazism.
That is why, especially today, it is vital to remember that Hamas is another arm of the Palestinian movement, and woe to us if we confuse ourselves into thinking that defeating Hamas is a strategic victory. It is only tactical. Even if Hamas lays down its weapons and is completely destroyed as an organization and as a governing regime, the Palestinian movement will continue its terrorist campaign aimed at dispossessing Jews of their homeland, and Jews who resist will continue to be accused of Nazism.
Only when we understand that even in the battle over consciousness there is no separating Hamas from the Palestinian movement, and when we present to the world its origins and its true face, murderous and imperialistic, can we begin to dismantle the narrative that casts the Zionist as the modern incarnation of the Nazi.
