Israelis are not Nazis, and Palestinians are not the Jews of the Holocaust. The comparison some make in the name of moral consistency is obscene. Here is why.
The Arab leadership that fought to keep Jews out of the British Mandate didn’t need Nazi Germany to teach it Jew-hatred; it partnered with the Nazis because their hatreds already intersected. The 1929 Hebron massacre killed over 60 Jews from a community rooted there for centuries, unprovoked. That pattern hasn’t changed.
Palestinian national identity was never just self-determination. It has largely been structured around undoing Jewish sovereignty, continuing the Mufti’s strategy of incrementalism, now backed by a global coalition pursuing the cause “by any means necessary.”
Jewish statehood was built to end two thousand years of persecution, not to inflict suffering on Arabs. Palestinian leadership, by contrast, tolerates suffering among its own people so long as it damages Israel, choosing confrontation over the material improvement of Palestinian lives.
Jews were exterminated for existing. No concession could have satisfied their killers. Arab Palestinians face no such fate: Israel made peace with Arabs who accepted the Jewish state, inside its borders and beyond, and Arab citizens of Israel vote, serve in parliament, and sit on its Supreme Court. That refutes any claim of racial persecution. The wars this conflict keeps producing, and the security measures that follow, are responses to that reality, not racism.
Nazi ideology held that a superior race was entitled to rule and eliminate others. Jewish chosenness is the inversion: not entitlement, but obligation, to live by the Ten Commandments and model that for others. Confusing the two is the exact error this comparison depends on.
Jews fleeing extermination found the world’s doors closed. The 1938 Évian Conference is the enduring symbol of that abandonment. Palestinians today have the sustained backing of the Arab League, the OIC, and hundreds of millions worldwide. A friendless minority marked for extermination is not a national movement with global patronage.
Mahmoud Abbas wrote his dissertation questioning the Holocaust’s scale, then stood in Berlin in 2022 and accused Israel of “50 Holocausts.” Hamas founder al-Rantisi called it a fabrication, while Mein Kampf still circulates and Nazi symbols are glorified in parts of Palestinian society.
Instead of gaslighting Israelis, ask: who urgently needs to learn the Holocaust’s lessons?