Author: Maria Sole Angiulli
The Holocaust Remembrance Day took place on the 27th of January, a day commemorating a genocide that claimed around 11 million lives, including 6 million Jews, and has left a profound imprint on the collective human psyche.
Path to Genocide
The Nuremberg Laws, introduced in 1935, discriminated against followers of Judaism (one of the world’s major monotheistic religions) and their descendants, considering them an inferior race, and over time the situation only worsened. With the outbreak of World War II, the Nazis created concentration camps to imprison political dissidents, homosexuals, Roma and Sinti people, prisoners of war and Jews.
Even if portrayed as mere prisons, the Nazis’ aim was ultimately to eliminate the people inside them. Jews were deported there simply to die, because Hitler sought the extinction of that part of the population, which he considered an existential threat to Germany and the so-called “Aryan” people – a genetically superior race native to Germany.
The persecution lasted for years and ended with the conclusion of the war. Many survivors later went on to support the creation of a state, with the help of the United Nations, called Israel in the region previously under British control.
Crisis in Gaza
Nowadays, in the Gaza Strip, we know that Israeli military forces are carrying out bombing raids on the territory, killing innocent civilians (with estimates of at least 71,662 deaths, at least 171,400 injured, around 10,000 missing and counting), destroying houses, hospitals and schools, and restricting humanitarian aid to the population. Even if it is portrayed as a war between two sides, it does not take extensive research to see that Palestinians cannot respond to Israeli attacks in the same way because they lack comparable technological weapons (one example often cited is the “Stone Intifada” of 1987–1993).
Under many social media posts about the Holocaust, it is possible to find numerous comments referring to the current situation in Palestine and either refusing to acknowledge past Jewish persecution or directly comparing the two. However, even if done with good intentions, comparing these different situations can be problematic because it risks invalidating the suffering of both sides.
Parallels between Gaza and the Shoah
On one hand, they share the fact that both populations have suffered or are suffering severe violence that some define as genocide, which the Oxford Languages dictionary describes as “the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.”
On the other hand, the Shoah did not originate from a territorial or political dispute but from an ideological and racial doctrine. Moreover, Palestinian civilians are, in theory, victims of the war fought on their land between Israel and Hamas (an organization that controls Gaza and is designated as a terrorist group by many countries), rather than being legally classified as a racially persecuted group in the same way Jews were under Nazi rule.
Numerically speaking, it is estimated that in the first two years of the Holocaust approximately 2.45–2.7 million Jews had already been killed, compared to the reported tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza.
Ending Thoughts
We can state that both populations have suffered and are suffering persecution and immense human loss, but it is difficult to equate the Holocaust and Gaza without oversimplifying the situations and overlooking important differences in geopolitical context, historical background, ideology and methods of violence. The important point is that we should not prioritize one group’s suffering over another’s, but remember and support both. Our empathy should not be based solely on political views, but on the objective recognition of the cruelty endured by these populations, remembering that we are all human beings worthy of respect.
Edited by: Olivia Pataki
Cover Image by: hosnysalah from Pixabay
https://pixabay.com/photos/people-crowd-families-immigrants-9429776/
