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The murder of six million Jews and millions of others carried out by the Nazis and their collaborators was the largest recorded genocide in modern history. Absolutely no comparison can be made between the complex Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews.
While one can criticize Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, in contrast to the Holocaust, there is not now, nor has there been, a significant Israeli ideology, movement, policy or plan to exterminate the Palestinian population.
The Nazis’ “final solution” to the “Jewish problem” was the deliberate, systematic and mechanized extermination of European Jewry. Hitler’s final solution led to the calculated, premeditated murder of six million Jews and the destruction of thriving Jewish communities across Europe.
Israel says that its policies towards the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are based on security concerns and the need to defend its population in the face of terrorist acts. But while these policies can certainly be scrutinized and criticized, they are in no way akin to the policies and actions of the Nazis and the Third Reich.
By comparing Israel to Nazis, some seek to label Israel as a singularly, uniquely evil state on earth, playing upon old antisemitic stereotypes that treat Jews as demonic and uniquely evil.
Moreover, it can be argued that those that make the comparison between the Jewish state and the Nazis and Hitler – who perpetrated the greatest and largest act of antisemitism in world history – have not chosen this comparison innocently or dispassionately. It is a charge that is purposefully directed at Jews in an effort to associate the victims of Nazi crimes with the Nazi perpetrators and serves to diminish the significance and uniqueness of the Holocaust.
To make such a comparison is antisemitic and constitutes blatant hostility toward Jews, Jewish history and the legitimacy of the Jewish State of Israel.