Is Equating the Gaza Genocide to Auschwitz a Misrepresentation?
Image: AFP
Nicholas Woode-Smith
Roberto Amaral's comparison of Gaza to Auschwitz is not just patently ahistorical but belies an ignorance of the realities of the Gaza conflict and the true human cost of the Holocaust (From Auschwitz to Gaza: The modern-day concentration camp, published in the Sunday Independent and IOL, 9 June 2025).
To equate the systematic industrial genocide of six million Jews in Auschwitz with Israel's military campaign in Gaza is not only a gross distortion but a deeply offensive minimisation of the Holocaust.
In five years, a patch of dirt approximately 346 acres large, guarded by 10 miles of barbed wire, became the last resting place of over 1.1 million innocents. The vast majority of those exterminated were Jews.
Auschwitz was just one of the many concentration and death camps constructed by the Nazi regime to exterminate Jews and their perceived enemies. Six million Jews were systematically rounded up, put into hellish camps, and shot, gassed, brutalised, tortured and slaughtered. The global Jewish population only recovered from this genocide in recent years.
The scale of the operation and its cold and calculated industrial efficiency were unlike anything that the world had ever seen before. Jakub Nowakowski, Director of Cape Town's Holocaust & Genocide Centre, poignantly highlights the intense and concentrated cruelty of the Nazi's final solution:
'Six camps... became centres of industrialised murder... In Bełżec alone, 500,000 Jews were killed in just ten months.'
Amaral's use of the term 'Luciferian' to describe Israel reveals much of the underlying bigotry of his argument. Describing an entire state as satanic is not a political critique; it's dehumanisation. This language echoes some of the oldest antisemitic tropes in history, many of which fuelled genocidal ideologies in Europe.
Amaral wishes to paint Israel as the fundamental antagonist in what is a tragic and complicated conflict. He fails to mention the October 7 massacre, one of the largest mass atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust, and the event that caused this war in the first place.
As Nowakowski pertinently comments:
'It is worth keeping in mind that it was Hamas that sparked this latest cycle of violence with its attack on Israel on October 7, two years ago, not the Israeli army.'
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Further, Amaral refuses to call the conflict a war, stripping Gazans and Hamas of their agency and acting as if Palestinians are only passive victims who have not pulled a single trigger.
It is this passivity that Amaral asserts is further evidence of Israel's genocide against the Gaza people. But there is a large difference between Gaza and Auschwitz. And genocide isn't just about the number of dead. As Nowakowski explains:
'The definition of genocide... turns on one thing above all else—intent. For an atrocity to be genocide, its defining objective must be the physical elimination of a group, or a part of that group.'
In the case of the Holocaust:
'These six camps, including Bełżec, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Treblinka, became centres of industrialised murder... Their deaths were not collateral; they were the objective.'
Genocide is not Israel's objective in Gaza. Israel is not marching civilians into gas chambers or firing wantonly at innocents. And despite misconceptions, Israel is not trying to starve the Gazan people either. The vast majority of civilian deaths have occurred because of Hamas' strategy of embedding itself among civilians, using homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques to store weapons and launch attacks on Israeli civilians, attempting to kill them merely for being Jewish.
The fact of the matter is that if Israel could achieve its military objective of saving its hostages and eliminating Hamas as a threat to its people without harming a single civilian, that is what they would choose. A true genocide would have no such discernment between combatants and noncombatants. The Jews of Europe, the Tutsis of Rwanda, the Armenians, and the Bosnian Muslims were targeted because of who they are. The aim was their extermination.
Amaral and other writers risk overextending the term 'genocide' and dulling its moral edge. It risks confusing true genocide with what is already a tragic, albeit necessary, war.
To call Gaza a modern Auschwitz is not only historically incoherent, but devalues the unique horror of the Holocaust, where genocide was not a side effect. It was the mission. Civilian deaths in Gaza must not be dismissed. But they must also not be mislabelled. If we are to prevent future genocides, we must first be honest about what they are and what they are not.
Comparing Gaza to Auschwitz reveals a deeper moral confusion. The Jews of Europe were powerless civilians systematically rounded up and exterminated solely for who they were. In Gaza, Israel is targeting Hamas, a heavily armed terrorist group that governs Gaza, started this war, and uses its people as shields. There is no moral equivalence between mass murder and tragic collateral damage. To pretend otherwise is to insult the memory of Holocaust victims and obscure the reality of today's war.
To call Gaza another Auschwitz is not just a mistake. It is a betrayal of memory and a barrier to truth and peace.
* Nicholas Woode-Smith is the the Managing Editor of the Rational Standard and a Senior Associate of the Free Market Foundation. He writes in his personal capacity.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.
*** EDITOR'S NOTE: The claims made in this article reflect factually incorrect statements regarding Israel's ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, as ruled by the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court's findings, and the ongoing and unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
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