“Israel treats the Palestinians the way Nazi Germany treated the Jews.”

Few slogans in modern propaganda are as powerful, emotional and poisonous as this one. In recent years, it has become a rallying cry at demonstrations and across social media. Gaza is depicted as the “Auschwitz” of the 21st century. Israeli airstrikes are labeled “genocide.” “Refugee camps” are likened to the Warsaw Ghetto. The nakba (the “disaster” or “catastrophe” of the State of Israel) is rebranded as the Arab shoah. Israel’s government is accused of plotting a “final solution.”

This is not analysis; it is propaganda by analogy. A system of pseudo-historical mirroring that places Israel in the dock of world opinion. The purpose is clear: to strip the Jewish state of any moral legitimacy and to cast its very existence as a crime.

The technique follows a simple, brutal pattern: Everything that Jews suffered in the 20th century is now projected onto the Palestinians. By copying the Holocaust narrative onto the Arab-Israeli conflict, activists create a false moral equivalence. The trauma of the Jewish people—the murder of 6 million men, women and children—is exploited as a weapon against the world’s only Jewish state.

If Jews can be accused of committing the very crimes once committed against them, then Israel’s legitimacy collapses in an instant. Whoever is portrayed as guilty of “the greatest crime of modernity” can have no right to exist. That is the underlying logic.

At the center of this construction lies the equivalence of the Nakba with the Shoah. The Palestinian narrative does not frame May 14, 1948, the day Israel declared its independence, in the context of an attempted genocidal war launched by five Arab armies. Instead, it is presented as a mirror image of Jewish tragedy: While Jews were murdered in Europe, Palestinians were supposedly expelled as part of a deliberate ethnic cleansing.

History is rewritten. The fact that Arab leaders rejected partition, declared war and sought the destruction of the Jewish state is omitted. What remains is a simplified myth: Jews shed their victimhood and turned into oppressors.

Words like “genocide,” “apartheid” or “racist regime” carry immense moral and political weight. Once applied to Israel, they create automatic outrage—protests, boycotts, diplomatic isolation—regardless of any actual evidence. Demonstrators wave flags where swastikas replace the Star of David and viral memes cast Israeli generals as “Hitler’s heirs.”

What was once unthinkable—equating Jews with Nazis—has entered the mainstream of public discourse. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism explicitly names this: “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is antisemitic. Such comparisons desecrate the memory of Holocaust victims and transform their descendants into villains. They are not critique but demonization, an ancient hatred dressed in modern clothes.

Historically, the comparison is absurd. The Holocaust was a unique event: the systematic attempt to annihilate an entire people.

Israel, by contrast, is a democracy defending itself against terrorist organizations that openly call for its destruction. Hamas’s massacre campaign on Oct. 7 made that reality brutally clear. Civilian casualties in Gaza are tragic, but they are not the objective of Israel’s military actions. They result from Hamas embedding rockets in residential areas and constructing tunnels beneath schools and hospitals. The Palestinian population has, in fact, grown for decades, an objective demographic fact that directly disproves the claim of genocide.

Propaganda does not follow facts but relies on images, and Hamas has mastered this perfectly. It ensures that every Israeli act of self-defense produces footage that can be weaponized against the Jewish state. Every tragedy is instantly broadcast, and every destroyed building becomes a symbol of victimhood. At the heart of this strategy lies the cult of martyrdom.

For Hamas, civilian deaths are not an unfortunate consequence but a political asset. Each casualty is woven into a story of sacrifice, broadcast as proof of resistance and sanctified as part of a larger struggle. Israel may possess military superiority, but Hamas controls the narrative, casting itself as David against Goliath in a digital age.

In reality, the Israel Defense Forces are fighting one of the most complex wars of modern times, while striving tirelessly to protect civilians far beyond the requirements of the laws of war and international law.

This propaganda war is global in scope: Viral clips of devastation are stripped of context and circulated widely across social-media platforms, often reaching millions before any explanation or verification can follow. In this way, propaganda becomes not an accessory to the conflict, but a central battlefield in its own right.

Some argue that Jews should be judged more harshly precisely because they once suffered, that victims have a special duty never to inflict pain. This argument is not moral but dehumanizing. It turns Jews into eternal suspects, people defined not by rights but by obligations.

The Holocaust was not a “moral lesson” for Jews to internalize, but an attempt to erase them from history. To demand that its survivors and their descendants “learn” something unique while no other nation is denied its right to self-defense reveals a deeply skewed worldview.

For Europe, these comparisons carry a peculiar convenience. If Israelis are “Nazis,” then the guilt of earlier generations becomes easier to bear. The Holocaust is universalized, hollowed out and relativized. Instead of remembering its singular horror, Europe projects it onto Israel; an act that trivializes Jewish suffering and fuels new antisemitism.

Sharp criticism of Israeli policies is, of course, entirely legitimate. Like any democracy, its government must withstand scrutiny. However, Nazi comparisons, double standards and Holocaust inversion aren’t valid criticism; they are antisemitic ideology. They relativize genocide, deny Israel’s right to exist and create a climate in which antisemitic violence becomes socially acceptable.

The memory of the Holocaust must be anchored in truth. To invert it, turning Jews into Nazis and terrorists into victims, is to practice modern antisemitism. The world has seen where such distortions lead.

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