Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany

Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are sometimes made by people who criticize Israel. People disagree about whether these comparisons are fair or if they are antisemitic. Some people call these comparisons Holocaust inversion.

22 October 2023: Pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Columbus, Ohio, displaying a poster that reads "Isreal [sic] are the new Nazis" during the Gaza war protests in the United States.

Examples

The World Jewish Congress (WJC) lists the following as examples of Holocaust inversion:^[1]

• Portraying Jews as Nazis
• Comparing the Nakba to the Holocaust
• Comparing Israeli prime ministers to Hitler
• Images showing Anne Frank wearing a keffiyeh^[2]
• Comparing Gaza to Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust

Antisemitic poster spotted at an anti-war rally in San Francisco on February 16, 2003, which incorporated both the motifs of "happy merchant Jews" and "Zio-Nazis". The slur ZIONIST PIGS^[3]was also used.

Antisemitic graffiti in Madrid, 2003, equating the Star of David with the dollar and Nazi swastika.

Academic views

Holocaust inversion is a form of Holocaust trivialization,^[4] or Holocaust distortion,^[5] sometimes considered offensive due to its ahistorical implication that Jews are somehow guilty for their own genocide in the same manner as the Holocaust's perpetrators, a rhetoric employed by some bad actors as a vehicle for their antisemitism.^[1][5]

Bernard-Henri Lévy

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy believed that the prevalence of Holocaust inversion had encouraged violence against Jews:^[6]

[A] mass movement demanding the deaths of Jews will be unlikely to yell "Money Jews" or "They Killed Christ." [. ...] for people to feel once again [...] the right to burn all the synagogues they want, to attack boys wearing yarmulkes [...] an entirely new discourse^[7] way of justifying it must emerge.

Yossi Klein Halevi

Author Yossi Klein Halevi believed that the comparison demonized Jews:^[8]

The deepest source of anti-Israel animus^[9] is the symbolization of the Jew as embodiment of evil. The satanic Jew has been replaced by the satanic Jewish state. [...] The end of the post-Holocaust era is expressed most starkly in the inversion of the Holocaust.

Alexandria Fanjoy Silver

Further information: Secondary antisemitism § Poland

Jewish historian Dr. Alexandria Fanjoy Silver believed that many of those engaging in Holocaust inversion were motivated by secondary antisemitism, a special form of postwar antisemitism "rooted in the psychological process of guilt-deflection", reportedly common in countries with a long history of antisemitism and strong nationalism.^[10][11] Dr. Silver added that Holocaust inversion,^[10] and the gaslighting of Jews who faced antisemitic abuses,^[10] showed secondary antisemitism to be a systemic issue in Western society,^[10] making it hard for Jews to discuss their lived experiences.^[10]

For instance, many Jews faced allegations of "talking too much about the Holocaust", being "anti-Palestinian" or "ignoring Islamophobia" for raising awareness about Hamas' atrocities on October 7, 2023,^[10] despite Jews having suffered 68% of religion-based hate crimes in the United States (US) in 2023 as per FBI data,^[12] while 46% of the world's adult population (around 2,200,000,000 people) were found to hold deeply entrenched antisemitic views as of January 2025.^[13]

Dr. Silver considered those accusing Jews of being "genocidal" as being motivated by secondary antisemitism given that the accusers were "so uncomfortable in its immorality" that they had to "twist it into an expression of morality."^[10] She also highlighted that secondary antisemitism was statistically the highest in Europe as of 2022 in relation to Holocaust memory, education and commemoration.^[10][14]

Clemens Heni

Jewish political scientist Dr. Clemens Heni maintained that secondary antisemitism often involved Holocaust inversion, in whose relevant propaganda tends to single out Israeli Jews for perceived wrongdoings.^[15] Dr. Heni found that a common theme of those propaganda features the exaggeration of German suffering from Allied bombing operations,^[15] such as the Dresden bombing in February 1945,^[15] and false accusations of Israeli Jews "weaponizing" the Holocaust to "extort" from present Germans,^[15] which he classified as "soft-core Holocaust denial"^[15] – a synonym for Holocaust distortion.^[16]

Those who distributed such propaganda include German author Jörg Friedrich, Martin Walser and sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky,^[15] whose ideas contributed to a false claim by far-right National Democratic Party's parliamentarians at a Saxon State Parliament (Landtag) session that "the British committed a bombing Holocaust against the Germans in Dresden."^[15] The post-war expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe was also phrased by the "soft-core" deniers as an expulsion Holocaust.^[15]