Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Photo:. Reuters
The article, “Zionism’s modern atrocities echo the horrors of Nazism” (Mail & Guardian, 26 August 2025) refers. This is not the first to push the notion that Zionists are Nazis and that the Gaza conflict is comparable to the Holocaust. But like all anti-Israel advocates, the article reveals a gross misunderstanding of not just the Holocaust, but of the entire conflict.
First, the article mentions that October 2023 saw the start of the present conflict but neglects to mention that the aggressor was Hamas – Gaza’s de facto and elected government. On 7 October 2023, Hamas and other radical militant groups crossed over Israel’s border and committed mass and direct slaughter of civilians that involved systematic sexual violence and torture. More than 250 people were taken hostage.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other government officials have reiterated that if their hostages are returned, and Hamas hands itself in, then the war will end. Yet, hostage hand-overs and ceasefires have been broken by Hamas. And when hostages were handed back, they came back emaciated and abused. Many, like 22-year-old Shani Louk, had her body paraded through the streets of Gaza to cheers.
Hamas’s goal wasn’t some noble fight to secure freedom for Palestinians. It made clear its goal in its founding charter — the destruction of Israel and the extermination of Jews. Hamas had genocidal intentions when it invaded Israel on 7 October 2023 and broadcast their crimes to the world.
Everything that happened after was its fault. And it continued to cause the destruction of Gaza and the deaths of innocents through its embedding of its fighters among civilians, using hospitals as military bases, and criss-crossing the country with tunnels that they have not once used to protect Gazans, but to wage their infantile war against Israel.
The International Criminal Court of Justice (ICJ) did not find Israel guilty of genocide. This is a lie that has been spread far too often across social media and in publications that should know better. The ICJ found that a genocide was possible but hadn’t occurred. The same could be said of any warzone.
Claims that Israel is committing genocide fail every test. Israel has the capacity to wipe out Gaza in days, yet has committed itself to a protracted war that risks its own people in an effort to minimise civilian casualties. And it has.
By its very nature, warfare (and especially urban warfare) will lead to collateral damage. We don’t live in a fairy-tale world in which Israel can just turn the other cheek and let its people be slaughtered, raped and stolen. So, Israel was forced into an urban conflict against an enemy that had spent the better part of two decades preparing the entire country for a siege that guaranteed civilian casualties. Because Hamas wants civilians to die. Every dead Gazan is a martyr that can be used to paint Israel as the villain.
Despite this, Israel has minimised civilian casualties through opening humanitarian corridors, dropping evacuation notices, and calling off key strategic strikes when the civilian death toll would be considered too great. It is naïve to think that not a single civilian would die.The international community ludicrously opposes any steps to evacuate Gazans so they can escape the warzone.
The article claims that this conflict is “unprecedented in this century”. This reveals a grave ignorance of the conflicts around the world. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Syrian Civil War, the Sudanese genocide, the wars in the Congo. Just to name a few.
The worst assertion is the comparison to the Holocaust and likening Zionists to Nazis, which demonstrates a lack of understanding of the Holocaust.
Unlike Hamas attacking Israel, the Jews didn’t attack Germany prior to the Holocaust. The first Jews to be persecuted and killed were Germans. Many of whom had served Germany proudly in World War I and were active citizens of their fatherland. The Nazis slaughtered them without provocation.
The nature of the genocide was also different. The Jews in the Holocaust weren’t killed as collateral damage or in crossfires between warring armies. They were lined up in industrialised death camps, and intentionally massacred by way of gas, firing squad, forced labour and a host of unspeakable tortures. Genocide requires intentionality. There is no intention to exterminate the Palestinian people. There was clear intention to do so towards the Jews.
Finally, the scale of the Holocaust and the present conflict is incomparable. The Gaza Ministry of Health puts the death toll at more than 65 000 in almost two years. This number is highly suspicious as Hamas has an incentive to inflate numbers for propaganda purposes. Two years into the Holocaust, more than a million Jews had already been killed. None of them were combatants. The death tolls of other genocides paint similar pictures.
About 500 000 to a million dead in about 100 days in Rwanda. Between one and 1.5 million dead in a year in Armenia. Between 300 000 and 400 000 in Sudan in an ongoing conflict with millions displaced.
The article tries to paint the founding of Israel as a colonialist project, stripping the Jews of their self-determination and history. The Nakba was not a colonial invasion. The displacement of Arabs wasn’t because of Israeli pogroms, but because of multiple Arab armies invading Israel in 1948. Israel told the Arab population to vacate their home so they wouldn’t be in the way when the Arab armies attacked. The Arab armies failed, and many who had vacated their homes feared to return. But many did. Those Arabs became Israeli citizens.
Israel is not an apartheid state. It is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy, and is very far from a Jewish supremacy project. Arabs and Muslims have full rights in Israel, with many serving high-ranking positions in government, the military and in the judiciary.
Israel is also the only Middle Eastern state that respects the rights of women and sexual minorities — not to mention religious minorities, as evidenced by its protection of the Syrian Druze population.
As South Africans, we should know better than to accuse a country with a stronger record on human rights than our own of practicing apartheid.
To equate Zionism with Nazism is not just historically false, it is morally repugnant. It trivialises the Holocaust, slanders the only democracy in the Middle East and emboldens those who harbour genocidal intent against Jews. We can disagree about Israel’s policies, but Holocaust inversion crosses the line into hate.
Craig Pantanowitz is the acting national chairperson of the South African Zionist Federation.