Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany

Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are a subject of significant controversy within political discourse. Given the legacy of the Holocaust, the appropriateness of these comparisons, including whether they constitute a form of antisemitism known as Holocaust inversion, is intensely debated.^[1][2]

Some scholars and critics of Israeli policy argue that such comparisons can be used as a rhetorical device to highlight specific actions or policies without antisemitic intent. Conversely, many historians,^[3] governments,^[4] and Jewish organizations maintain that these comparisons are ahistorical, morally equivocal, and often serve to deny or minimize the uniqueness of the Holocaust while demonizing Jews and the Jewish state.^[5][6]

• People made comparisons between Zionism and Nazism even before Israel was founded in 1948.
• In 1945, a British politician named Edward Spears said political Zionism was like the Nazi idea of Lebensraum (living space).^[4]
• Victor Klemperer, a German-Jewish writer who survived the Holocaust, wrote that both Zionism and Nazism were similar kinds of nationalist ideas.^[7]
• In 1948, famous Jewish thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein signed a letter. The letter compared a political party led by Menachem Begin to Nazi-like groups.^[8]
• English historian Arnold J. Toynbee first compared Zionism to Nazism, but he later changed his mind after other scholars criticized his view.^[9]

• During the Six-Day War in 1967, the Soviet government said Israel's military actions were like those of Nazi Germany.
• After the Likud party won Israel's election in 1977, right-wing politicians in Israel began using Holocaust comparisons to describe their left-wing opponents.^[10]

• An Israeli philosopher, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, warned that occupying the Palestinian territories could make Israelis act like "Judeo-Nazis." He said it could hurt the morals of the Israeli army.^[11]
• In 1983, a scholar named Boaz Evron said that if Israel became an immoral society, it would not survive, just like Nazi Germany did not. Another professor, Richard Arens, compared Israeli settlements to Nazi Lebensraum.^[12]
• During the First Intifada, historian Omer Bartov wrote a letter to Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin. He said that telling soldiers to "break the bones" of Palestinians could make the army brutal, like the German army in World War II.^[13]
• A Holocaust survivor, Yehuda Elkana, warned in 1988 that if Israel saw all its enemies as Nazis, it might start acting like Nazis itself.^[13]

• In the 21st century, some Israeli soldiers, politicians, and public figures have also made such comparisons.
• In 2005, some Israeli settlers wore yellow stars during protests. They did this to compare their removal from Gaza to the persecution of Jews in the Holocaust.^[14]
• In 2012, a former Israeli soldier was quoted saying he felt like a Nazi during his service in the First Intifada.^[15]
• Another soldier in 2014 said that damage in Gaza looked like photos of Warsaw destroyed in World War II.
• In 2016, an Israeli general, Yair Golan, gave a speech that many people thought compared modern Israel to 1930s Europe. He later said he did not mean to compare Israel to Nazi Germany. In 2019, he did compare right-wing Israeli politicians to Nazis.^[16][17]
• Yair Netanyahu, the son of the prime minister, compared an Israeli movement to Nazi Germany in 2020.^[18]
• A former general, Amiram Levin, said in 2023 that Israel's control of the West Bank was like Nazi Germany's policies.^[19]
• In December 2023, a mayor said Gaza should be made empty like Auschwitz. The Auschwitz Museum said his words sounded like a call for murder.^[20]
• In February 2025, a left-wing politician, Ofer Cassif, compared Israel's plan for Gaza to the emigration of Jews from Nazi Germany. Right-wing politicians criticized him strongly for this.
• A politician named Moshe Feiglin compared both Israel and Palestinians to Nazis in a statement about Gaza.

• In August 2022, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was in Berlin, Germany. When asked about a Palestinian attack in 1972, he said Israel had committed "50 Holocausts" against Palestinians. The German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, later said that comparing other events to the Holocaust is unacceptable, especially for Germans. A German newspaper called the remarks antisemitic. Afterward, Abbas said he did not mean to downplay the Holocaust. He said he was trying to talk about the suffering of the Palestinian people since 1948.^[21]

• Politicians from other countries have also made comparisons.
• In 2016, a Swedish housing minister, Mehmet Kaplan, had to resign. This happened after a video was found from 2009 where he said Israel treats Palestinians like Nazis treated Jews in the 1930s.^[22]
• In 2018, Turkey's President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said that the "spirit of Hitler" lives in Israel. He said Israel's belief that the land is only for Jews is like Hitler's belief in a pure race. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the remarks and criticized Erdoğan's government.
• In 2023, the President of Tunisia, Kais Saed, said that while Tunisians protected Jews in the Holocaust, Israel was now bombing children in Gaza. A Jewish leader said such comments could cause hatred against the Jews still living in Tunisia.^[23]
• In February 2024, Brazil's President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, caused controversy by comparing Israel's war in Gaza to the Holocaust.^[24]
• In April 2025, an Argentine lawmaker, Vanina Biasi, was charged for her tweets. She had called Israel a "Nazi" state and described the war in Gaza as a "Holocaust."^[25]

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy believed that the prevalence of Holocaust inversion had encouraged violence against Jews:^[27]

[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^[28] way of justifying it must emerge.

Author Yossi Klein Halevi believed that the comparison demonized Jews:^[29]

The deepest source of anti-Israel animus^[30] 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.

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.^[31][32] Dr. Silver added that Holocaust inversion,^[31] and the gaslighting of Jews who faced antisemitic abuses,^[31] showed secondary antisemitism to be a systemic issue in Western society,^[31] making it hard for Jews to discuss their lived experiences.^[31]

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,^[31] despite Jews having suffered 68% of religion-based hate crimes in the United States (US) in 2023 as per FBI data,^[33] 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.^[34]

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."^[31] She also highlighted that secondary antisemitism was statistically the highest in Europe as of 2022 in relation to Holocaust memory, education and commemoration.^[31][35]

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.^[36] Dr. Heni found that a common theme of those propaganda features the exaggeration of German suffering from Allied bombing operations,^[36] such as the Dresden bombing in February 1945,^[36] and false accusations of Israeli Jews "weaponizing" the Holocaust to "extort" from present Germans,^[36] which he classified as "soft-core Holocaust denial"^[36] – a synonym for Holocaust distortion.^[37]

Those who distributed such propaganda include German author Jörg Friedrich, Martin Walser and sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky,^[36] 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."^[36] The post-war expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe was also phrased by the "soft-core" deniers as an expulsion Holocaust.^[36]