The Holocaust and the Gaza Genocide: A Forbidden Comparison?
Anne-Ruth Wertheim 09/25/2026
(A shorter, Dutch version of this essay appeared on September 24 in De Groene Amsterdammer )
People who draw comparisons between the Holocaust and what Israel is doing to the Palestinians are often quick to be accused of antisemitism. But comparing is not the same as equating. There are certainly important differences, but there are similarities as well. In this article, I examine the similarities between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians today and the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews at the time.
Amsterdam (Dispatch to Informed Comment; Feature) – How oppressed people are constantly forced to choose between a new situation that limits their options and an alternative that is even more disadvantageous to them.
And how, in this way, they are made partly responsible for whatever unknown fate ultimately awaits them.
Is what Israel is doing to the Palestinians comparable to what the Nazis did to the Jews?
There has been considerable debate about this question, most recently after Frans Timmermans made a remark to that effect. He was immediately accused of antisemitism, as was the entire PRO party (the socialdemocratic/green party of the Netherlands), of which he is a prominent member. But I will argue that he was right: what Israel is doing to the Palestinians can indeed be compared to what the Nazis did to the Jews.
Comparing is not the same as equating. When we compare events, or sequences of events – that is, historical processes – we consider not only their similarities but also their differences. And there are indeed important differences between what the Nazis did to the Jews and what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. There are, for example, no gas chambers in Gaza or on the West Bank. But the Jews did not simply end up in the gas chambers of Eastern Europe overnight. That outcome was preceded by a long and protracted process, the outcome of which remained shrouded in mystery for much of the time.
Let me take my great-aunt Phine Asbacher-van Gelder as an example. She was one of the sisters of my grandmother, Heintje Wertheim-van Gelder. Phine and her husband lived in a lovely little house with a garden in Aerdenhout. In 1942, however, they were forced to move to a flat in the Transvaal neighbourhood of Amsterdam East, ostensibly for their own safety. The Nazis concentrated the whole Dutch Jewish population in this area, and over time around 80 per cent of its residents were Jewish. Because the neighbourhood was geographically hemmed in by the Ringvaart canal and an elevated railway line, it could easily be sealed off completely. My great-aunt and her husband were then transported via the Muiderpoort trainstation to Camp Westerbork, once again supposedly for their own good. Before long, they were deported from there to Sobibor, where her husband was murdered on 7 May 1943. Phine herself was murdered a few months later, on 23 July 1943. They were 61 and 59 years old, respectively. My grandmother escaped that fate by taking her own life on 14 May 1940, the day the Netherlands capitulated to Nazi Germany, together with my grandfather, Jonas Mozeszoon Wertheim. They had foreseen what lay ahead for the Jews.
The step-by-step process by which the Jews were driven ever deeper into a trap made up of successive compartments was described with great clarity by the Polish Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. In his influential 1989 book Modernity and the Holocaust, Bauman shows how this mechanism worked: at each successive stage, Jews were confronted with a choice between bad and worse. They were forced to make that choice themselves, and in this way the devious system made them complicit in the process that ultimately led to their own destruction. All the while, the final outcome of that process remained shrouded in darkness.
This same step-by-step process, in which people are forced to choose between bad and worse as as they enter each successive compartment of the trap, can also be seen in what is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza and, to some extent, on the West Bank. Here, too, the ultimate outcome remains hidden from those caught up in the process. It began when Palestinians were forcibly driven from their homes and villages around the time the State of Israel was established. They were fired upon by Israeli forces from the hills, their villages were razed to the ground, and it gradually became clear that their only chance of survival was to seek refuge in refugee camps. There they were crowded together, first in tents and later in permanent buildings, under increasingly difficult conditions. At first, they were still able to leave the camps, for example to work in Israel. But step by step, their freedom of movement was restricted.
In Gaza, this enclosure was enforced by an electrified fence surrounding the entire territory, with watchtowers at regular intervals from which the population was kept under armed surveillance day and night. On the West Bank, the process unfolded somewhat differently. Israeli settlers established themselves in an ever-growing number of locations throughout the territory, taking over Palestinian land and building settlements from which Palestinians were excluded. These settlements were connected by an extensive network of roads, while Palestinians faced a complex system of checkpoints that increasingly restricted their freedom of movement.
Over the years, various forms of resistance emerged in Gaza. One example was the largely non-violent protests of 2018–2019, when groups of unarmed Palestinians repeatedly approached the fence from inside Gaza. Gazans learned first-hand how Israel responded to such actions: protesters were shot in the knees. As early as 2006, there had also been recurring periods in which entire areas were bombarded, invariably presented as punishment for particular acts of resistance. Following the 7 October 2023 outbreak from Gaza into Israeli territory, these bombardments became more or less continuous. Before each bombardment, residents were given a choice: they could leave for another part of Gaza, where they were told they would be safe. That was the lesser of the two evils, and most complied and fled. Yet once they reached the designated area, they often discovered that they were being bombed there as well. They had effectively been forced to choose between the bad – abandoning their homes – and the worse – being bombed. In recent months, this process has gone a step further. The total area within which Gazans are permitted to move has been progressively reduced through the so-called Yellow Line. Here, too, the process has unfolded incrementally, step by step.
The bombardments not only kept people constantly on the move, but also deprived them of the few remaining opportunities to provide for themselves. Initially, for example, Gazans were still able to grow some of their own food. By now, however, they have become almost entirely dependent on whatever food and medicine Israel allows into the territory. Moreover, since 7 October 2023, Gazans have no longer been permitted to work in Israel, outside the fence. Until then, around 20,000 people – roughly 1 per cent of Gaza’s population – had done so. These workers had to endure humiliating procedures every morning before being allowed to cross the fence to go to work and again in the evening on their return. Since then, however, virtually no one has been allowed to enter or leave the Gaza Strip. Once again, this has been justified as being for their own protection: outside Gaza, Palestinians would supposedly be at risk because of the anger among Israelis over the events of 7 October 2023.
As a child, I experienced a similar step-by-step process myself, in which each successive stage confronted you with a choice between bad and worse. During the Second World War, my family believed that, far away in Indonesia, then still a Dutch colony, we would be safe from the Nazis. But we were soon to discover that the long arm of the Holocaust would reach us there as well. In 1942, when I was seven years old, Japan invaded and occupied the vast Indonesian archipelago. At the time, some sixty million Indonesians lived there, while the Dutch, who until then had ruled the colony, numbered only around 300,000. For the Japanese occupying forces it was relatively easy to strip this small Dutch minority of its power by confining them in camps. And that was precisely what they began to do during the first months of the occupation. They established around three hundred camps across the archipelago, each holding approximately a thousand prisoners, with separate camps for men and for women and children. Conditions varied from camp to camp, but everywhere people were crowded together behind fences, given far too little food and almost no medicine, and subjected to brutal punishment for any form of resistance. And they were kept at gunpoint day and night from high bamboo towers.
My father was imprisoned on the very day the colonial authorities surrendered. My mother, however, was able to remain in our house by the duck pond in Batavia – now Jakarta – for some time with my sister, my little brother and me. This was possible because, on my father’s advice, she had withdrawn all their money from the bank on the first day of the occupation. After all, salaries had stopped being paid. Many Dutch people made the mistake of doing the opposite: they deposited their money in the bank and soon found themselves without the means to support themselves, leaving them with little choice but to enter the internment camps.
But one day we too were told that we would be better off being interned in a women’s camp, euphemistically referred to as a ‘protected district.’ At first, internees were still allowed to leave these quarters during the day, but before long they were completely sealed off. The prospect of entering the camp was deeply distressing. Although very little information had emerged since it had been closed off, we had gathered that conditions inside were steadily deteriorating. Yet we were told that outside the camp we risked being attacked by the Indonesian population, which would be even worse. Faced with that choice, we decided to enter the camp. After we had been there for a year, my mother was once again confronted with a choice that would have far-reaching consequences.
On 24 September 1944, we received an order from the Japanese camp authorities stating that anyone with even a single drop of Jewish blood in their veins would be transferred to a separate camp. Japan, of course, was allied with Nazi Germany, and after the war it became clear how, at this stage of the occupation, the Nazis had succeeded in persuading the Japanese to segregate Jewish internees from the others.
My mother was not Jewish herself, but we, as the children of our Jewish father, were half-Jewish. She lay awake at night wondering whether she should register us as such, knowing that this might mean we would be sent to the Jewish camp while she would have to remain behind. She reasoned that the Japanese probably did not know that Wertheim was recognised as a Jewish name. Our fellow Dutch prisoners, however, knew that perfectly well, so all it would take was for one of them to betray us. And everyone knew what could happen if you disobeyed an order from the Japanese. My mother could not consult my father. He was far away in a men’s camp, and we did not even know whether he was still alive. After the war, however, we learned that he had faced the same dilemma and, after much deliberation, had decided to take the risk and not register as Jewish.
In the end, my mother decided to avoid the worse outcome – the possibility of being separated from us – and chose what seemed the lesser evil. She registered herself as Jewish, which meant that we were no longer classified as half-Jewish but as fully Jewish. And so we accompanied her to the Jewish women’s camp Tangerang. From there, together with the other Jewish women and children, we were transferred to the Adek camp, where we remained until the end of the war.
In the days before our transfer, I encountered antisemitism for the first time. I can still picture one of my little brother’s friends standing a short distance away from us and chanting: ‘You have to go to Tangerang, because you’re Klojoden!’
For us, Tangerang – and later Adek as well – was far worse than the camp we had come from. It was even filthier, disease was even more widespread, medicines were almost non-existent, even more people died, including children, and we suffered even greater hunger. And here we were also forced to watch as Indonesian guards under Japanese command, who had tried to escape, were beaten until they bled – a brutal warning intended to keep us in line. Yet from our fellow Jewish prisoners, who had been transferred to Tangerang from other women’s camps across West Java, we learned that, for some of them, conditions in our camp were actually an improvement.
So, looking at the broader picture and comparing the segregation of Jews by the Japanese with the persecution of Jews by the Nazis in Europe, one can identify quite a number of similarities. A fundamental difference, however, was that the Japanese, as far as I have been able to establish since the war, had no intention of killing us.
Photo of Gaza by Hosny salah: https://www.pexels.com/photo/child-in-gaza-camp-working-in-muddy-conditions-35934179/
Let us return briefly to what is happening on the West Bank. The Palestinians are not being bombed there, but they too are gradually being confined to ever-smaller areas, while their living conditions are getting worse by the day. They, too, are repeatedly confronted with choices between bad and worse and are thus made personally complicit in the deterioration of their circumstances, without knowing where that process will ultimately lead. When a new Israeli settlement is about to be established – often first signalled by the appearance of a temporary mobile home on Palestinian land – the local residents know what may happen if they resist. They risk being attacked, often by armed force, and people may be killed, with the assistance of the Israeli army or, at the very least, under its watchful eye. So what is worse: risking death or giving up your land?
Zygmunt Bauman identified another aspect of the Holocaust that can also be seen in the way Israel treats the Palestinians. This concerns the intervals between the successive orders through which the Nazis sought to drive the Jews ever deeper into the trap. These intervals could not be too short, because the Jews had often chosen the lesser of two evils precisely in the hope of buying themselves more time. If the next measure followed too quickly, the Nazis risked losing the cooperation of their potential victims. A similar pattern can be seen in the way Israel operates in the Palestinian territories, where a certain amount of time tends to pass between one measure and the next.
A final aspect of Bauman’s work that I want to highlight – and one that can also be applied to what is being done to the Palestinians – is the effort by Israel to conceal its actions from the outside world. The Nazis went to extraordinary lengths to keep their gas chambers hidden from public view, and they were remarkably successful in doing so. A similar effort to restrict outside scrutiny can certainly be seen in Gaza, where access for journalists has been severely limited and where, as is well known, many journalists have been killed.
In short, comparing is not the same as equating. There are certainly differences between the way the Nazis treated the Jews back then and the way Israel treats the Palestinians today, but there are similarities as well. It must be possible to identify and discuss those similarities without those who do so being vilified for making the comparison.