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Hostage-Shoah comparisons are wrong, but they contain some truth

There are very good reasons why the sight of emaciated hostages prompted analogies with the Holocaust

February 11, 2025 14:33
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Hamas fighters escort Israeli hostage Eli Sharabi on a stage before handing him over to a Red Cross team in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, on February 8, 2025. (Getty Images)
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Three men – Eli Sharabi, Ohad Ben Ami and Or Levy – were released by Hamas on Saturday in a deplorable state. They report that they and other hostages were starved, hung upside down, beaten, branded, strangled, and kept in a tunnel in which they could not stand. Eli Sharabi was told his wife Lianne and daughters Noiya and Yahel were alive and was made to read a statement saying how much he looked forward to seeing them. They died on October 7: this is the Hamas sense of humour. Their condition on release led to this observation from Donald Trump: Sharabi, Ben Ami and Levy looked like Holocaust survivors, he said.

The Times made this comparison in cartoon form: the first part had three men behind barbed wire holding the sign “Never Again” in 1945; the second part had three men holding the sign “Again” in 2025. Is it seemly to compare these abused men to Holocaust survivors? Is it, in the ghastly dishonest mire that constitutes dialogue about Israel and Palestine, and Jews and Arabs, accurate or helpful?

It’s more accurate than calling us Nazis, which plenty do. Jews are increasingly framed as Nazis in intention and behaviour: the eliding from Nazi to Jew is irresistible nowadays. The most forgivable analysis is that it is comforting, and that is a tribute, though an awful one. The Shoah is so frightening, such an affront to the fantasy of civilisation, it’s easier to believe that Jews had it coming than to confront the truth that much of Europe was complicit, and the continent is soaked in Jewish blood. If you frame Jews as genocidal murderers, the Shoah appears less as the monstrous crime that ended European Jewish civilisation than a necessary cleansing, as the Nazis said it was as they dropped the pesticide into the chambers. It is expiation, retrospective and narcotic.

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Hostages