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

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.

That is the generous analysis: another, less generous, is that parts of society – wealthy pseudo-intellectuals particularly, who have time to spare – have imbued murderous Christian medieval Jew hate. They believe – whether they know it or not, and most don’t – in the myth of the singular demonic Jew. They want to reanimate him for many purposes both trivial and important. This mythical creature must be taunted with its own history, for our history is interesting, and the pseudo-intellectual is curious about it, being vain. He measures his own morality against the legend of the Jew, as his ancestors did, and he seeks to possess what he considers Jewish singularity for himself: this is an urge to dominate and own, and in my facetious moments I call it a kind of spiritual colonialism. To do this, he steals our history. Each violent act attributed to Israel, he tells us, is an affront not only to the victim of this act, but to the Jew’s own ancestor. The dead Jew is a saint to be learned from – this will end, possibly quite soon – the living Jew an affront.

Even so, is a comparison with the Shoah accurate here? Of course not: the suffering of thousands, no matter how grievous, is not Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmo or Majdanek. In the last 50 years we have seen attempts to coalesce all murderous acts in history into one great miasma, where catastrophes are denied specificity, and therefore meaning: that is how the deputy prime minister of Britain and half the UN can mark the Shoah without mentioning Jews, and others compare Israeli wars of self-defence to Nazi wars of conquest. The comparison remains absurd: Be’eri is no more the Warsaw Ghetto than Rafah is. The Shoah was the destruction of an entire civilisation. That is why Claude Lanzmann used the word revenants, not survivors: those who returned from the dead. What happened to the hostages is only an echo of the Shoah.

For Hamas and Islamic Jihad, though, the Shoah is a Platonic ideal – I joke – and goal. I fear that the murderous hatred Christian Europe meted on Jews has simply moved, as Jews have moved: in continental Europe there aren’t that many left of us to kill. The Nazis planned a Final Solution in the Middle East, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad are their successors. Their rhetoric is annihilatory, though we have allies in the Middle East. (We must remember that). To those in the West who say Hamas and Islamic Jihad do not mean it – who say Death to the Jews is just a marketing tool, or opening position, or joke – I say, a nation of Holocaust and ethnic cleansing survivors – the Mizrahi Jews – are the wrong people to tease.

The fear is: the great war of the 20th century was in two parts – perhaps the Shoah is too. Having been chased across the world for centuries, where will we end?