I am writing this article with a heavy heart, between attending funerals and comforting mourners, supporting soldiers and their wives and children, praying for the healing of the injured and for the return of the hostages. Israeli society is coping with many challenges and we face a long and difficult road ahead.
We may feel totally overwhelmed by these horrific events, but it is still important to think clearly and to make careful distinctions. In my humble opinion, this is important not just as an issue of language and history, but also because it has practical consequences for how we decide to deal with Hamas – politically, militarily, and also from a religious and spiritual perspective.
Hamas are not Nazis.
For many years, historians of the Shoah have been working hard to establish the Holocaust as a unique event in the history of mankind, different from other genocidal events such as the Armenian genocide and wars in Africa. Their motivation is to show that the Shoah was unique not just because of the scope and focus of the Nazi brutality, but also because of their specific intention to destroy the Jewish people.
Comparing these Gaza criminals with the Nazis will make it easier for other people to minimize and negate the uniqueness of the evil that we experienced during the Holocaust. This plays into the hands of fools who make stupid comparisons between the Nazis and all kinds of immoral and indecent actions that take place around the world. It is therefore in our own interests to reject the association being made between the terrorists from Gaza and the Third Reich.
I would suggest another reason why we should reject this comparison, which contradicts the idea that the Shoah was a unique event. I personally believe that the Holocaust was not a one-off event in Jewish history, but part of a pattern that we have experienced repeatedly, since Amalek first attacked the Jewish people on the way out of Egypt.
As we say on Seder night: “In every generation they rose up against us to destroy us”, and in many cases they almost succeeded. Since the Jewish nation was formed and anointed as a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation”, there were always those who hated us. This is the deep hatred that we are still experiencing in the world today. Antisemitism – the oldest hatred – is often cloaked in different disguises. For example, Haman told the Persian King that the Jews were disobedient, and in the ancient world, pagans despised us for our monotheism.
In the Middle Ages, Jew-hatred was based on religion: Christianity and Islam against Judaism. Christian Europe was soaked in Jewish blood for over a thousand years, from the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, to the massacres at Kishinev and later Russian pogroms. In the Islamic world they have a long tradition of Jew hatred, from the decrees of the Almohad Caliphate in 12th century Spain, to the Farhud in Baghdad in the 20th century.
In modern times, religious justifications were replaced by anti-Semitic arguments, from the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”. In the Land of Israel, hatred has been dressed up as the justification for a territorial struggle. Of course, the conflict did not start with the border disputes of 1948 or 1967, but concerns the very presence of Jews in the land, as we saw in the 1921 and 1929 massacres.
On this historical timeline, the Shoah is one event of many. Of course, it stands out because of its scale, and because it was systematically planned and carried out by the German state rather than a mob of bloodthirsty rioters, like the crusades and the pogroms. But it is part of a broader sequence of events that started with Amalek and will only end when God brings redemption to the Jewish people and to the world. According to this second approach, there is no reason to label Hamas as Nazis, since they are just another group on the timeline of Jew-hatred – an evil force in their own right.
It is part of our optimistic nature to believe that the world is a good place, and to limit the evil within narrow limits. We want to believe that God made humankind good – both as believing Jews and as humanistic liberals living in a supposedly civilized world. That is why we prefer to frame the Shoah as a unique phenomenon, and to put the murderers of Gaza in their own category as unique and extraordinary. But unfortunately, this is not the case. Taking the murderous Arab pogrom of 2023 out of its historical context only helps to foster dangerous illusions of the kind that got smashed on Simchat Torah.
The murderers of Hamas are the heirs of the Israel-haters of previous generations. They will still exist even if we flatten the whole of Gaza, because their Hezbollah brothers sit on our Northern border, and the influence of their Iranian supporters is felt all around us and even within Israel.
No one should think that if the IDF’s protection were removed from our homes – whether in Judea and Samaria or in the rest of Israel’s cities, towns and kibbutzim, some humanitarian force would protect us from a similar fate to that of the residents of the Gaza Envelope. Not all nations are evil and seek to destroy us – there were righteous gentiles during the Shoah who helped us, but not enough to prevent Hitler’s Final Solution.
There is only one justification for using the nickname “Nazis” for Hamas: for international propaganda. If using this comparison helps us to win the sympathy of part of the Western world, it may allow us the scope to act against Hamas, by stirring the global conscience in our favor. However, I doubt whether using this false comparison will be beneficial, especially in the long term for international propaganda. It would be better for the world to understand that Hamas are not the Nazis of the past, but today’s manifestation of the evil forces that have always been sitting on our borders, waiting to ambush us at any opportunity. If we do not come to our senses, defend ourselves, and defeat them as we should, this Gaza massacre will not be the last.
If Hamas are not Nazis, what should we compare them to? The association that is closest to the consciousness of the Western world and perhaps the most effective comparison is with the Islamic State terrorists (ISIS). Internally, we have no stronger derogatory term in Hebrew than “Hamas”, as mentioned in this week’s Torah reading. Hashem chose to destroy the world because it was full of “hamas”, meaning murderous violence. Hamas will surely become a byword for the ultimate manifestation of evil, as experienced throughout Jewish history, and on the same continuum as Amalek, the Crusaders, the Cossacks, the Nazis, and many other villains.
As we read in Psalm 79: “Let the nations not say, “Where is their God?” Before our eyes let it be known among the nations that You avenge the spilled blood of Your servants.”
Rabbi Dr. Yehuda Brandes is the President of Herzog Academic College and Chair of the Hemed State Religious Education system. Translated from Hebrew by Sarah Manning
