For decades, the comparison was taboo. Understandably so. To compare anything or anyone to Nazi Germany was to invoke the worst horrors in modern human history: industrial genocide, ethnic cleansing, fascist ideology, and global war. But when the state of Israel, created in the aftermath of the Holocaust, begins to echo, rhetorically, strategically, and militarily, some of the very tactics that defined Nazi Germany, the time for silence is over.

Let us be clear from the outset. This is not a one-to-one comparison. The Holocaust was a unique event, and Nazi Germany was a fascist regime obsessed with racial purity, with extermination as a goal. But genocide, as defined under international law, does not require gas chambers. It requires intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. That is exactly what we are witnessing in Gaza. This moment, unfolding in real time before the eyes of the world, bears the unmistakable signs of genocidal policy, even if carried out under the euphemisms of modern warfare and national security.

Netanyahu’s government has implemented policies that amount to collective punishment, long before October 7. A complete siege on Gaza. Bombardments that leave no safe zone. The targeting of hospitals, bakeries, journalists, and civilian convoys. The forced displacement of over a million people into what are effectively militarized famine zones. The blocking of aid. The language used by Israeli officials refers to the population as human animals, or as legitimate targets if they do not evacuate. Evacuate where? There is nowhere left to go. There is no escape for civilians when every square kilometer is under surveillance and threat, when every corridor is a trap.

This is not war. This is not self-defense. This is extermination by attrition. The method has changed, but the result is the same. Mass death. Demoralization. Destruction of a people and their future.

To draw the comparison is not to diminish the Holocaust. It is to honor its warning. “Never Again” was never meant to be a slogan exclusive to one people. It was meant to be a universal moral imperative. Yet the very people who suffered one of history’s greatest atrocities have, in this case, allowed their trauma to become weaponized in service of another. The global community has facilitated this by elevating Israeli exceptionalism to the point of untouchability, silencing critics with accusations of anti-Semitism, even when their objections are grounded in the very human rights values we claim to uphold.

This is not the first time Israel has inflicted suffering on Palestinians. The Nakba, the mass expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians in 1948, was the beginning of a policy of ethnic removal. But in 2023, 2024 and 2025, with the full backing of many Western powers and the silence of many Arab leaders, Israel crossed a line. It turned Gaza into a killing field. Entire families have been erased. Entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble. Schools, mosques, and UN shelters have been bombed repeatedly. Not once. Not by mistake. But systematically, with the aim of making Gaza uninhabitable.

We are told Hamas hides among civilians. That is not justification for genocide.

We are told Israel has the right to defend itself. So do the Palestinians.

But defense does not look like carpet bombing. It does not look like starving a population of two million people. It does not look like killing more children in a few months than any war in recent history. The statistics are staggering. The footage is unbearable. And still, world leaders look away.

And then there is the ideology. The dehumanization. The incitement. When politicians openly call for Gaza to be flattened, for Palestinians to be expelled, when settlers rampage through the West Bank with impunity, when the media is filled with justifications of violence against a trapped population, what are we supposed to call it? What label is appropriate when one group is designated as subhuman, as a demographic threat, and is dealt with accordingly? When a state creates a framework in which some lives are valued, and others are disposable, and enforces that framework with brutal precision, the comparison to Nazi ideology is no longer hyperbole. It is clarity.

The world swore to remember. To learn. But remembrance without recognition is hollow. It is easier to condemn Nazis from the past than to call out similar crimes in the present. It is easier to say “Never Again” at a Holocaust museum than to stop genocide while it unfolds live on every screen. The images from Gaza are not distant black-and-white photos from history. They are full-color, real-time broadcasts of horror. They are the faces of dead children pulled from rubble. They are the screams of mothers. The empty stares of orphans. The bloodstained blankets in makeshift hospitals.

This is not just Israel’s crime. It is America’s, which supplies the bombs. It is Germany’s, which arms the very state that once invoked its own guilt as justification for its existence. It is the EU’s, which debates words while children starve. It is the Arab regimes’, who sell out Palestine for trade deals and Western approval. And it is ours. Each of us who stays silent. Each of us who treats this as complicated. Each of us who refuses to see what is right in front of us.

No, Israel is not Nazi Germany. But it has borrowed the tactics. It has normalized language that echoes fascist regimes. It has used trauma as shield and sword. And it has created a system in which millions of people are penned in, bombed, starved, and then blamed for their own deaths. When civilians are portrayed as enemy combatants, when the word terrorist becomes a blanket justification for killing, when survivors are treated as threats, the world becomes complicit in erasure.

When the victims of genocide become the perpetrators of another, we are faced with a moral crisis of the highest order. Our responsibility is not to the state, not to a flag, but to the principles we claim to hold dear. If human rights mean anything, they must apply universally. If the international system is to have legitimacy, it must act. Condemnations are not enough. Arms embargoes, prosecutions, and boycotts must follow.

So yes. Today, it is time to compare Israel to Nazi Germany. Because if we wait until the body count reaches six million, we have already failed. Because genocide does not begin with numbers. It begins with language. With silence. With impunity. And it ends with a graveyard so vast we can no longer count the names.