Equating Gaza with Auschwitz Is an Error
Comparing Gaza to Auschwitz blurs the moral and historical clarity that genocide demands
Written by: Jakub Nowakowski
This article is a response to the article “From Auschwitz to Gaza: The modern-day concentration camp” by Roberto Amaral.
One of the most beautiful synagogues still standing in Poland is located in the small, charming town of Łańcut. Its mid-18th-century walls feature stunning, preserved paintings depicting mythical and biblical animals, along with scenes from Jerusalem. On the eastern wall lies one of the synagogue’s most important features: the Aron Kodesh, a sacred space for the Torah.
Łańcut is one of roughly 700 synagogues that still exist in Poland today—a small fraction of the thousands that stood before the war. Each and one of them faced east, with the Aron Kodesh always located on the eastern wall. This orientation reflected the enduring hope and longing of Jews for Jerusalem—a place from which they were exiled nearly 2,000 years earlier by the Romans.
It’s important to remember that although the state of Israel was established after the Second World War, Jews across Europe had been dreaming of and striving for a return to Jerusalem for millennia. This yearning gave rise to Zionism—the movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Decades before the Holocaust, tens of thousands of European Jews emigrated to Palestine. For instance, between 1924 and 1928, about 30,000 Jews left Poland for Palestine, then under British mandate, driven by this shared vision.
Yes, after the Holocaust the nations of the world granted survivors the state of Israel. But the same United Nations also offered independence to Palestine—a proposal that was rejected by the Palestinian leaders and led to the first of many, wars.
Roberto Amaral focuses heavily on numbers related to the Gaza conflict. These numbers, particularly the civilian casualties, are heartbreaking. However, the author also makes comparisons to the Holocaust, so it’s important to reflect on some numbers from that period as well.
Take 42,000, for example. During the Holocaust, the Germans established over 42,000 camps, ghettos, and labour camps across Europe. Some operated for years; others, only months. Then there are six—the number of death camps designed specifically for mass extermination.
These six camps, including Bełżec, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Treblinka, became centres of industrialised murder. In Bełżec alone, 500,000 Jews—primarily from southern Poland—were killed in just ten months. At Auschwitz, over a million Jews, along with tens of thousands of other victims, were murdered. Treblinka saw the extermination of over 900,000 Jews, along with an unknown number of Poles and Soviet prisoners.
What’s often overlooked is that the victims in these death camps were not only local Jews. They were transported from across Europe—from France, Italy, Greece, and even Mediterranean islands. Some endured weeks in cattle cars, only to be killed upon arrival.
And then there’s the number 1.5 million—the estimated number of Jews killed in mass shootings by German forces and their collaborators, primarily in what is now Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. These executions were meticulously planned, often taking place in forests, ravines, or on the edges of towns, leaving behind mass graves that scar the landscape to this day.
But genocide is not unique to the Holocaust. In 1994, Rwanda witnessed the genocide of approximately one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu in just 100 days. In 1995, during the war in the Balkans, 8,000 Bosnian Muslims—mostly men and boys—were massacred in Srebrenica by the armed forces of the Republika Srpska. There were other massacres during that war. Other bombings. Other civilian deaths. But only one place, one event—Srebrenica—was recognised by the International Tribunal as genocide.
There’s something deeply unsettling about constantly comparing the unquestionably horrific suffering of Gaza’s civilians—who, to a significant extent, are hostages not only of Israeli government policy but also of their own leaders and of Hamas, an organisation recognised as terrorist around the world. It is worth keeping in mind that it was Hamas that sparked this latest cycle of violence with its attack on Israel on October 7, two years ago—not an Israeli army.
The definition of genocide isn’t complicated: it emerged from the political debates after World War II and turns on one thing above all else—intent. For an atrocity to be genocide, its defining objective must be the physical elimination of a group, or a part of that group. Any other benefit—military advantage, economic gain, revenge—must be secondary.
Consider the summer of 1945, when American bombers unleashed atomic weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing at least 200,000 people—mostly civilians—some in the blink of an eye, others in the cruel, lingering agony of burns and radiation sickness. Just months earlier, Allied aircraft had laid waste to Dresden, claiming between 18,000 and 25,000 lives, almost all of them non‑combatants. In 1943, similar firestorms over Hamburg consumed some 40,000 to 50,000 civilians beneath rubble and flames. And in 1944, German troops carried out a savage reprisal against Warsaw: they slaughtered around 200,000 residents in the wake of the uprising, expelled another 700,000, and reduced the once‑vibrant city to ruins.
None of these victims, however unspeakably tragic their deaths, are classified as genocide. Why? Because in each instance, the perpetrators did not seek to annihilate an entire people. The Germans did not intend to exterminate all the Poles; the Allies did not aim to wipe out every German; the Americans did not want to kill all the Japanese. Their goals were strategic or punitive—whether to terrorise a population, cripple an economy, hasten surrender, or punish resistance—not to achieve the physical elimination of a group.
By contrast, genocide allows no such caveats. European Jews in Warsaw, Tutsi in Kigali, Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica—none could surrender, convert, hand over property, or flee to save themselves. For them, special units arrived, surrounded towns, separated families, and executed people methodically until their victims ceased to exist. Their deaths were not collateral; they were the objective.
Yes, here are respected historians and genocide scholars who warn that aspects of Gaza today bear the hallmarks of genocide—especially in the chilling language used by some Israeli politicians. Yet just as many experts prefer terms like war crimes or crimes against humanity.
Ultimately, it won’t be up to journalists or scholars to decide: it will be the international courts created for precisely this purpose, and their verdict may be years away. In the meantime, our task is clear: we must apply pressure to end the bloodshed, not only on Israel but on Hamas as well, whose continued detention of dozens of hostages could be the single most important key to halting the violence.
Jakub Nowakowski is the Director of the Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Centre.