A ceasefire may have stopped the rockets, but the next campaign is already underway — fought not with weapons, but with words. Across headlines, NGOs, and social media feeds, Gaza is being recast as a “holocaust.” The same movement that cheered Hamas’s atrocities now presents itself as a community of survivors. It is a breath-taking inversion — the transformation of aggressors into victims and defenders into monsters.
The world has entered a new theatre of moral manipulation. The rhetoric of genocide, once reserved for the industrial extermination of a people, has become an instrument of political warfare. In Gaza, the word holocaust is being stripped of its historical and moral meaning and reapplied to Israel — the state founded to ensure that such a horror could never happen again.
The weaponisation of suffering
From the first hours of Hamas’s October 7 massacre, Israel faced not only a military assault but a coordinated campaign of narrative distortion. Hamas’s strategy has always relied on civilian suffering — using its own people as both human shields and human currency. The dead and displaced of Gaza were not the unintended consequences of Hamas’s tactics; they were the point. Every civilian casualty became a propaganda victory, every ruined building a photo opportunity to be fed to the world’s newsrooms and human-rights forums.
Now, in the war’s aftermath, this strategy has evolved into something darker: a global identity movement of “Gaza survivors,” recasting a terrorist organisation’s victims as the perpetrators of Nazi-like crimes. It is linguistic warfare at its most insidious — what historian Deborah Lipstadt has called “Holocaust inversion” – the turning of Israel into the new Nazi and Jews into their own oppressors.
Historical desecration masquerading as empathy
The Holocaust was not a war between combatants. It was the deliberate, systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews — men, women, and children — for the crime of existing. To equate that with a defensive military campaign aimed at dismantling a jihadist army that embeds itself among civilians is not only false but obscene.
When Gaza’s advocates claim to have “survived a holocaust,” they trivialise the word into a metaphor of political convenience. They erase the uniqueness of the Shoah and mock its victims. Worse still, they do so while aligning themselves — often unwittingly — with the very ideology that once sought to annihilate the Jewish people. Hamas’s founding charter praises Hitler, invokes antisemitic conspiracy theories, and pledges eternal war against Jews. To describe the dismantling of such a regime as genocide is to turn morality on its head.
The inversion of moral order
This inversion is not spontaneous; it is the logical outcome of decades of propaganda that has recast Israel’s existence as a form of aggression. From Soviet disinformation in the 1970s to the Durban conference in 2001, the language of human rights has been slowly co-opted to delegitimise the Jewish state. “Apartheid,” “colonialism,” and now “genocide” — each word once had a precise meaning rooted in law and history. Each has been emptied of that meaning and repurposed as a weapon against Israel alone.
The result is a global discourse where the moral compass no longer points north. Terrorists who hide in schools are called “resistance fighters.” Soldiers who warn civilians to evacuate before an attack are called “war criminals.” The only consistent principle is that Israel must always be guilty — even, and especially, when it is not.
The exploitation of Western conscience
Hamas and its allies understand something that too many in the West have forgotten: that moral language is powerful only when it can be hijacked. “Genocide” and “Holocaust” are words that evoke immediate emotional outrage. They short-circuit reason, replacing analysis with instinctive empathy for whoever claims the title of victim.
In a world where image outweighs evidence, Hamas has mastered the art of emotional manipulation. A photograph of rubble circulates faster than the story of a terror tunnel beneath it. A crying child eclipses the fact that the same hospital housed a command centre. The inversion is total: suffering caused by Hamas becomes suffering inflicted by Israel. Facts become optional; emotion becomes truth.
The moral and linguistic cost
If this distortion goes unchallenged, it will not merely slander Israel — it will erode the meaning of genocide itself. When every war becomes a “holocaust” and every airstrike a “massacre,” the true genocides of our age — the Yazidis under ISIS, the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the Tutsis in Rwanda — fade into moral equivalence. Words that once carried the weight of humanity’s darkest chapters become hollow slogans.
And the cost to Jewish memory is profound. The Holocaust was the defining trauma of the modern Jewish people. To watch its memory weaponised against the descendants of its victims is to witness history devour itself. It is not empathy that drives this — it is envy and resentment: the desire to appropriate the moral capital of Jewish suffering while denying Jewish legitimacy.
Resisting the rewriting of reality
Israel’s war was not against Gaza but against Hamas — an entity that turned Gaza into a fortress of death and despair. The distinction is everything, yet it is precisely what propagandists seek to erase. In doing so, they rewrite the moral grammar of our time, where terrorism becomes resistance and self-defence becomes atrocity.
Those who care about truth — journalists, academics, faith leaders, and policymakers — must resist this slide into moral relativism. They must insist on the difference between tragedy and evil, between the unavoidable consequences of war and the deliberate targeting of civilians.
To call Gaza a “holocaust” is to rob both Jews and Palestinians of dignity: Jews, by desecrating their history; Palestinians, by denying their agency and reducing them to eternal victims of others’ actions. True moral clarity demands rejecting both distortions.
The integrity of memory
The Holocaust stands as a singular event in human history — the nadir of moral collapse and the reason the world swore “Never Again.” That phrase was never meant to be a political slogan. It was a warning about how lies, repeated often enough, can destroy the capacity for moral judgement.
Today, that warning echoes again. When those who chant for Israel’s destruction claim to have survived its “holocaust,” we are witnessing not empathy but the final inversion — a world turned upside-down, where truth is punished and falsehood rewarded.
To defend the meaning of the word Holocaust is not a matter of semantics. It is a defence of civilisation’s memory itself. For if words lose their integrity, so too does the moral order they sustain.
