Historical truth is not the property of any state or political movement. Its warning against dehumanization belongs to humanity.
Some subjects have become almost impossible to discuss without being forced into a political camp.
The Holocaust is one of them.
Mention it, and some will accuse you of defending Israel. Criticize the Israeli government, and others will accuse you of insulting the memory of the six million Jews murdered by Nazi Germany.
Both positions betray history.
The Holocaust does not belong to Zionism. It does not belong to Israel, to any government, or to any political ideology. It belongs to humanity.
It is the history of what happens when hatred becomes state policy. When people are stripped of their names and reduced to a religion, an ethnicity, or a category. When discrimination becomes ordinary, persecution becomes legal, and the world waits until a catastrophe is impossible to ignore.
Hitler and the Nazi regime did not murder six million Jews overnight.
Before the concentration and extermination camps came years of propaganda. Years of antisemitism, discriminatory laws, segregation, dispossession, and the systematic removal of rights. Jewish people were first portrayed as dangerous, disloyal, and less human. Once enough people accepted that lie, everything that followed became possible.
The Holocaust was carried out by a criminal regime. But it was also enabled by collaboration, fear, indifference, and the silence of people and governments that knew something was happening but failed to act before it was too late.
Saying this is not Zionist propaganda.
It is history.
As someone who has spent years documenting war and listening to survivors, I have never understood why acknowledging the Holocaust should make anyone within the pro-Palestine movement uncomfortable.
I understand the anger behind that discomfort. The memory of the Holocaust has repeatedly been used to silence legitimate criticism of Israel. Accusations of antisemitism have been directed at people simply for opposing occupation, apartheid, collective punishment, or the killing of Palestinian civilians.
That weaponization of history must be challenged.
But we should not respond by distancing ourselves from the Holocaust. We should never surrender historical truth simply because someone else has tried to use it for political purposes.
If anything, those of us who stand with Palestine should be among the strongest defenders of the truth of the Holocaust.
Not because the Holocaust justifies the establishment or actions of any state—it does not. And not because Jewish suffering can be used to excuse Palestinian suffering—it cannot.
We should defend its truth because we know what it means when an entire people are dehumanized. We know what happens when a population is treated as a threat simply for existing. We know where the language of collective guilt can lead.
The Holocaust was not a Zionist project.
It was a crime against humanity.
Its victims included Jewish children, parents, workers, teachers, artists, and entire families whose only “crime” was being born Jewish. The Nazis also persecuted and murdered Roma, disabled people, political opponents, LGBTQ+ people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, prisoners of war, and others whom the regime considered unworthy of life.
Remembering them should not be controversial.
Their suffering should not depend on our political position. Their memory should not require loyalty to the Israeli government. And mourning them should never mean remaining silent about what Israel is doing to Palestinians and Lebanese people today.
There is no contradiction here.
We can remember the six million Jews murdered by Nazi Germany and condemn the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
We can oppose antisemitism and oppose Zionism.
We can mourn the victims of the Holocaust and demand justice for Palestinians and Lebanese civilians killed by Israel.
These positions are not morally incompatible. They come from the same principle: no people should ever be treated as less human than another.
Human dignity cannot depend on nationality.
It cannot depend on religion.
It cannot depend on whether a victim is politically convenient.
When we say that every civilian life matters, those words must apply to everyone—or they mean nothing.
That is why remembering the Holocaust does not weaken the Palestinian cause.
It strengthens its moral foundation.
The Holocaust shows us where hatred can lead when people stop seeing their neighbors as human beings. It teaches us that language matters because mass violence does not begin with mass graves. It begins with words. It begins with propaganda—with the repeated claim that a particular group is dangerous, inferior, unwanted, or collectively responsible.
It begins when cruelty becomes acceptable because of who the victims are.
History does not repeat itself in exactly the same way. Gaza is not Auschwitz. Palestine is not Nazi Germany. Every crime has its own history, circumstances, and victims. We do not need to erase those differences to recognize familiar patterns of dehumanization, collective punishment, mass displacement, and international silence.
History may not repeat itself precisely, but it warns us.
And one of its clearest warnings is about silence.
Silence alone did not create the Holocaust. Nazi ideology, state power, war, bureaucracy, and countless acts of collaboration made it possible. But silence gave persecution room to grow. Governments delayed. Institutions looked away. Ordinary people convinced themselves that what was happening to their neighbors was not their responsibility.
By the time the world fully confronted the horror, six million Jews had been murdered.
That lesson belongs to every generation.
Including ours.
Today, while politicians and commentators argue over terminology, civilians continue to be killed. In Gaza. In Lebanon. In Sudan. In Ukraine. In conflicts that receive global attention and in others the world has nearly forgotten.
The victims are usually people who had no control over the decisions that placed them in danger.
As a journalist, I have learned that statistics never tell the whole story.
A number does not tell you what someone was doing before a bomb struck their home. It does not tell you what they wanted to become, whom they loved, or who waited for them to return. It does not show you the empty chair at the family table or the messages that will never receive an answer.
War turns people into numbers.
The responsibility of journalism is to give them back their names.
That is why remembering the Holocaust matters.
Not because its memory belongs to one state or one political movement, but because it reminds us what happens when human beings are turned into symbols, threats, and statistics instead of being seen as people.
For decades, the world has repeated the words “Never Again.”
But if those words are reserved for one people, they do not mean never again.
They mean never again for some.
“Never Again” must be a universal commitment: against antisemitism, racism, occupation, dehumanization, collective punishment, forced displacement, and mass atrocities—regardless of who commits them and regardless of who the victims are.
Otherwise, it is not a principle.
It is a slogan.
The Holocaust must never be used to justify injustice against Palestinians. But it must also never be denied, minimized, or abandoned because Israel and its supporters have tried to use its memory as a shield against accountability.
We are capable of holding more than one truth.
The Holocaust happened. Six million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.
Antisemitism remains real and dangerous.
And none of this gives Israel the right to occupy Palestinian land, destroy Gaza, kill civilians, displace families, or commit war crimes in Palestine and Lebanon.
One truth does not erase the other.
More than eighty years after the Holocaust, the question is not simply whether we remember its victims. Memorials, museums, books, testimonies, and surviving families have preserved their memory.
The real question is whether we have understood what their history was trying to teach us.
Have we learned to recognize hatred before it becomes policy?
Have we learned to challenge dehumanization before it becomes mass violence?
Have we learned that silence while civilians are being killed is not neutrality?
History remembers the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
It also remembers the governments that delayed, the institutions that looked away, and the people who remained silent.
Our generation is now creating its own historical record.
One day, people will look back at Gaza and Lebanon. They will see the destroyed homes, the displaced families, the murdered children, and all the warnings the world chose to debate instead of answering.
The question is no longer what history will teach them.
The question is what history will say about us.
Source note: Historical information about the Holocaust and groups persecuted by Nazi Germany is supported by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. For international legal context concerning the occupied Palestinian territory and alleged international crimes, see the International Court of Justice’s 2024 advisory opinion and the International Criminal Court’s Palestine proceedings.