A banner proclaiming “Palestine: the victory of the oppressed people against Nazi Zionism”, brandished by Hamas terrorists while the hostage Naama Levy, her pants bloody upon her capture, is ordered to smile, in uniform: this image sums it up . All the barbarism. His whole strategy. Nazify Israel, whitewash the crimes of Hamas, reverse the roles between executioners and victims: this is the essence of their propaganda.
But this story does not end there. It’s not just Hamas. It goes beyond Gaza, it infiltrates university campuses, settles into activist circles, and even political speeches. Figures like the deputies of La France insoumise, pseudo-anti-racists, organizations like Amnesty International, ready to twist legal concepts to accommodate their ideologies, and pseudo-feminists give it a dangerous echo. “Nazi Israel”, “Genocide in progress”, “Hamas resistance”: these slogans are not semantic blunders. They are ideological weapons, which legitimize hatred and justify violence.
The term “genocide” emptied of its meaning
Today, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, as the last voices of survivors die out, these relays are guilty of an accusatory inversion. A form of negationism that distorts History. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide”, defined it as the deliberate and systematic destruction of an entire group. To equate the suffering of civilians in Gaza with organized genocide is to empty the term of its meaning and open the door to confusion and violence.
The consequences are already there: synagogues attacked, Jewish students harassed, demonstrations calling for an Intifada. In Nanterre, a Jewish teenager was raped by attackers who justified their crime by their hatred of Israel. These acts are not isolated excesses. They are the fruits of a climate carefully maintained by Hamas and amplified by those who, consciously or not, become its collaborators.
This strategy is nothing new. It is rooted in Soviet and pan-Arab propaganda of the 1960s, designed to Nazify Israel and present Zionism as a racist and colonial ideology. In the 1970s, it was institutionalized at the UN with Resolution 3379, which qualified Zionism as racism. In Durban in 2001, under the pretext of combating global racism, anti-Semitic hatred found an international forum. Israel was described as a racist entity to be destroyed. This discourse, which should be marginal, has settled at the heart of institutions and societies. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in 2014, already accused Israel of “surpassing the Nazis in barbarity”. Mahmoud Abbas, in 2022, dared to speak of “fifty holocausts”. These words are not excesses. They are ideological weapons, calculated to reverse historical guilt and fuel persistent hatred.
Guilt changes sides
Since October 7, we have witnessed a brutal acceleration of this logic. That day, more than 1,400 Israelis were massacred, women raped, children kidnapped. However, some refused to characterize these acts as pogroms. Others dared to deny the atrocities, going so far as to justify these crimes. So it is Israel that we accuse of genocide, it is Zionism that we accuse of colonialism, it is Gaza that is becoming Auschwitz. This is not clumsiness or ignorance. It is a contemporary and accepted form of negationism.
Why this inversion? Because it serves an ideological objective: to discredit Israel, erase its historical link with the Shoah, and make it an illegitimate state. The Shoah, which long served as a moral pillar in the post-war period, is now being exploited. We trivialize it, we divert it, and we replace it with an ideological narrative based on decolonization. In this vision, Israel is no longer the refuge of a persecuted people, but a colonial anomaly to be rectified.
If the Jews become the Nazis in the collective imagination, then the symbol of the Shoah is emptied of its meaning. The guilt changes sides. And what has been built for eighty years is collapsing: the fight against anti-Semitism, Israel’s right to exist and prosper, and more broadly, the defense of democratic values which should protect us from barbarism. .
Giving in to this propaganda is not only a betrayal of memory. This allows contemporary anti-Semitism, disguised as political commitment under the guise of morality, to proliferate. And with it, the pillars of justice, truth and universalism are wavering.
*Simone Rodan-Benzaquen is European director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC).