In human history, the Holocaust stands as a completely separate, grim, and monumental memorial of what political regimes and even entire nations, driven by an ideology of hatred and dehumanization, are capable of.

Should this memorial serve as a wordless reminder of past lessons, or should the history of the Holocaust be a platform for dialogue about present events and lessons unlearned? How do we balance the universality of those tough lessons and the uniqueness of the historical event?

It would be no exaggeration to say that October 7th was the most traumatic event for the Jewish people since the Second World War. It is for a reason that the images of the terrible massacre awakened the most horrifying feelings, fears, and analogies in the collective memory of our people.

Nevertheless, we must be particularly cautious in making comparisons of any contemporary events, even the most difficult and tragic ones for our people, to the Holocaust. While it is indeed possible to draw some analogies, we must do so very cautiously, as this is a very slippery slope that often leads to the highly undesirable phenomenon of diluting the memory of the Holocaust and making inappropriate comparisons.

Unfortunately, there’s no need to look far for examples. Even the current events in the Gaza Strip are being cynically compared by some journalists, public, and political figures to vivid symbols of the Shoah. Some of them manage to compare The Gaza Strip, which has been under exclusive Palestinian control since 2005, to Nazi ghettos, the attack of October 7th to the Jewish uprising in those ghettos, and the Israeli army’s entirely justified military response to the brutal terrorist attack on its borders – to their elimination.

The very legal definition of the intentional extermination of a people, developed under the influence of the Holocaust events and the Nuremberg trials after the war, is today being eroded by its use against Israel in an indictment in the UN International Court of Justice in The Hague.

In a world of abundant information and growing populism, we see more and more inverted truths and cynical distortions of reality, where the events of the Holocaust, if not denied at all, are being used for provocative headlines and speculations more and more.

But going back to the events of October 7th and analyzing their perception in Israeli society and the Jewish world, we can truly understand the analogies and feelings that arose on that day. After all, the massacres were committed based on the fundamentalist ideology of radical hatred and dehumanization of Israelis. The methods of killing included unthinkable, inhumane atrocities and abuses that are hard to comprehend. And what thousands of residents of the captured communities near the Gaza border and participants of the music festival near Re’im experienced was a sense of total insecurity in the face of a force that seeks your extermination.

It is this deep sense of fear, born of centuries of brutal persecution of Jews and brought to unthinkable proportions during the Second World War, that the Jewish State has endeavored to eradicate forever by the very fact of its creation and the strength it has acquired over the years. Israel has indeed instilled an almost unshakable sense of security and confidence in its citizens.

Sadly, on October 7th, this feeling was broken for a given time, leaving space for deep fears and traumas of the past once again. And yet, despite the confusion and the State’s failure to fulfill its duty to its citizens in the first hours of that very morning, the State of Israel was able to stop the terror attack and respond with a powerful blow to the enemy.

That is precisely why the rally of yellow stars on the clothes of the Israeli diplomatic mission to the UN was perceived so controversially. It may be that hatred of Jews is still the same hatred, and radical anti-Semitism is once again raising its head around the world, but unlike the times when yellow stars were a humiliating measure, today, we have a decent response to it.

We must do everything possible to ensure that malfunctions like the one on October 7th do not happen ever again so that we continue to talk about horrifying events only in the context of history, as we do every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day.