What are the valid and invalid boundaries when comparing the events of October 7 to the Holocaust?

In human history, the Holocaust stands as a distinct, grim, monumental testament to what political regimes and even entire nations can achieve when driven by an ideology of hatred and dehumanization.

Should this monument serve as a silent reminder of the lessons of the past, or should the history of the Holocaust serve as a platform for dialogue on contemporary events? How can we strike the right balance between the universal nature of those difficult lessons and the uniqueness of this historical event?

It is no exaggeration to say that October 7 marked the most traumatic event for the Jewish people since World War II. It is for good reason that the images of the horrific massacre reawakened almost forgotten feelings, fears, and analogies in the collective memory of our nation.

Nonetheless, we must exercise extreme caution when drawing comparisons between the Holocaust and any modern events, even those most complex and tragic for our people. Although certain analogies can indeed be drawn in this case, we must do so with great care, as this is an highly slippery slope that often leads to an extremely undesirable phenomenon: the dilution of the memory of the Holocaust and inappropriate comparisons.

Regrettably, one does not have to look far for examples. Even the current events in the Gaza Strip are cynically compared by some journalists, public figures, and politicians to the vivid symbols of the Shoah. Some manage to compare the Gaza Strip, which has been under exclusive Palestinian control since 2005, to Nazi ghettos; the October 7 attack, to the Jewish uprisings in those ghettos; and the fully justified military response of the Israeli army to the brutal terrorist attack on its borders, to the liquidation of those ghettos.

The very legal definition of genocide, developed under the influence of the Holocaust and the post-war Nuremberg trials, is today being eroded by its application against Israel in the indictment at the UN International Court of Justice in The Hague.

In a world of abundant information and rising populism, we see an increasing inversion of truth and cynical distortion of reality, while the events of the Holocaust, if not outright denied, are increasingly exploited for sensationalist headlines and provocations.

Yet, returning to the events of October 7 and analyzing how they were perceived within Israeli society and the Jewish world, we can fully comprehend the analogies and feelings that arose that day. The mass murders were driven by a fundamentalist ideology of radical hatred and the dehumanization of Israelis. The methods of slaughter involved unimaginable atrocities and abuse, difficult for the human mind to comprehend. What thousands of residents in the captured communities near the Gaza border and attendees of the music festival near the Reim kibbutz experienced was a sense of utter vulnerability in the face of a force seeking their annihilation.

It was precisely this profound sense of fear, born of centuries of brutal persecution and elevated to unimaginable scales during World War II, that the Jewish state, through its creation and the strength it acquired over the years, sought to eradicate forever. Over time, Israel indeed instilled in its citizens an almost unwavering sense of security and confidence in the future.

Regrettably, on October 7, this sense of security was temporarily shattered, giving way to the deep-seated fears and traumas of the past. Nonetheless, despite the initial confusion and the state's failure to fulfill its duty to its citizens in the opening hours of the aggression, the State of Israel succeeded in halting the terror attack and delivering a powerful response to the enemy.

This is why the action involving yellow stars worn on the clothing of the Israeli diplomatic mission to the UN was received with such ambivalence. While hatred of Jews may remain the same hatred, and radical antisemitism is once again rising globally, unlike the era when yellow stars were a degrading imposition, today we possess a worthy response. We must do everything within our power to ensure that failures such as Black Saturday on October 7 never occur again, so that we may continue to speak of these terrible events solely in the context of history, as we do every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day.