Europe has a high fever. On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, some of its voices—among them Italy’s l’Unità—chose delirium over truth, comparing the war in Gaza to the Shoah. This is not mere provocation; it is a form of denialism dressed up as moral outrage.
Only fever—or ignoble political calculation—can produce such a confusion. Israel did not wake up one morning to exterminate a people. It was attacked. Men, women and children were murdered, raped, burned alive and kidnapped by Hamas. The Jewish state fought because it had to.
To claim otherwise requires hallucination. Did Jews prepare for decades to butcher Gazans, investing billions and digging tunnels? Did a frenzied population cheer them on? Did a leadership hide behind human shields—explicitly, as the assassinated Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar admitted—to extract ideological cover? Genocidal Israel? Please!
The facts alone expose the lie. In 1967, there were about 360,000 Gazans. In 2005, 1.376 million. Today, more than two million—numbers that grew through wars and clashes in which Israel, for as long as it could, avoided harming civilians. A strange “genocide,” indeed—one accompanied by repeated offers of coexistence, rejected since 2005.
The numbers game has become theater. From United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese to Gaza’s Health Ministry, figures leap to 60,000 dead, with 9,000 terrorists included—while other assessments point to roughly 20,000 armed fighters killed and a similar number of civilian casualties in a fully militarized society, where missile launchers were embedded in buildings and hospitals served as Hamas facilities.
A one-to-one ratio would be among the lowest ever recorded in urban warfare. We note this conditionally, because verifiable data remain scarce—while outrage reliably generates attention and funding.
What is clear is this: Israel has never sought the elimination of Palestinians. It is not in Israel’s history. Israel has consistently sought peace. Hamas’s choices, by contrast, are written in black and white and executed through relentless terrorist aggression.
To save civilians, the Israel Defense Forces used every tool available: evacuations, phone calls, leaflets and warnings. Were Jews ever warned to flee before the Shoah? Or were they hunted, creature by creature, to gas chambers and mass graves? In Israel, soldiers are investigated and prosecuted for violations of strict rules of engagement. Targets are armed; hospitals are struck only if used by Hamas; buildings only if they are launch sites or fortifications.
Meanwhile, humanitarian reality is inverted. Food trucks entered Gaza by the hundreds daily—unless Hamas stole them—yet front pages run images of children suffering from malnutrition caused by illness, presented as proof of Israeli cruelty. History is twisted until the falsehood becomes “known.”
The deeper lie is colonialism. The Jewish state is not colonial. Jews are at home, in the land of their fathers—attested by the Bible and by Roman, Greek, Christian and Islamic historians. Israel’s claim to the land is stronger than most; Mark Twain described it as desolate before Jews revived it with their labor. Israel never planned to expel Arabs; it was Arabs who attacked Jews.
Enough lies. Enough shameless antisemitism. And to those who chant “Never Again,” say it honestly: We defend Israel.
