Last summer, during a podcast interview, then-mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani offered a stunning justification for using the phrase “Globalize the intifada.” He pointed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, claiming that because their page on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising included the Arabic word “intifada,” he was merely following their lead.
He delivered this comparison casually, as though the desperate, final resistance of Jews against the Nazi regime was morally equivalent to the suicide bombings and terror attacks that targeted Israeli civilians during the First and Second Intifadas, or Palestinian uprisings against Israel.
The Holocaust museum responded forcefully, stressing the grotesqueness of the comparison. However, it was already too late to correct the record. The damage was done.
That brief episode exposed a deeply toxic and accelerating trend: Holocaust terminology, once guarded by a collective moral responsibility, is now being ruthlessly co-opted and weaponized. The goal is not education or legitimate critique. It is to invert Jewish memory, turning it into a political assault that actively puts Jews at risk.
The catastrophic consequences of this distortion were brutally evident last month at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. The call to “globalize the intifada” under the pretext of heroism is, in reality, nothing other than gunmen murdering old men and young children whose only crime is their Jewish heritage.
The Hanukkah massacre at Bondi is not disconnected from the rhetoric that, in the wake of Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, antisemitism was given a renewed lease on life. When activists chant about globalizing violence, Jews hear those calls clearly. As we learned in Australia, as the global intifada goes, there is no daylight between chants and bullets.
Inversion of history
For the past two years, since Hamas massacred Israelis in their homes and at a music festival, I have watched activists not only justify violence but also actively rewrite the Holocaust and steal Jewish trauma in the process.
They appear at protests in striped uniforms evoking concentration camps. They superimpose a keffiyeh over Anne Frank’s face. They routinely accuse Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing. They describe Gaza as a concentration camp.
They take the language created specifically to describe the systematic murder of European Jewry and reuse it without remorse – or consequence.
Some may believe that the shock value serves their cause; others may simply not grasp the depth of the harm that is being done. But the outcome is unmistakable: Jews are being labeled Nazis.
History is being inverted so that the descendants of genocide victims are cast as the perpetrators of history’s greatest crime. This is not political critique; it is brazen antisemitism.
Compounding the Bondi tragedy is the fact that the Jewish community there, though small, has the highest per capita population of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel.
For them, the Holocaust is not a metaphor; it is the lived memory of grandparents who fled Europe, believing they had finally found safety.
One of those survivors, Alex Kleytman, was murdered at Bondi Beach. He survived the Nazis, only to be killed decades later by the same hatred, now dressed in modern political language. May his memory be a blessing.
Abuse of definitive terms
One of the most common ways Holocaust memory is weaponized is through the claim that Israel’s war against Hamas constitutes genocide. South Africa has pursued a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, despite the court’s finding no evidence of genocidal intent.
Israel has taken extensive measures to warn Gazan civilians and minimize harm, even putting its soldiers at risk, while Hamas deliberately embeds itself within civilian infrastructure, using schools, hospitals, and homes as shields.
Make no mistake: It is a war, and it is tragic. But it is not genocide.
The irony of hearing Israel’s actions called genocide is painful. The term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer who escaped the Nazis, precisely because no existing word could describe the systematic destruction of his people.
Today, that same word is shouted at rallies by activists who are clearly unconcerned with whether it reflects reality, truth, or justice. It is shouted to harm Jews, emotionally and practically. As the word’s force loses its true meaning, those hearing it simultaneously lose their capacity to recognize real atrocities.
The same distortion applies to ethnic cleansing. Before the Nazis built the death camps, they explored plans to deport Jews from Europe. When that failed, extermination followed.
After the war, Europe’s Jewish population had been reduced from 9.5 million to 3.5 million. Entire communities vanished. Survivors were left homeless and stateless. That is ethnic cleansing.
Using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s efforts to dismantle a terror organization that invaded Israeli homes, burned families alive, and dragged civilians into tunnels is another inversion of history, aiming to create animosity toward Jews.
However, the most disturbing trend is not this but the casual labeling of Jews as Nazis. Israel, like any democracy, is open to criticism, but none of that criticism requires Nazi analogies. Jews cannot be Nazis because the core tenet of Nazism is the desire to eradicate Jews. To call Jews Nazis is not analysis; it is an attempt to erase the possibility of Jewish victimhood while simultaneously inviting collective punishment against us for crimes we did not commit.
Call for clarity
This inversion of history does not strengthen any political cause: It fundamentally weakens the world’s ability to recognize true extremism. When every conflict is labeled “genocide,” the term becomes meaningless. When every refugee camp is a “concentration camp,” history is hollowed out. When Nazism is reduced to a slogan, its core ideology – the hatred of Jews – disappears into the noise.
Palestinian civilians are facing genuine, tragic suffering. Acknowledging that suffering does not, and must not, require stealing Jewish history or turning Jewish trauma into a weapon against Jews. That practice does not advance peace; it fuels hatred. And, as we tragically saw in Australia recently, it gets Jews killed.
Holocaust terminology must never be used as a political weapon. It carries the weight of millions of murdered lives. When that language is distorted to attack Jews, it reveals the true intent behind the message. This is not about justice; it is about erasure.
If the world truly means “Never again,” it must learn from history, not reverse it.■
Hen Mazzig is an Israeli-raised author and social critic redefining Jewish advocacy through his social media laboratory TLVi.org.