By any measure, October 7, 2023, was one of the darkest days in modern Jewish history. The massacre carried out by Hamas terrorists was a brutal assault not only on Israel’s sovereignty but on the dignity and safety of the Jewish people. Families were slaughtered in their homes, women were raped, children burned alive, and grandparents were kidnapped – acts of unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity. It was barbaric, evil, and without justification, but it was not the Holocaust.
This statement does not seek to diminish the horror of October 7. Rather, it aims to preserve the moral and historical precision required to understand both tragedies in their full gravity. We must reject the urge to equate these two catastrophes – not to protect the uniqueness of the Holocaust for its own sake, but to protect truth itself. Because when every genocide becomes a Holocaust, then the word Holocaust ceases to mean anything.
The significance of the Holocaust
The Shoah was not just another genocide. It was the systematic, industrialized extermination of six million Jews by one of the most technologically advanced, culturally sophisticated, and bureaucratically efficient states in the world. Nazi Germany didn’t just murder Jews; it mobilized its entire modern machinery to erase them. Trains, census records, legal decrees, scientific institutions, and chemical factories were all conscripted into the cause of annihilation.
Jews weren’t just murdered, they were documented, numbered, transported, and incinerated with chilling precision. It was the ultimate perversion of progress: a modern nation-state deploying its full institutional power for genocide.
October 7, by contrast, was an eruption of premodern barbarism. It was not carried out by a state with an advanced bureaucracy, but by a terrorist group driven by hatred and religious fanaticism. The violence was not systematic, but chaotic and intimate. Victims were not processed by a state, they were slaughtered at point-blank range, burned in their homes, and taken hostage into underground tunnels. It was evil in its rawest, most visceral form.
So while October 7 was not the Holocaust, it does not make it any less terrifying. In one way, it was even more chilling: it revealed the limits of Jewish power in an age when we believed we had finally secured our own defense.
October 7 shattered the illusion of Israel's power
For decades, Jews comforted themselves with a powerful counterfactual: If only there had been a State of Israel in the 1930s, the Holocaust would never have happened. That belief has become foundational to modern Zionism and to the collective Jewish psyche. Israel was not just a refuge; it was the guarantee of “never again.” It was the promise that the Jewish people would never again be defenseless, stateless, or at the mercy of those who sought their destruction.
October 7 shattered that illusion. It exposed the terrible truth that even with a strong army, advanced intelligence, and fortified borders, Jews can still be butchered, raped, and stolen from their families. It reminded us that sovereignty is not immunity, and that no state – even Israel – can offer absolute protection against the world’s oldest hatred. The pogroms of the past returned, not to the shtetls of Europe, but to the kibbutzim and festive gatherings of southern Israel.
To be clear: saying October 7 was not the Holocaust is not to minimize it. It is to be honest about what it was and what it was not. Just as Rwanda was not the Shoah. Just as Darfur, Armenia, Cambodia, and Bosnia were not the Holocaust. Each genocide is its own horror, with its own mechanisms, ideologies, and implications. Conflating them helps no one, least of all the victims.
Yes, October 7 was the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Still, it was not the Holocaust. We should never liken it to that event. To do so dilutes the specificity of both, and risks cheapening the very language we use to describe evil. If everything is the Holocaust, then nothing is. Let us honor the victims of October 7, not by comparing their deaths to another tragedy, but by seeing their suffering clearly, on its own terms. And by ensuring that their memory, too, is never forgotten.
Let us pray that all the remaining hostages return home for proper burial immediately and for the eradication of Hamas for good. The most important difference between the Holocaust and October 7 was the Jewish people’s ability to respond to the atrocities with strength, valor, and victory.
The writer is professor of political science at Touro University. He was the inaugural chair of the National Holocaust Monument of Canada.