Get your hands off the Holocaust, Mehdi Hasan

Remember when Britain exported nice things to America, like The Beatles? Now we treat it as a dumping ground for our irritants. Behold Mehdi Hasan, who started out as a scribe for listless left-wing magazines in Britain and now makes a living titillating moneyed liberals in the US by feeding back to them their lazy, luxury beliefs. Trump is bad. Israel is evil. Jimmy Kimmel’s ‘cancellation’ was the most stunning and brave martyrdom since St Sebastian. And then that most twisted of high-status opinions, the one it might be normal to spout at Team Mamdani soirées in Bushwick, but which still leaves most normal people cold – ie, that what Israel is doing in Gaza is a genocide. And possibly comparable to the Nazi genocide.

Hasan gave vent to a version of this puerile and ghoulish view on X this week, perhaps forgetting he was on a public platform and not gabbing with Ivy League Israelophobes at a swanky do for Cythnia Nixon. He was responding to Eli Lake, a columnist for the Free Press. Lake had a pop at digital blowhards like Hasan who bemoan Israel’s promise to dismantle Hamas’s tunnels in Gaza. Even though that is literally a requirement of the peace plan Hamas has ostensibly signed up to! ‘It’s a genocide against the indigenous tunnels of Gaza’, Lake quipped. Hasan, who suffers from a lifelong allergy to humour, the poor lad, was not happy. So not happy that he played the Holocaust card. Which is always a shitty thing to do, but against a Jew like Lake? Mate.

He wrote: ‘One of the ways in which the Gaza genocide is worse than a lot of previous genocides – Rwanda, even the Holocaust – is that you didn’t have Hutus or Nazis mocking the genocide after it was over.’ No, back then the genocidaires were too busy being ‘shunned / deradicalised / prosecuted’ to make wisecracks.

First off, can we agree this is an insane response to a gag? Someone jokes about destroying Hamas’s underground lairs and you bring up the Holocaust? Get some perspective, or at least a funny bone. I’m curious to know why anyone would get their knickers in a twist about laying waste to tunnels in which an army of anti-Semites stored weapons and tortured Jews. Just get rid.

More to the point, to speak of Gaza in the same breath as the Holocaust is historical illiteracy of the most noxious kind. It is ignorance on steroids. Even stating the basic facts feels ridiculous, because surely everyone with a reading age higher than nine knows this shit? Gaza was a war between two armies: the army of the Jewish State and the neo-fascist militia of Hamas. It was a war in which the IDF targeted Hamas fighters and Hamas fighters targeted the IDF, killing more than 900 of its soldiers. The Holocaust was the machine-like incineration of an entirely defenceless people by one of the mightiest and wickedest empires the world has ever known. Comparing these two events is worse than dumb – it is sinister and repulsive.

The most striking part of Hasan’s tweet is where he says ‘One of the ways’ in which Gaza feels worse than the Holocaust…. So post-war jokes are not the only thing that make Gaza worse? What else does, Mehdi? It’s not the numbers, that’s for sure. The estimated death toll for the two-year war in Gaza is 70,000, a great many of which will be Hamas militants. That’s far lower than the toll for other recent wars – Yemen, Syria, Sudan – which are rarely called genocides.

But here’s the thing: at the height of their Jew-killing frenzy, in 1944, the Nazis were exterminating 6,000 human beings a day at Auschwitz II in Birkenau. Men, women, children, the elderly, the disabled: gassed, burnt, vaporised. More in 12 days than in two years of war in Gaza. It is a grotesque insult against memory, against truth itself, even to say the word Gaza in the same sentence as the word Holocaust. Hasan must know this? He went to Oxford FFS. Actually, maybe that explains it.

The numbers are only one part of the story. There’s intention, too. The wild clamour of the keffiyeh mob and their enablers in the NGO world to have the Gaza war branded a ‘genocide’ wilfully overlooks that Israel’s aim was not to destroy the Palestinian people but to destroy Hamas. There was a time when progressives would have considered it noble for a Jewish army to take the fight to a fascist militia that had raped and massacred its people. How do the ‘genocide’ nuts explain that the war is winding down – we hope – now that the hostages have been returned and there’s a peace deal that says Hamas must disarm? Do you know when the Holocaust would have ended had the Allied forces not intervened? When there was not one Jew left on Earth.

Hasan is back-pedalling. He says his tweet was ‘clumsily’ worded. He’s telling those who accuse him of Holocaust relativism to ‘go fuck yourself’. Defensive much? The fact is he gave voice to an untruth that has spread like a pox in educated circles – that Gaza is a genocide, not unlike that genocide. NGOs gleefully peddle this calumny. Pompous columnists rattle it off. You see it on every soulless march against Israel, with placards calling Israel the New Nazis and likening Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto.

I can’t read Hasan’s mind. I have no idea why he parrots this myth. But I have my suspicions about why the broader ‘pro-Palestine’ movement does. Howard Jacobson says the reason Israel’s haters always reach for the Holocaust, despite there being ‘thousands of years of pitiless warfare’ they could reference instead, is ‘to wound Jews’, ‘to punish them with their own grief’. To my mind, it’s something worse than Holocaust relativism. It’s Holocaust inversion, where the Jews are reframed as the perpetrators rather than the victims of the greatest crime in history, all to the end of washing away the historic guilt of privileged woke Westerners. Now that the war in Gaza has stopped, please, can this war on truth stop, too?

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy