Analogies, to be sure, are seldom perfect. Often we insist on differences. But no less often comparisons alert us to resemblances we would prefer to ignore. In recent years the Jewish community has found itself compelled to reckon with another analogy—one that casts the state of Israel in an unfavorable light. Over the past three years Israel has prosecuted a brutal war that reputable human rights organizations now consider a genocide. In late November Agnès Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International, described “two years of relentless bombardment and deliberate systematic starvation” that have left Gaza’s Palestinian population in conditions of thoroughgoing catastrophe. The so-called cease-fire to which Israel agreed in October has hardly brought a real reprieve. As Callamard notes,
So far, there is no indication that Israel is taking serious measures to reverse the deadly impact of its crimes and no evidence that its intent has changed. In fact, Israeli authorities are continuing their ruthless policies, restricting access to vital humanitarian aid and essential services, and deliberately imposing conditions calculated to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza.
Recent estimates by Amnesty and other groups suggest that more than 18,000 children have been killed, though we can presume that the actual number is far higher, and will only grow higher still due to difficulties in securing food and medicine. Many others, adults and children, are still missing; some are assumed to be lost in the rubble. Many Palestinian children who are still alive will grow up without families and with permanent disabilities.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem went so far as to call the assault on Gaza “our genocide.” No doubt the USHMM would take umbrage at that phrase. In early August 2025 Stuart Eizenstat, the chair of the museum’s board, published a statement in The Jerusalem Post, reproduced on the USHMM’s website, in which he objected to the “weaponization” of terms such as genocide “in order to attack the legitimacy of the existence of the Jewish State.” It is admittedly true that in public discourse critics will sometimes seize upon the strongest language to express moral disapproval or to condemn their opponents. But many human rights groups, including Jewish ones, find the charge of genocide legitimate. They did not reach that conclusion lightly, and the suggestion that they wield it only as a weapon is deeply unfair.
The museum would prefer, it seems, to see the persecution of the Jews as a singularity beyond all comparison, a crime that stands as an emblem of absolute evil and must not be enlisted for “political purposes” lest we profane the memory of the dead. But this idea threatens the universal standards it is meant to protect. Every crime is singular, but no crime is so terrible that it exceeds the bounds of comparison. To exempt any act—or, indeed, any individual or state—from comparison is to vitiate the very possibility of moral reasoning.