The masterful propaganda of ‘deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust’

October 7, 2023, was a deadly day for people on the Israeli side of the Armistice line with Gaza. Most of the casualties were Israeli (some were foreign workers), and all the Israelis were presumably Jewish. Whether, as the much-quoted phrase at issue has it, October 7 was “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust” is debatable; but let’s assume that it was, even though the official number of 1,200 does not distinguish between civilians and soldiers, nor between civilians killed by Hamas versus those killed by the IDF in its botched rescue. 

The problem with the phrase is not statistics. The problem, rather, is that this lament’s exterior message is merely a Trojan horse for powerful propaganda hidden within. 

For 75 years and counting, the Israeli state has been working towards removing as many non-Jews as possible from the river to the sea and subjugating any remaining non-Jews to apartheid. That is the so-called “conflict,” unabridged. But this being unacceptable in the modern world, Israel must constantly invert reality, a chore which the hidden messages of “the deadliest day since the Holocaust” accomplish brilliantly. 

By invoking the Holocaust and the victims’ identity as Jews, it subliminally but powerfully reinforces the lie that Palestinians are hostile to Israelis because they are Jewish and that Hamas’s breaching of the siege on October 7 was rooted in antisemitism. And it takes eyes off the actual crime — that Israel has turned Gaza into a concentration camp for non-Jews. 

No — Hamas’s purpose was to kidnap Israelis because, denied any conventional means of self-defense, hostages were the only bargaining collateral they could seize. This is neither to defend nor condemn what Hamas did, nor to attempt to sort atrocity fact from fiction. The point, rather, is that the “deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust” line is a cynical exploitation of those deaths to empower the state that is the ultimate cause of all the violence.

The Holocaust reference is a continuation of a Zionist dehumanization tactic dating back to the immediate post-war era: the systematic transferring of Nazi identity onto the Palestinians. In 1948, this served Zionism by easing the conscience of the war’s Jewish survivors who, having survived the Holocaust, were now Hagana members in Palestine razing other people’s villages because of their ethnicity. 

Today’s propagandists go further — we increasingly hear that Hamas is not merely as bad as the Nazis, but worse. The reason? The Nazis, this Holocaust revisionism goes, considered their crimes to be crimes, whereas Hamas does not consider its crimes to be so. Hamas, the argument goes, is like the Nazis but without the Nazis’ alleged moral compass.

This tactical transference of Nazi identity onto the Palestinians is also seen in the Israeli indoctrination song for children produced in the aftermath of October 7, in which Palestinians, and specifically the people of Gaza, are referred to as “swastika-bearers.” For Zionism to achieve its ultimate goal of a “racially pure” state, the Israeli masses must see the Palestinians as subhuman heirs to the Nazis, and this indoctrination is best begun with children.

There is a final, cynical irony to the “deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.” The land adjoining Gaza onto which Hamas fighters sailed is actually part of Palestine according to the UN Partition, but Israel seized it in 1948 and forced its people to Gaza — the descendants of whom are now being massacred. So, yes, the victims were Jewish because Israel had ethnically cleansed the land of non-Jews and filled it with Jewish settlers.

Zionism failed Jews during their darkest days, consistently placing its political interests above their survival and emancipation. It not merely failed to pursue safe haven outside of Palestine, but even forcibly blocked it. Yet the Israeli state now squanders the memory of the Nazis’ victims in order to empower its own race crimes, a tactic of which the “deadliest day since” is a particularly cynical example. Hidden in those words is, “We, Israel, are the moral weight of the Holocaust, and those who challenge us are the heirs of the Nazis.”