I couldn’t join my family in honoring our ancestors murdered in the Nazi genocide while Israel uses our history to justify its oppression of the Palestinians. Instead, I honor my family’s lives by doing all I can to stop the Gaza genocide today.

Hamas’s effort to gain Western sympathy by comparing the Gaza genocide to the Holocaust is understandable but ultimately shortsighted. Instead, putting the genocide in the larger context of colonial violence could build genuine solidarity.

Much of my family left Turkey after my great-grandfather was murdered in the Armenian Genocide. Turkey, Israel, and many other countries still deny this genocide occurred. It’s a denial that enables genocides like that in Gaza to take place today.

In my life, I have been enmeshed in two genocides. The first was when I survived the Holocaust in World War II. The second is the Gaza genocide, which is being carried out in my name and which is exploiting my story to justify the slaughter.

The shame of Israel’s genocide in Gaza will haunt the international moral conscience and the Israeli psyche for the coming century. Though Israelis, accustomed to the perpetual shaming of Germany, are unprepared for the shame they must now confront.

The Allies failed to denazify Europe by failing to dismantle the political foundations their own nations shared with the Nazi regime. Europeans need not repeat that mistake.

After ten months of relentless genocidal war, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that both the Israeli state and society are partners in the genocide. The picture that emerges is a genocide from above and below.

The Jewish state learned that it can commit its own Holocaust in Gaza and deny that it exists.

The Israel lobby is attempting to indoctrinate Americans that the context for the October 7 attack is the Holocaust. This is a misrepresentation. The Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

The horror of the past has returned in a new guise, and the comparison of the Jewish ghetto under Nazism with the Gaza ghetto under Israel’s current fascistic authority must cease to be sacrilegious.