This weekend I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. You arrive there thinking you already know enough about that history, because we’ve studied it, seen it and heard about it a thousand times, but then, standing in front of the railway tracks, the barracks and the remains of the crematoria, you realise that certain words cannot be used lightly.

Everyone should visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. Not as a mere formality, not to strike a pose, not to take a staged photograph in front of the railway tracks, but because perhaps, after seeing those places, some people might at least have the decency to weigh their words before using them as weapons in political debate.

Today, however, the opposite is happening. A powerful word – ‘genocide’ – is taken, stripped of its meaning, twisted, and repeated everywhere – on social media, in universities, in public squares, on talk shows – until it ceases to describe a specific reality and becomes simply the most inflammatory way of accusing Israel.

That is the point. Not the criticism of the Israeli government, which is as legitimate as any political criticism. Not the acknowledgement of the suffering of Palestinian civilians, which does exist to some extent and should not be denied. The point is the deliberate misuse of a word that was coined to describe the deliberate annihilation of a people, and which is now being used as an ideological weapon against the Jewish state.

What happened at Auschwitz was genocide. Gaza was not.

It should go without saying. Yet these days, it’s almost a provocation.

The State versusthe individual

Auschwitz was not just another war tragedy. It was the modern state transformed into a machine of extermination. Not out-of-control gangs, not bombings, not military chaos, but trains, lists, registers, selections, gas chambers, crematoria, shifts, orders, offices.

Administered death.

Nazism did not seek to defeat the Jews. It sought to eliminate them. It did not seek to curtail their political power, nor did it seek to retaliate against an attack, nor did it seek to strike at an armed organisation. It sought to wipe out the Jews simply because they were Jews. Men, women, the elderly, children. Guilty of simply existing.

This is the difference that many people pretend not to understand.

Because if everything is genocide, then nothing really is. If every war becomes genocide, if every humanitarian tragedy is equated with the Holocaust, if every civilian casualty automatically becomes evidence of deliberate extermination, then the word loses its meaning. And when a word loses its meaning, it also loses respect for those who have etched that meaning into their very flesh.

The Western Left andits obsession with Israel

Then there is a political reality that we must have the courage to acknowledge. A huge section of the Western left has a massive problem with Israel. Not with this or that Israeli government. With Israel as such.

This can be seen in the selective obsession, the disproportionate outrage, and the speed with which every conflict involving Israel is turned into a moral trial of the very existence of the Jewish state. In the Middle East there are dictatorships, civil wars, massacres, persecuted minorities, oppressed women, and homosexuals who are imprisoned or hanged, yet the only country that provokes constant demonstrations, university boycotts, cultural hysteria and accusations of genocide is always Israel.

Strange, isn’t it?

Since 7 October, this hypocrisy has become obscene. Hamas has massacred Israeli civilians, abducted children, women and the elderly, attacked young people at a music festival, and carried out a modern-day pogrom broadcast almost in real time. And yet, in the West, a section of the political, academic and media worlds immediately felt the need to put things into context. To explain. To add the ‘but’.

Not even in the face of the massacred Jews can they keep quiet for twenty-four hours.

Then Israel reacted, and the word was already at the ready: genocide.

There is a war in Gaza. Auschwitz was a genocide

The conflict in Gaza is a brutal, tragic and dirty war – as, unfortunately, are asymmetric wars waged against a terrorist organisation that hides within a densely populated area, uses schools, hospitals, tunnels and civilian neighbourhoods, and regards Palestinian deaths not as a tragedy to be avoided, but as political capital to be exploited.

This does not automatically excuse every decision made by the Israeli government. It does not mean that every air strike is justified, that every decision is proportionate, or that every mistake must be excused. But it does mean one specific thing: context matters.

Israel is fighting Hamas. Nazi Germany exterminated the Jews.

Putting the two things on the same level is not political analysis. It is propaganda.

Auschwitz was an industrial project aimed at exterminating an entire people. Gaza is a conflict that arose following the massacre of 7 October, against an organisation whose political agenda includes the destruction of Israel and the death of the Jewish people. Everything is open to debate, but we must not distort the terminology.

Because calling what is happening in Gaza ‘genocide’ serves only one purpose: to portray Israel as the new Nazism. And this is not a political criticism. It is a deliberate, repugnant ideological manoeuvre that turns history on its head and places the descendants of the victims in the dock, facing the same charges as their persecutors.

Anti-Semitism changes its guise

Anti-Semitism today rarely takes the form of a swastika on the arm. That would be far too easy to spot. Today, it prefers more acceptable language – the sort that can be used in living rooms, universities, newsrooms and student assemblies.

It is called ‘anti-Zionism’, ‘resistance’, ‘decolonisation’, ‘the struggle against imperialism’. Words which, in far too many Western circles, now serve as respectable terminology for an old obsession: the Jew as the culprit, Israel as the absolute evil, the Jewish state as the only state in the world whose very right to exist is contested, not just its actions.

And this is where the misuse of the word ‘genocide’ becomes even more serious. Because it does not merely serve to misrepresent Gaza. It serves to criminalise Israel at its very core. It serves to suggest that the state, which was founded in part to guarantee the Jews a home after the Holocaust, is today the moral heir to the Nazis.

It is a historical blasphemy.

And it is also a form of violence against memory.

They should be taken to Auschwitz

That is why Auschwitz-Birkenau should be visited at least once in a lifetime. Especially by those who talk too much. By those who shout ‘genocide’ at demonstrations without knowing what it really means. By those who use the Holocaust as a storehouse of political metaphors. By those who claim to be imparting moral education to the world, yet cannot distinguish between industrial-scale extermination and a war against a terrorist group.

We should bring students, journalists, MPs, activists, academics and political influencers – anyone who thinks that words are merely tools for winning an argument.

Because perhaps there they would realise that ‘genocide’ is not just a fancy word. It is not a superlative. It is not a ‘very bad war’. It is not ‘a lot of civilian deaths’. It is not ‘a policy I don’t like’.

Genocide is Auschwitz. It is Birkenau. It is Treblinka. It is the Holocaust. It is the deliberate, planned, organised, industrial-scale attempt to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth.

And so, yes, after seeing those places, one can still criticise Israel, challenge its government, debate the war, defend the Palestinians and call for different political solutions. All of this is perfectly legitimate.

But if he carries on calling the events in Gaza ‘genocide’, then he is no longer making a mistake out of ignorance.

He is choosing to lie.