Lula’s Holocaust Comparison Is Historically Inaccurate Even If One Agrees With The Gist

By focusing only on Hitler’s Jewish Genocide, Lula is inadvertently laundering the Israeli lobby’s top talking point and proving that he himself has been duped by them into falsely thinking that Jews were the first ethno-national group to be genocided by the Nazis, not the Poles as the historical record indisputably proves.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva provoked a global controversy with his comparison of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza to Hitler’s genocide of the Jews in the Holocaust. He was promptly declared persona non grata by Tel Aviv until he apologizes, which he thus far hasn’t signaled any intent to do, and his ambassador was summoned to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum for a reprimand. In response, Brazil recalled its top diplomat from Israel and the whole world is now talking about this scandal.

Here’s the entirety of what he said on Sunday while attending an African Union Summit in Addis Ababa:

“What’s happening in the Gaza Strip isn’t a war, it’s a genocide. It’s not a war of soldiers against soldiers. It’s a war between a highly prepared army and women and children. What’s happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people hasn’t happened at any other moment in history. Actually, it has happened: when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”

Even if one agrees that Israel is carrying out genocide, Lula’s comparison is historically inaccurate.

For starters, comparing anything to Hitler or the Holocaust is just a lazy attempt to describe them as the ultimate evil and accuse them of genocide, not to draw factual parallels. The reality is that Hitler was responsible for more than just the Jewish Genocide (Holocaust/Shoah), which wasn’t even his first one despite them being the first ethno-national group to be persecuted by the Nazis, though it killed a larger percentage of people than any of his other genocides. The truth is that the Poles were genocided first.

Entire villages were wiped out during the blitzkrieg, which deliberately targeted civilians for the purpose of killing them in order to obtain so-called “Lebensraum” (“living space”) for the Germans. The several-week-long Siege of Warsaw killed at least 1% of the prewar population of 1.3 million and destroyed over 10% of its structures. The survivors were then starved and the intelligentsia systematically slaughtered as part of Hitler’s plot to genocide the majority of the population while enslaving those few who remained.

In fact, the first prisoners in Auschwitz were Polish political ones who arrived in June 1940, and the “Final Solution” to genocide the Jews wasn’t made until a year later. By the end of World War II, approximately 1/5 of the prewar Polish population was genocided (around 6 million out of 30 million), half of whom were Jews. Israeli politicians like former President Reuven Rivlin don’t even regard the Poles as victims, however, while many members of the global public are completely ignorant of their suffering.

That’s because the Israeli lobby successfully politicized the Holocaust in order to present Jews as sitting atop that conflict’s hierarchy of victimhood even though it can be argued that no such hierarchy should have ever been constructed in the public’s imagination and that it’s deeply immoral to do so. Everyone who was killed by the Nazis regardless of the way in which they were murdered, including indirectly via starvation, is an equal victim of that totalitarian regime. Jews and all other victims are equal, full stop.  

By focusing only on Hitler’s Jewish Genocide, Lula is inadvertently laundering the Israeli lobby’s top talking point and proving that he himself has been duped by them into falsely thinking that Jews were the first ethno-national group to be genocided by the Nazis. A larger percentage of Warsaw’s prewar population was killed by the Nazis in a shorter time than Gaza’s prewar one was killed by Israel, plus the latter doesn’t have death camps where they systematically slaughter people like the former did.

Some have argued that Rafah is a modern-day concentration camp, but that comparison is also inaccurate since nobody is being systematically slaughtered there, and the only reason why they’re unable to leave is because neighboring Egypt refuses to open its borders in violation of international law. To be sure, the artificial concentration of internally displaced people in Rafah can be described as the result of ethnic cleansing, but that’s not the same as genocide no matter what some activists claim.

The only grounds upon which Israel can be accused of genocide concern its indiscriminate bombing of residential areas on anti-terrorist pretexts that killed over 1% of the strip’s prewar population so far. If that’s the standard that one is applying, as Lula appears to have done in his remarks, then he should have said that something like this last happened “when Hitler decided to kill the Poles.” They were the first ethno-national group to be genocided by the Nazis, not the Jews, and it’s false to claim otherwise.

Without intending to, Lula lent credence to the Israeli lobby’s imaginary hierarchy of victimhood that’s pushed to justify Israel’s UN-mandated creation at the expense of the majority-Muslim prewar population’s wishes, which was then exploited to justify its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. His ignorance of historical facts, as common as this is among the majority of people worldwide when discussing World War II, actually harms the Palestinian cause despite Hamas thinking otherwise.

They praised his comparison as “an accurate description”, which was likely due to their similar such ignorance of historical facts alongside their opportunistic desire to take maximum advantage of this scandal to draw more worldwide attention to Israeli war crimes. Quite cynically, despite many among this group being critical of the way in which the Holocaust was politicized at the Palestinians’ expense, they themselves now want to politicize their incomparable plight by drawing a false historical parallel.

At the end of the day, the Israeli lobby has so successfully manipulated perceptions about the Nazis’ genocides via their imaginary hierarchy of victimhood and the public is so comfortable lazily comparing everything to the Holocaust that historical justice is unlikely to ever be served. Few will ever learn that Poles were the first ethno-national group to be genocided by the Nazis, nor that half of the “Polocaust’s” victims were Jews and half of the Holocaust’s were Poles, thus making them equal victims by that metric.

Lula has the right to say whatever he wants no matter how historically inaccurate it is, but one way to partially defuse this scandal if he so chooses is to set the record straight by clarifying that something like this last happened “when Hitler decided to kill the Poles”, not the Jews. He probably won’t do so though since he’s invested a lot of political capital in presenting himself as a pro-Palestinian leader, hence why he’s expected to stick with his false comparison even if he’s informed of the historical facts.