When the Holocaust is evoked for everything – except Jewish suffering

Eli Sharabi, Or Levy, and Ohad Ben Ami have just returned yesterday from Hamas captivity. The images of them stepping out of International Red Cross vans and onto Israeli soil are haunting: emaciated bodies, sunken eyes, shaved heads, the visible scars of starvation and mistreatment. The shock, however, isn’t just the sight of them. It’s the eerie familiarity of that sight. They look like Holocaust survivors. Not metaphorically, not symbolically, but literally. The same gaunt faces, the same hollowed-out expressions, the same skeletal frames of those liberated from death camps in 1945. They were kidnapped, imprisoned, abused, and starved all for the same reason: being Jewish. 

For decades, the Holocaust has been evoked for nearly every cause imaginable – except Jewish tragedies themselves. Wars, refugee crises, immigration and border policies, political rivalries – public figures, activists, and commentators are quick to draw parallels to the Nazi genocide. “Never Again” has become a vague, universalist slogan, stripped of its original Jewish specificity and applied liberally to all manner of issues. Yet when Jews themselves are targeted, abducted, brutalized, and returned home looking like Holocaust victims, the world suddenly forgets how to make the analogy. Like many Jewish Holocaust survivors, Eli Sharabi, too, has returned home emaciated and gaunt, only to learn that his entire family was murdered 16 months ago. 

The irony is glaring. The very people who invoke the Holocaust to discuss foreign conflicts, social justice movements, and political debates now hesitate to acknowledge the most direct and obvious historical parallel: an actual Jew like Or Levy who returned from captivity starved, abused, and with his head shaved— having been held for over a year by an Islamist terrorist group that openly praises Hitler and Nazis. That international hesitation isn’t incidental. It is a deliberate erasure. It stems from a discomfort to acknowledge Jewish vulnerability in the present because doing so would require recognizing that antisemitism, particularly in the form of violent anti-Jewish movements, is not a relic of the past. It is alive and well, not just on the fringes, but at the very center of geopolitical conflicts and international discourse. 

Nowhere is this appropriation more blatant than in the Arab world, where the Holocaust is simultaneously denied, celebrated, and weaponized against Jews. The result is a grotesque inversion of history; the same people who trivialize or outright deny the genocide of six million Jews are the first to use its imagery when it suits them politically. The world tolerates this because it fits into a broader, internalized discomfort with acknowledging Jewish suffering of the present. To do so would mean recognizing that antisemitism is not an abstract historical evil, but a force that continues to shape Jewish existence today. To do so would require a level of moral clarity that too many people are unwilling— or unable— to confront. 

There is no abstraction here. Eli Sharabi, Or Levy, and Ohad Ben Ami are living, breathing evidence that the Jewish body, once again, has been brutalized for being Jewish. Their frail bodies and hollowed-out faces are not symbols of the past but evidence of a reality that the world refuses to acknowledge. They step out of captivity into the arms of their people who have seen this before. And the world, for all its performative Holocaust remembrance, will look away.