I need to talk about something that’s been bothering me, actually, more than bothering me. It’s been breaking my heart and making my blood boil in equal measures.
A recent trend on social media by people in Gaza, claiming, “I survived the Gaza holocaust.” While war is terrible and any loss of life is devastating, some things are just not comparable. We need to have an honest conversation about words, because words matter. History matters. And what survivors choose to do with their survival matters most of all.
Let me be crystal clear about the Holocaust. It was a systematic, industrialized genocide designed to eradicate every single Jewish person from the face of the earth. Six million Jews were murdered. Men, women, children, and babies – torn from their mothers’ arms – were thrown into gas chambers and otherwise murdered. Entire families were erased. Ancient communities that had existed for centuries, gone. One and a half million Jewish children were killed. Millions of others, Roma, disabled people, homosexuals, and political prisoners, were also systematically exterminated.
The intent was complete annihilation: Not territory, not politics. It was a total erasure of Jewish existence.
Talking about Gaza
Now, let’s talk about Gaza. The civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in this conflict has been approximately 1:1, even by independent estimates. That’s incredibly lower than most modern urban warfare scenarios. In World War II, that ratio was 3:1. In Iraq, it was almost 3:1. The US military estimates that in modern urban warfare, a 9:1 civilian-to-combatant ratio is typical.
During the Holocaust, there was no ratio because it was the pure, intentional genocide of civilians.
In Gaza, Israel provided evacuation warnings, opened humanitarian corridors, and supplied aid even while under attack. The Nazis herded Jews into ghettos and then into death camps with cold, methodical precision: No warnings; no escape routes; just death.
The Gaza population has grown steadily over the past decades, from roughly 1.4 million in 2005 to over two million today. During the Holocaust, two-thirds of European Jewry was annihilated in just six years. Entire branches of my family tree simply end in the 1940s with no descendants. That’s genocide. That’s a holocaust.
War is terrible. Innocent deaths are tragedies. But calling this a holocaust is an insult to actual Holocaust survivors and an attempt to erase the specific evil that was perpetrated against the Jewish people.
What is more bothersome about this historical appropriation is not just the use of the word “holocaust,” which is horrifying enough, but rather what comes next. We have actual Holocaust survivors to learn from, and their example is extraordinary.
My grandparents’ generation emerged from literal hell. They had numbers tattooed on their arms. They watched their parents, siblings, and children being murdered. Entire towns were erased, people were forced to dig mass graves and then were lined up and shot into them; babies were tossed in the air to be used for target practice; and those who survived concentration camps were forced into death marches. The survivors of these events had every reason, every justification in the world, to be bitter, to seek revenge, to give up on humanity entirely.
What did they do? They rebuilt.
Rebuilding, not hatred
They didn’t teach their children to hate. They didn’t strap bombs to their kids and send them to blow up German cafes. They didn’t demand that the world feel sorry for them and treat them and their future generations as survivors in perpetuity. They didn’t wallow in victimhood.
Instead, they learned new languages in new countries. They started businesses from nothing. They remarried after losing their first families. They had children and grandchildren, not to create the next generation of revenge-seekers, but to affirm life itself. They chose hope over hatred.
Look what they built. The Jewish contribution to the world post-Holocaust is staggering. We make up 0.2% of the world’s population, yet we’ve won over 20% of Nobel Prizes. Jewish survivors and their descendants have made groundbreaking contributions to medicine, technology, science, the arts, and peace. They built Israel from a desert into a thriving democracy. They built their own communities while contributing to and strengthening others around the world.
When survivors choose creation over destruction, education over indoctrination, and life over death, they can remake the world a better place.
The choice every survivor makes
Here’s what I want young people in Gaza, and anyone anywhere else touched by war and trauma, to understand: You have power, enormous power, the power to decide what your survival means.
Real survivors don’t just survive, they thrive. They take the gift of life and ask, “What am I going to do with this? How can I make my family, my community, and my world better because I’m still here?”
Victimhood is seductive. It’s easy. It asks nothing of you except to be angry and demand things from others. But survivorship? True survivorship demands everything of you. It demands that you grow, that you build, and that you create meaning from suffering.
The Holocaust survivors I’ve known didn’t have easier lives than others. They carried unimaginable trauma. Many woke up screaming from nightmares for decades. But they made a choice every single day: to be builders, not destroyers.
Where do we go from here?
So when I see this trend of “I survived the Gaza holocaust,” I don’t just see historical revisionism. I see a squandered opportunity. I see young people being taught that survival means claiming victim status rather than power. That means demanding sympathy, rather than building a better future.
War is horrific. Loss is real. Pain deserves acknowledgment. Still, the response to suffering defines us.
Will you use your survival to create or to destroy? To build bridges or to blow them up? To raise children who contribute to the world or who seek to harm it?
The real Holocaust survivors showed us the way. They proved that even after the worst evil humanity has ever produced, it’s possible to choose life, choose creation, choose hope.
That’s the legacy of true survivors. That’s what we should all aspire to.
That’s why words matter. When we conflate war with genocide, we don’t just distort history; we rob the next generation of the most powerful examples of human resilience we have.
Learn from the real survivors, learn how to build.
The writer is chief communications officer and global spokesperson for Aish. In the past six months, she has been invited to testify three times before the Knesset Committee for Immigration, Absorption, and Diaspora Affairs, regarding global antisemitism and educational solutions.