Historical experience is instructive here. Nazi Germany sought to legitimise mass violence and genocide through the language of “preventive security”, “existential threat”, and “exceptional circumstances”. As Hannah Arendt demonstrated, this language removed violence from moral scrutiny and presented it as a bureaucratic necessity. Raul Hilberg showed in detail that the Holocaust did not emerge as a sudden aberration, but unfolded as a systematic process in which each step was framed as “necessary” and “inevitable”. Today, we do not debate these arguments; we must reject them.

This is why the issue here is not a matter of analogy. It is a matter of recalling a fundamental historical truth: no political justification can render the mass killing of civilians legitimate.

This moral and legal principle does not legitimise Hamas’s attacks of 7 October. On the contrary, those attacks constitute clear violations of international law. Yet a state cannot invoke the violations of a non-state actor to justify collective punishment, the use of disproportionate force, or policies that undermine the very conditions of civilian life. International law does not establish symmetrical responsibilities; it does, however, render violations assessable and comparable.

Claims that civilians are used as “human shields” do not suspend humanitarian law. On the contrary, such conditions intensify a state’s obligations. The principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution become even more binding in such contexts. Reducing the destruction inflicted on a population that lives under blockade, lacks safe zones, and has no realistic means of escape to questions of intent misses the point. What we observe here is an unmistakable humanitarian catastrophe and a serious legal problem.

At this point, one clarification is essential. The most lucid analyses of how Nazi violence was legitimised through the language of “necessity”, “security”, and “inevitability” come from Jewish thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Raul Hilberg, and Zygmunt Bauman themselves. What is at stake here, therefore, is not a polemical comparison, but a universal ethical warning distilled from historical experience.

We have a responsibility not to reduce this issue to symbols or emotional analogies. It is a matter of principle:
we cannot defend the mass killing of civilians, whatever justification is invoked.
This principle applied in the past, and it applies today.