On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel, murdered approximately 1,200 people and abducted more than 240 others. One of those kidnapped was my 35-year-old son, Sagui, who lived on Nir Oz, the kibbutz I’ve called home for most of my adult life and which was destroyed during the attack. Sagui is among the 120 hostages still held by Hamas.

That horrific day and the devastation of Gaza caused by Israel’s military response have led to countless references to the Holocaust and related terms: genocide, Nazis, pogroms. Some of Israel’s opponents have loosely and irresponsibly accused Israel of genocide against the Palestinians. My own government has also invoked those terms, mainly to convince Israelis of the magnitude of the threat they face from Hamas.

As the son of a man who survived the Holocaust and a woman who fled Nazi Germany, I find our government’s use of such references to the Nazi genocide to be deeply offensive. As the father of a hostage, I find the use of such language excruciating. And as a professor of history, I am appalled by the inaccuracy of such statements and frightened by their implications for Israeli society.

There is one truth to our leaders’ invoking of the Holocaust: Oct. 7 was indeed the deadliest single day for world Jewry since the Holocaust. The comparison ends there.

By invoking collective memories of the Holocaust, Israeli government ministers and other leaders are effectively absolving themselves of the horrors of that “Black Saturday” — in effect, shirking their accountability for the massacre and their sacred responsibility to return all the hostages alive.

In fairness to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current ministers, earlier governments have also invoked Holocaust images to mobilize the country. The practice dates back to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, and includes Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who compared the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat to Hitler in 1982. Since Oct. 7, however, the frequency and intensity of these statements seem far greater.

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