This past week, Dani Dayan wrote an article for The Jerusalem Post that we felt compelled to place on the front page. It addresses a critical point in the slop that has become the battlefield of public opinion.
Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, affirmed that Israel’s war in Gaza does not legally constitute genocide, while crucially, he also called for moral clarity and restraint. This is a necessary, if delicate, stance, rooted in legal precision and a conscious guard against Holocaust distortion.
Still, it also reveals tensions in the broader debate about how we understand and respond to suffering, self-defense, and using concise language in wartime.
At its core, Dayan’s argument rests on a legal distinction: Genocide requires specific intent to destroy a protected group, something that courts, including the International Court of Justice (ICJ), have not yet found against Israel. Dayan also insists that equating the IDF with Nazis contaminates Holocaust memory and constitutes a dangerous distortion of history.
That accuracy is critical. The devaluation of Holocaust language not only trivializes its profound horrors but also undermines the careful scholarship and testimony meant to prevent future atrocities.
Using the word 'genocide' flippantly is morally corrosive
Bandying around the term “genocide”, whether by Israel’s harshest critics or even by some of its defenders – in inverted form – is not only historically irresponsible, it is morally corrosive.
The Holocaust was a singular event: The state-directed, ideologically driven annihilation of the Jews. It must not be degraded to a rhetorical weapon in today’s conflicts.
Yet Dayan does not fall into the trap of dismissing Palestinian suffering.
On the contrary, he acknowledges the devastation, displacement, and loss in Gaza, including among innocents unaffiliated with Hamas, and urges Israel to minimize civilian harm even while defending itself.
That appeal draws deeply on Jewish moral tradition: the sanctity of life, the principle of tohar ha-neshek (purity of arms), and the rule of law. He frames these not as luxuries but as defining commitments, responsibilities that distinguish Israel from those who celebrate death and terror.
This balance, between refusing false historical analogies and recognizing the reality of human suffering, is precisely what makes Dayan’s argument compelling.
It is too easy, in the heat of war, to collapse into binary narratives: Israel as a genocidal aggressor or as a blameless defender with no obligations to the innocent.
Dayan reminds us that moral clarity lies elsewhere: in the ability to both reject false charges, and hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards, even under fire.
He is also right to warn about the dangers of rhetoric.
The public discourse surrounding the war has been saturated with inflammatory comparisons, often reducing complex realities to slanderous slogans.
Dayan correctly says that labeling IDF soldiers as Nazis dishonors the victims of the Shoah and trivializes the meaning of genocide.
But he is equally candid in noting that Holocaust analogies used on the Israeli side, branding Palestinians as “Nazis” or calling October 7 “another Shoah,” also threaten our moral integrity and historical clarity. Memory, he insists, is not a weapon; it is a responsibility.
There is a quiet but powerful moral challenge in this. Dayan is not excusing the devastation in Gaza, nor is he minimizing Israeli trauma.
He is asking Israelis and Jews worldwide to hold both truths at once: the necessity of defending against Hamas’s barbarism, as well as that of seeing the humanity of Palestinians who have no part in terror. That is not a weakness. It is the strength of a people who remember their history too vividly to dehumanize others.
Dayan’s intervention does not only relate to the present war. It is about the moral future of Israel itself. If the Jewish state emerges from this conflict having defended its people, but lost its moral compass, the cost will be immeasurable. But if it can hold fast to its values even in the crucible of war, then it will not only survive, but will vindicate the principles that gave it life.
The real test of Israel’s strength is not only defeating Hamas but doing so without surrendering the values that define it. That, in the end, is the message of Dayan’s article, and it is one that Israel and its supporters would do well to take to heart.