The Utility of Comparison in Resisting the Gaza Genocide

This essay examines the pro-Palestine student encampment movement of 2024 within the framework of political debates concerning comparisons between Palestinian and Jewish historical experience. I turn to recent efforts to compare Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto to look more deeply at the concept of comparison and to inquire broadly into what it means to compare Jewish and Palestinian experience. Since these histories are fundamentally linked, we can learn more by exploring these interconnections than by censoring them. From this perspective, comparison itself, pursued strategically, can become a means of resisting the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.