The Nazis Targeted Journalists Too
A warning for what comes next in Gaza
Comparisons between Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the Nazi Holocaust are becoming more common. Admittedly, during rallies I attended in October 2023, I used to cringe at the sight of protest signs bearing side-by-side images of Israeli flags and swastikas. At the time, it seemed bad optics to have swastikas anywhere near a pro-Palestine protest, considering the torrent of deceitful antisemitism accusations leveled against the movement.
Nearly two years later, the historical analogy is self-evident—worrying about optics has gone out the window. Truthfully, there was never a moment when Israel was shy about their intent. From the onset of their assault in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies across all segments of Israeli society evoked blatantly genocidal rhetoric. And through a perverse twist of logic, they attempted to cast Palestinians as the real Nazis, as if regurgitating fabricated stories on Western media of Palestinian children reading Mein Kampf could deflect from their documented atrocities. Public statements by Israeli politicians, military officials and journalists—of which over 500 were compiled by human rights lawyers between October 2023 and January 2024 alone—became the basis of South Africa’s genocide case in the International Court of Justice. Activists even created a digital game called “Zionist or Nazi” that lists genocidal statements, asking you to guess whether they were uttered by Nazi officials or Israeli officials. You might as well flip a coin, the rhetoric is indistinguishable.
As Israel continues to escalate in Gaza, it has become clear that shared language is the tip of the iceberg. Israel’s actions also resemble Nazism–the indiscriminate bombings, looting homes, decimating religious sites, forcibly starving a civilian population, and now the complete occupation of Gaza City.
Because of the courageous reporting from Palestinian journalists, who continue to document war crimes despite being disproportionately subjected to them, we can now see Israel’s actions in Gaza for what they are—a genocide analogous to the Holocaust. Israel’s systematic targeting of journalists, whose very work enables us to make this clear-eyed comparison, is yet another tactic straight from the Nazi playbook.
On the evening of August 10, 2025, four Al Jazeera journalists were at work inside a media tent in front of Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital. Since the beginning of Israel’s genocide, journalists have frequently congregated near hospitals, where the most reliable internet and electricity in the besieged Gaza Strip can be found. Journalists have also frequently come under the crosshairs of targeted Israeli drones, as was the case at 11:35 pm that evening, when Israel assassinated Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal.
Al-Sharif, father of two, was born in the Jabilia refugee camp and refused to abandon the frontlines of Israel’s genocide in Northern Gaza despite constant threats against his life. He was described by his colleagues as the “face of Al Jazeera’s Arabic coverage” and “the voice of Gaza.” For nearly two years, al-Sharif stood in front of a camera and chronicled Israel’s genocide to the world, bearing witness to the destruction of his home. In a letter he wrote to be published after his death, al-Sharif shared: “If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice.”
He was one of the last remaining journalists in Gaza, whose numbers have steadily dwindled due to Israel’s policy of barring international media from entering, while simultaneously targeting Palestinian journalists–a war crime according to the Geneva Conventions, which Israel has violated with unprecedented frequency. Brown University’s Costs of War project revealed that over the past 23 months, Israel has killed more journalists in Gaza than in the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam War, the four wars in former Yugoslavia and the war in Afghanistan – combined. In yet another brazen war crime, as I was drafting this story on August 25, I received an Al Jazeera notification that Israel had assassinated five more journalists during an air strike on Gaza’s Nasser Hospital. A letter by Ahmed Abu Aziz, published posthumously, asked the question: “If I am killed, what will you write about me?”
The unparalleled number of journalists Israel has slaughtered is a distinct feature of their genocide, and in some ways transcends analogy, even to atrocities committed by Nazis. But this attempt at silencing the voices of an occupied people while waging a genocide does have historical precedent—one that should gravely concern us. A parallel history from the Warsaw Ghetto illuminates a troubling warning for what may come next in Gaza.
Within days of Germany’s occupation of Poland in September 1939, the Jewish press came under fire. This wasn’t exactly surprising, considering the fascist penchant for burning books, and that one of Hitler’s first actions as German Chancellor was barring “non-Aryans” from working as journalists. According to historian Lucy Dawidowicz in The War Against the Jews, “The penalty for possession of a radio was death. All printing equipment–typesetting machines and presses–had been immediately confiscated by the Germans when they invaded Poland, and by October 1939 all publishing came under German control.” A robust underground press in the Warsaw Ghetto emerged against the backdrop of this perilous political landscape. Jewish writers and printers, much like Palestinian journalists in Gaza, refused to stay silent.
Several Jewish political organizations–with the Socialist Jewish Labor Bund leading the charge–resisted the Nazi threats and soon 50 “illegal” newspapers and bulletins were being published in the Ghetto. The Jewish underground press served many purposes, including circulating outside news from the war fronts, stirring dissent within the Ghetto through scathing anti-Nazi editorials, coordinating resistance activities, and crucially, informing the outside world about the conditions in the Ghetto. Networks of couriers were established, using forged documents to travel around Occupied Poland and Lithuania, risking their lives to deliver newspaper copies from the Warsaw Ghetto.
The Jewish underground press operated amid dire physical conditions. One year after occupying Poland, the Nazis forced every Jew into a small sector of Warsaw, constricting them within brick walls to create a “ghetto” that separated Jews from non-Jews. Around 400,000 people lived in the 1.3 square mile Warsaw Ghetto (population density of 300,000 people/square mile), with an average of 7.2 people per room. For comparison, the population density was roughly 10 times greater than New York City today. Inside the Ghetto walls, Jews contended with derelict sanitation infrastructure and starvation rations. During the first 18 months of the Ghetto, about 83,000 people died of starvation and disease.
Nazi-imposed starvation was the subject of several articles published by the underground press, including editorials titled “What Has Happened to the Bread,” and “The Masses Pay – the Rich Rule.” Animosity was not only aimed at Nazi occupiers, but also the Judenrat, or Jewish Council, who were the de facto intermediary between Nazis and Jews, often accused of collaborating with Nazis and executing their orders. The attempt at class consciousness reflects the political nature of the underground press, dominated by revolutionary socialists in the Jewish Labor Bund.
Before World War II, the Bund, with their pro-diaspora cultural emphasis and anti-Zionist political program, was already one of the most prevalent Jewish organizations in Eastern Europe and Warsaw, the city with the highest Jewish population globally. But they rose to even greater prominence during the German occupation, and were the leading force of anti-Nazi resistance in Warsaw. This can partly be attributed to the Bund’s underground press operations, which benefited from the foresight of their publishers, who—predicting an eventual raid from occupation forces—removed two mimeograph machines from their headquarters in September 1939. These machines and other supplies such as stencils, ink and paper comprised their printing operation—the most sophisticated in the Ghetto.
In a 1941 letter from the Bund’s Central Committee in the Warsaw Ghetto to the New York branch, underground press operatives wrote that one of their central goals was “To inform the Jewish populace about the resistance and struggle against the occupant beyond the borders of the Jewish Ghettos.” Jews trapped in the Ghetto were eager for news from the outside world, so the underground press used hidden radios to circulate broadcasts about global anti-Nazi efforts. I am reminded of stories1 of Palestinians in Gaza who, upon encountering news about resistance efforts from the international community, have expressed that the solidarity movement has made them feel less alone in their suffering and brought a semblance of hope.
Another stated goal of the Bundist underground press was to “strengthen the power of resistance and endurance of the Jewish masses in the face of unheard-of-terrible persecutions without parallel in human history.” The Jewish underground press was an organ of resistance in the Ghetto and a crucial catalyst for organized action, especially among Jewish workers who were trucked to factories outside the Ghetto to labor against their will. The Bund’s weekly periodical, the Veker, popularized the slogan: “work badly and slowly.” Sabotage was another common resistance tactic, and “mysterious fires” frequently blazed in German factories where Jews were forced to work.
The inextricable connection between the Warsaw Ghetto’s underground press and resistance movement is particularly interesting in the context of incessant accusations that Palestinian journalists targeted by Israel were in cahoots with Hamas fighters. These allegations are largely unproven and often blatantly fabricated. One such example is when Israel claimed that Ismail al-Ghoul, an Al Jazeera correspondent murdered on July 31, 2024 who worked alongside Anas al-Sharif, was a member of Hamas’ military wing. They claimed to have a document indicating that al-Ghoul received a military rank in 2007—the only problem being that in 2007, al-Ghoul was ten years old. Israel is now making the same accusation about Anas al-Sharif, once again without any real evidence. In this respect, the resemblance to Nazi Germany is uncanny, with the exact same pretext used to justify murdering members of the Jewish underground press.
On April 17, 1942, a day known as “Bloody Friday,” Nazis rounded up 52 Jews in the Ghetto, executing them in the street. The majority were printers or people associated with the press. Several of their spouses and families were murdered along with them. The Bloody Friday massacre was a brutal show of force unprecedented up to that point in the Warsaw Ghetto. The official justification for this atrocity, which was passed down from Nazi officials and announced by Adam Czerniakow, leader of the Judenrat, was that it was "sporadic in nature.”2 But in private, Czerniakow informed a Bundist leader that the Gestapo had indicated that the executions specifically targeted Jewish political dissidents in the underground press, and that these massacres would continue as long as the underground press did. Czerniakow asked him to cease publishing operations, but the Bundist leader refused. An editorial in the Veker, titled “The Bloody Night,” addressed the killings: “Let them not dishonor the peace of the martyrs. That Friday night in the Warsaw ghetto was only one small link in the great chain of the bestial murders of the Jews by Hitler.”
These justifications for murdering journalists—either claiming that they were killed by accident, or else labeling them as terrorists—are shared by both Nazi officials and Israeli officials. However, the two cases are not quite equivalent. A major difference is that members of the Jewish underground press were indeed political radicals inciting anti-fascist resistance, whereas there is little evidence of the same relationship between Palestinian journalists and fighters. Yet, today it is uncontroversial to praise the resistance efforts of the Jewish underground, which famously included armed uprising. With hindsight, we can all agree that the underground press’ involvement did not warrant their murder. Which begs the question, why don’t we have the same attitude towards Palestinian journalists in Gaza?3 We can endlessly debunk Israel’s propaganda, but might it be more powerful to refuse the underlying premise, that even if what they say is true, Palestinians still deserve to live? To me, this is one lesson from the Warsaw Ghetto.
Another is that targeting journalists can signify an escalation in the pace of genocide. Before Bloody Friday, Jews were being forcibly starved, but Nazi policy had not yet reached the stage of total annihilation. This is partly because the Warsaw Ghetto was the staging ground for an unfinished anti-Jewish propaganda film called Das Ghetto, which depicted Jews as pathologically greedy and vermin-like. But the need for dehumanizing propaganda would soon become obsolete.
April 17, 1942 marked a shift in Nazi policy from suffocation to liquidation. According to the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, many Jews in the Ghetto had been slowly coerced into adapting to the conditions created by the Germans. 18 months into the occupation, the death of relatives by starvation and disease had become an inevitable fact of life. But neighbors gunned down in the streets was something new. After Bloody Friday, Jews suspected of connection to the underground were often seized from their homes in the middle of the night and shot. The Ghetto was soon gripped by a sense of panic. This panic was merited, as unbeknownst to them, Bloody Friday was the beginning of the end. Three months later, Nazi Germany began the process of “liquidation,” during which they transported the entire population of the Warsaw Ghetto to death camps, including Treblinka. Despite their fierce resistance during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, by the end of May 1943, the entire Warsaw Ghetto was destroyed and about 400,000 Jews were killed.
What began with the targeting of a few dozen clandestine press operatives, ended in the complete annihilation of Jews in Warsaw. As Israel continues its policy of targeting journalists in Gaza, creating what the Committee to Protect Journalists has called “a news void where war crimes go undocumented,” let Warsaw serve as a warning for what this may signify.
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“From the heart of this catastrophe, I say: We see you, we feel you, and your actions reach us even when the borders remain closed.” - a mother in Gaza named Alaa writing to hunger strikers in Chicago. (source)
If that reasoning sounds familiar, it might be because when Israel isn’t accusing slaughtered journalists of being terrorists, they instead characterize their deaths as incidental, denying the intentional targeting of journalists.
A question inspired by Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims.