Gaza: History Repeating Itself

A haunting parallel between Oradour and Gaza exposes the world's failure to stop genocide in real time.

In October, the greatest escape from "hell on earth" will mark its second anniversary.

The images of genocide social media have exposed—of Israel's murderous campaign of death—will forever haunt the world.

Eighty years of relentless terror, murder, and the brutality of oppression used to subjugate the Palestinian people have opened the world’s eyes to decades of moral failure and naïve sympathy for an illegal settler-colonial state that conned the world into believing it was the victim rather than the guilty party.

Israel successfully carried out the greatest deception of modern times—one that’s run over generations.

Hamas’s brazen attack on the IDF to set free the Palestinian people from Israel’s grip, after 20 years of living in an open-air concentration camp, wasn’t the catalyst for Israel’s so-called right to defend itself—because those who oppress don’t have the right to defend themselves—but rather a pretext to ramp up and accelerate its final solution.

The international community now recognises what Israel has always been: a fraud fuelled by deceit. Maniacal doesn’t begin to describe Israel and its people.

The devastation in Gaza rivals the nuclear holocaust the US illegally and immorally inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both became nuclear tests sites – the Japanese army was days away from collapsing, and the slaughter of more than 500,000 innocent Japanese wasn’t about ending WWII – Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t military sites, it was to send a message of American dominance to the Soviet Union, showcase the terror of atomic power, and cement America’s position as the new global superpower through mass murder.

History offers another chilling comparison: Oradour-sur-Glane, near Limoges in France, preserved as a living monument to Nazi Germany’s terror. It stands as a reminder of the evil the Nazis unleashed on the Jewish people and Europe in their pursuit of domination.

The parallels between the terror of Nazi Germany and Israel’s actions are unmistakable. The same bloodlust that once persecuted Jews now runs through the descendants of those persecuted—perpetrators of a near-identical level of calculated, psychopathic violence.

Oradour exists to remind whoever visits it of the horror that took place on 10 June 1944—only four days after D-Day—when 643 civilians, including 247 children, were massacred by the Waffen-SS Das Reich Division. The Nazis had entered the quiet village under the pretext of a routine identity check, their real intention however, was to send a brutal message of terror and collective punishment.

On that fateful day, the SS rounded up the entire population and separated the men from the women and children. The men were taken to barns and garages where machine guns were pre-positioned. Once fired upon, the wounded were doused in petrol and set alight. While that act of brutal psychopathy was taking place, the women and children were locked inside the village church. Explosives were detonated inside, and when anyone tried to escape the fire, they were shot down. The 447 people trapped inside burned to death —nearly all mothers with their children. Only a few escaped. The village was then looted and razed.

For Oradour’s horror, it’s perhaps the closest parallel to what Palestinians in Gaza are enduring.

When I walked through Oradour, on 17 September 2017, it’s allowed me to draw that eerie comparison. Gaza is today’s Oradour—flattened, broken, smouldering. Anyone who cares about the Palestinian people, should visit Oradour to understand its history. The experience swims with a disturbing similarity to what the world now witnesses daily—but on a scale more relentless, eviller, and far greater. Gaza is hell, just as Oradour was on 10 June 1944.

Oradour now remains frozen in time—a village that died so others might remember. Its ruins preserved not as a relic but as testimony. Gaza, on the other hand, is being annihilated in real time—without preservation, without memory, and without justice.

While Oradour is protected by solemn respect, Gaza is defamed by propaganda. The dead are labelled militants. Its survivors are cast as complicit. Gaza’s entire population is dehumanised to justify its destruction. The same language used by Nazis in 1944 echoes today in official press briefings, Western parliaments, and media talking points.

What Oradour represents in history, Gaza lives daily. It’s not a memorial—but a living massacre. A place where entire families are buried beneath rubble. Where a child loses both legs and their parents in one airstrike. Where mothers breastfeed in shelters without water or electricity. Where hospitals are bombed, food convoys are denied, and every street corner is a mass grave.

And yet, the world hesitates. The international community—those self-declared champions of human rights—remain paralysed, or worse, complicit. The same governments that once cried “never again” now fund and arm the regime carrying out atrocities before the world. “Never again” has become a chant of cowardice.

What’s undeniable is Gaza’s no longer a metaphor. It embodies every lesson the world claimed it had learned from the Holocaust, from Rwanda, from Srebrenica—and promptly forgot. Those lessons have been betrayed in Gaza.

Oradour’s, victims are honoured and remembered, Gaza’s are being erased. If the world remains silent, future generations will know of Gaza only through silence. The kind that allows mass graves to go unmarked, genocides to be reframed as “defensive actions,” and accountability to vanish.

The comparison isn’t only valid—it is essential. Oradour was one village. Gaza is many. And it’s still burning.