While the instinct to find a universal message in the destruction of European Jewry is understandable and in some ways admirable, it has increasingly taken the form of an effort to downplay the fact that the Holocaust happened, specifically, to Jews. James Kirchick comments on this tendency:

[T]o the mandarins of the progressive left, the Holocaust’s meaning is always and necessarily to be found in its “universalism.” According to this line of interpretation, the evil of the Nazis can be located in their abandonment of the European cosmopolitan tradition and descent into bestial particularism and nationalism—the very qualities that Israel, foremost among the nations, is charged with embodying today. This sleight of hand has the miraculous effect of clouding the causes of the Holocaust so that anti-Semitism is relegated to a background role, if it is mentioned at all.

Harping on the fact of six million dead Jews [in this atmosphere of opinion] becomes weirdly tribal, even Nazi-like; asserting Jewish peoplehood is too close to asserting Aryan-ness, the disastrous results of which Europeans have been expiating for the past seven decades. It doesn’t matter that there is no Israeli Auschwitz, or anything even approaching it; the particularism and nationalism of Israel is enough to implicate everything that has followed. . . . Israel is [seen as] the carrier of the European disease that wise Europeans have transcended through their enormous, Christ-like suffering, and their formation of the European Union. . . .

Today’s progressive narrative of the Holocaust-without-Jews is not altogether different from the last, great leftist attempt to deny the truth of the Shoah. After World War II, the Soviet Union and its puppet regimes in Central and Eastern Europe solemnized the Nazis’ victims as “anti-fascists,” lumping together the six million Jews who were, by dint of their birth, singled out for execution with the Communists and socialists who were targeted because of their political disposition. Emphasizing the specifically anti-Semitic nature of the Holocaust, Communists worried, would work against their political purposes as the populations over which they ruled were quite anti-Semitic themselves—and had by and large looked away, or even eagerly participated, as their Jewish neighbors were carried off to the gas chambers. . . .

Yet the Holocaust’s universal meanings are not inconsistent with an appreciation of its singularity. . . . Without independently acknowledging both the universality and the historicity of the Holocaust, we will fail to understand what happened, and to whom—and how to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again, to anyone.

Even if the agreement with Hamas to secure the release of some, and possibly all, of the remaining hostages—and the bodies of those no longer alive—is a prudent decision for Israel, it comes at a very high price: potentially leaving Hamas in control of Gaza and the release of vast numbers of Palestinian prisoners, many with blood on their hands. Nadav Shragai reminds us of the history of such agreements:

We cannot forget that the terrorists released in the Jibril deal during the summer of 1985 became the backbone of the first intifada, resulting in the murder of 165 Israelis. Approximately half of the terrorists released following the Oslo Accords joined Palestinian terror groups, with many participating in the second intifada that claimed 1,178 Israeli lives. Those freed in [exchange for Gilad Shalit in 2011] constructed Gaza, the world’s largest terror city, and brought about the October 7 massacre. We must ask ourselves: where will those released in the 2025 hostage deal lead us?

Taking these painful concessions into account Michael Oren argues that they might nonetheless be necessary:

From day one—October 7, 2023—Israel’s twin goals in Gaza were fundamentally irreconcilable. Israel could not, as its leaders pledged, simultaneously destroy Hamas and secure all of the hostages’ release. The terrorists who regarded the hostages as the key to their survival would hardly give them up for less than an Israeli commitment to end—and therefore lose—the war. Israelis, for their part, were torn between those who felt that they could not send their children to the army so long as hostages remained in captivity and those who held that, if Hamas wins, Israel will not have an army at all.

While 33 hostages will be released in the first stage, dozens—alive and dead—will remain in Gaza, prolonging their families’ suffering. The relatives of those killed by the Palestinian terrorists now going free will also be shattered. So, too, will the Israelis who still see soldiers dying in Gaza almost daily while Hamas rocket fire continues. What were all of Israel’s sacrifices for, they will ask. . . .

Perhaps this outcome was unavoidable from the beginning. Perhaps the deal is the only way of reconciling Israel’s mutually exclusive goals of annihilating Hamas and repatriating the hostages. Perhaps, despite Israel’s subsequent military triumph, this is the price for the failures of October 7.