Brolly says 'parallels between Israeli actions and Nazi extermination of Warsaw Ghetto are striking' after posting image online showing a swastika inside a Star of David

Mr Brolly made the comments to the News Letter after coming in for heavy criticism over an image he had posted online depicting a Star of David with a swastika inside.

A few days earlier, Mr Brolly (a barrister and podcaster) had asked on Twitter "why Ulster Scot Protestants support genocide" and "champion it with such relish" in relation to the Israel/Gaza situation.

The cartoon posted by Mr Brolly on Wednesday portrays Gaza as a kind of walled vat under Israeli control, into which are pouring bullets from soldiers and out of which is pouring blood – all while figures embodying the USA and EU look on.

Several Twitter users said that they had “reported” the posting and a large number of the 200-plus responses to it were extremely negative, with one user, @Richard_Ardvark (a self-described history student with some 700-plus followers) accusing Mr Brolly of “trivialising the Holocaust”.

When this negativity and the specific comment about the Holocaust were put to Mr Brolly, he issued this statement to the News Letter: “The factual depiction of the massacre of defenceless people is accurate.

"Many leading Jewish commentators are calling out the genocide. Just this morning Prof Kenneth Roth (Princeton), whose father survived the holocaust, accused Israel of war crimes.

"My interpretation is that the cartoonist is making an ironic point about the use of the holocaust, the term ‘Nazis’, the Israeli delegation to the UN wearing stars of David, to silence opposition.”

The last remark is a reference to Israel’s UN ambassador Gilad Erdan, who wore a yellow star on his suit reminiscent of those forced upon Jews in the 1930s and 40s in Germany, when he turned up to the UN HQ in New York on Monday.

Inside the star was written the oft-repeated post-Holocaust phrase: “Never again.”

Mr Brolly continued by adding that “leading Jewish groups” including Jewish Voice for Peace and the Twitter account Torah Judaism “are being branded antisemitic”.

"The parallels with the Nazi extermination of the Warsaw ghetto are striking,” he said.

"The interesting thing is that people supporting the genocide are looking for connotations of antisemitism rather than calling out Israel for what is now described by the UN and others as ‘a textbook case of genocide’.

"If Jewish people were hemmed into the Gaza ghetto being bombarded by Palestinian and Arab forces I would be calling out that genocide in just the same way.

"My concern is the sanctity of human life.”

In autumn 1940, the Nazis rounded up the 350,000-or-so Jews of Warsaw – who made up about 30% of the city’s 1.3 million inhabitants – and hemmed them into a zone which took up a mere 2.4% of the city’s space (about 1.3 square miles), along with another 50,000 or so Jews from the neighbouring area.

The ghetto was enclosed in 10 feet walls, and its inhabitants starved or became fatally ill until the Nazis eventually liquidated the slum, killing almost all its inhabitants.

According to the US Holocaust Museum, by the end of the war just 174,000 people were left in the city, of which only about 11,500 were Jews.

The professor Roth referenced by Mr Brolly is a former executive director of the global Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022.

Prof Roth has accused Hamas of war crimes, and in the last 24 hours has also said that “Israel dropping several large bombs in the middle of a densely populated refugee camp was completely and predictably going to lead to a significant and disproportionate loss of civilian life and therefore a war crime”.

Mr Brolly also sent a string of articles and tweets to the News Letter, including one from Raz Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, New Jersey, in which Prof Segal argued that “the assault on Gaza can also be understood in other terms: as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes”.

The UN Genocide Convention, which entered force in 1951, defines genocide as something that involves the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

This does not just involve killings, but also “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, or “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”.

Arguably the smallest widely-recognised case of genocide is that of Srebrenica, when over 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Christian Serbs in the Balkans over a period of several days in 1995.

At time of writing, the Palestinian death toll (as reported by the Hamas-run Gazan health ministry) was approaching or had already reached 10,000, a result of the Israeli response to the murder of about 1,400 of its citizens and kidnapping of over 200 more.

However, recent armed conflicts – such as the ongoing one in Yemen or in Nigeria – have seen many times this number of people killed without the word “genocide” being widely invoked.