Anti-Israel groups commemorated the Holocaust by hijacking its memory. Gift of the Givers and other South African anti-Israel organizations marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day by screening a film that falsely portrays the descendants of Holocaust survivors as the reincarnation of the Nazis.

The South African government established itself as an anti-Israel trailblazer in late 2023 by bringing Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on false charges of genocide. Meanwhile, the South African government is hosting an array of groups that have been alleged by some to be part of a Hamas funding umbrella.

Gift of the Givers calls itself “the largest disaster response, non-governmental organisation of African origin on the African continent,” and claims to have distributed $320 million in 47 countries over 32 years. It was also part of the Union of Good — according to the Union’s website in the early 2000s — which the United States sanctioned in 2008 for funding Hamas.

In recent months, Gift of the Givers founder Imtiaz Sooliman has crossed the line into blatant antisemitism on at least two occasions. At a rally in honor of the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 2023 massacre, Sooliman declared that “Zionists … run the world with fear. They control the world with money.” At a gala in November 2024, Sooliman doubled down on his overt Jew-hatred, railing about “Zionists” using “fear” and “money,” according to the South African Jewish Report.

Sooliman’s recent remarks call into question his organization’s motivations for hosting a “Holocaust Memorial Day screening” of the film “Al-Shifa Hospital: The Crimes They Tried to Bury” on January 27.

That day marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, where the Nazis murdered over 1 million Jews during the Holocaust — via starvation, disease, shooting, and gas chambers.

Gift of the Givers played the movie — produced by Qatari state-owned media network Al Jazeera — at a hospital lecture hall. Apparently, this venue would help viewers relate to the supposed victims of Israel’s two-week, surprise raid on the Hamas-controlled health facility in late March 2024.

But Shifa isn’t just a hospital. There is evidence of Hamas operating out of Shifa Hospital since at least 2006. By 2014, the hospital had become a “de facto” command center for Hamas. Hamas’ control of Shifa Hospital was an open secret.

In February 2024, The New York Times wrote that evidence suggests that Hamas “used the hospital for cover, stored weapons inside it and maintained a hardened tunnel beneath the complex that was supplied with water, power and air-conditioning.”

During the raid that is the subject of the documentary, Israel killed top Hamas officials, while Hamas fired from the emergency room, maternity ward, and elsewhere. Over the course of the operation, according to the IDF, the Israelis detained up to 900 suspects, 513 of whom were confirmed to be Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad members, and killed around 200 terrorists in gun battles.

Despite the mountain of evidence, a hospital staffer interviewed in the film contends that the Israelis tried to push a false narrative about Hamas using the hospital. Instead, the documentary tries to frame the operation as a vindictive assault on one of the few places of refuge in Gaza.

Erasing the security context of Israeli actions has been central to the attempts to charge Israel with war crimes, including genocide. The film does not ask why hundreds of terrorists were operating in a hospital and endangering its patients and staff.

There are other reasons to doubt the Al Jazeera narrative. In October 2024, Israel published information indicating that six Al Jazeera journalists were members of Hamas.

In March 2024, Al Jazeera published a report featuring the testimony of a woman who claimed that the Israelis “raped a number of women” during the operation. The former managing director of Al Jazeera said that a Hamas investigation found the rape allegation to be fabricated, and that the woman lied to “arouse the nation’s zeal.” Nevertheless, the false rape allegation remains on Al Jazeera’s site.

Portraying Israel as the reincarnation of the Nazis both trivializes the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust, and seeks to cast Israel as a villain. It is also a prime example of how modern antisemitism is manifested, according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, the most widely accepted definition of Jew-hatred.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is a somber occasion to remember the victims of the Nazi genocide and to resolve to never allow it to happen again.

Alternatively, for Gift of the Givers, it is an opportunity to justify attacking, kidnapping, and killing Holocaust survivors and their descendants in their homes in southern Israel by claiming that Israelis are like the Nazis. The same backwards morality and distortion of reality that underpin a leading South African humanitarian organization’s descent into antisemitism, have also allowed Pretoria to establish itself as Hamas’ lawyer at the ICJ.

David May is a research manager and senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Follow David on X @DavidSamuelMay. Follow FDD on X @FDD.

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