Gaza Is Not Normandy: How Historical Illusions Justify Present-Day Atrocities

🖋️ By Malik Mukhtar
📍 www.ainnbeen.blogspot.com
📅 July 11, 2025

When Bret Stephens, a columnist at The New York Times, compared the ongoing devastation in Gaza to the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, he didn’t just distort history — he weaponized it.

With rhetorical solemnity, he asks us to recall the “indiscriminate bombing” of French civilians by Allied forces as a price “worth paying” for the greater good of defeating Nazism. It is the kind of polished moral relativism that sounds profound — until you dig one inch below the surface and smell the rot.

Let’s be clear: Gaza is not Normandy.
And Israel’s war in Gaza is not the Allied campaign to liberate Europe from Hitler’s war machine. The IDF is not storming beaches to liberate the oppressed — it is bulldozing entire neighborhoods, starving civilians, and systematically dismantling the infrastructure of a society imprisoned behind a blockade.

The Numbers Stephens Won’t Quote

Between October 2023 and July 2025, more than 62,000 Palestinians — the overwhelming majority of them civilians — have been killed in Gaza. Over 70% are women and children, according to UN and humanitarian sources. As of this week, UNICEF reports that one child is killed every 12 minutes.

Compare that with the estimated 12,000 French civilians killed in the entire Normandy campaign — an operation that lasted nearly three months and involved millions of troops across several nations fighting an invading empire. France was occupied. Gaza is besieged. France had an army. Gaza has tents.

In Normandy, civilian deaths were collateral in the fog of a multi-national counter-invasion. In Gaza, entire apartment blocks, hospitals, schools, bakeries, and UN shelters have been deliberately leveled, even when GPS coordinates were shared in advance.

This is not war. This is extermination.

The "Righteous Cause" Ruse

Stephens appeals to a mythical “righteous cause.” Let’s ask: what is Israel’s righteous cause?

Was it righteous when Israel cut off food, water, fuel, and medicine to Gaza’s 2.3 million residents?
Was it righteous when Israeli officials called Gazans “human animals,” and the Defense Minister vowed to “completely siege” the Strip?
Was it righteous when 97% of the population was displaced, and mass graves had to be dug for hundreds of corpses decomposing in bombed-out ruins?
Was it righteous when the IDF bombed aid convoys, attacked UN staff, shelled refugee camps, and wiped out entire family trees in seconds?

Let us remember: the Allies didn’t blockade France for 17 years. They didn’t say the enemy's children were legitimate targets. And they didn’t use artificial intelligence to generate kill lists targeting civilians with “dumb bombs” under a veneer of smart warfare.

Existential Threat or Colonial Obsession?

Stephens invokes the “existential threat” argument, echoing a tired script used to excuse decades of brutal occupation. But Israel is a nuclear power, heavily armed and backed by over $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid. Gaza, by contrast, has no army, navy, or air force.

If Hamas is truly the “apotheosis of evil,” then why are children bearing the brunt of Israel’s bombs? Why are foreign aid workers, journalists, and UN staff being killed in unprecedented numbers? Why has Israel refused over 20 UN investigations and blocked ICC access to war zones?

Because this is not an existential fight. It is a calculated campaign of ethnic cleansing dressed in the language of national security.

Selective Memory and Weaponized History

Stephens says we should avoid “retroactive moral judgment” on Allied actions during WWII. Fine. But we must apply current moral judgment to present-day atrocities — not excuse them by invoking the heroism of a different era.

Using WWII analogies to justify flattening Gaza is like citing the Civil War to defend police brutality in Black communities today. It’s grotesque, manipulative, and morally bankrupt.

The Allies didn’t kill 62,000 civilians to destroy a guerrilla group in a city the size of Detroit. They didn’t bomb children’s hospitals and then say, “Oops, there was a tunnel.” And they didn’t have a military spokesperson gleefully tweeting about the destruction of “terrorist-infested neighborhoods” — knowing full well those “infestations” were actually families seeking shelter.

History Will Not Be Kind

Stephens asks: “What was the moral calculus that we pursued?”

Let me answer that.

In Gaza, the moral calculus has been outsourced to propaganda. To euphemisms. To a collective Western cowardice that dares not name the genocide as it unfolds live on every screen.

In 1944, the world was united to defeat a fascist regime. In 2025, the world is watching a nuclear-backed regime use that very history to rationalize its crimes against the defenseless.

And when the rubble clears, it won’t be Bret Stephens or Benjamin Netanyahu who must answer for this “righteous” cause. It will be the orphans, the amputees, the grieving mothers, and the poisoned soul of a world that let it happen.

📌 Sources:

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