This is Israel’s 9/11.

This is Kristallnacht.

This is Kishinev.

In the wake of the devastating terror atrocities on October 7, these slogans are everywhere. We read that Hamas = Nazis. Or Hamas = ISIS. That this is the “Hamas Holocaust.” These historical analogies emblematize our pain and fear. They fix the scale of our suffering and spur urgent resolve. In a world in which too many people cannot bring themselves to condemn vile butchery of Jews, these analogies also channel our outrage into challenging apathy. Yet such mental images also constrain our ethical and political reasoning precisely when we need it most. In this moment of profound trauma, I worry that our quick recourse to historical analogies devoid of context impairs our ability to think critically about the hard moral and strategic choices that we face. If we wish to invoke the past to explain the present, we must also be willing to learn its lessons for the future.

Take the common metaphor of October 7 as Israel’s 9/11. Comparison with America’s terrorist tragedy captures the enormity of Israeli loss. The 9/11 analogy also registers the terrible shock and profound sense of vulnerability encompassing Israeli society and the larger Jewish world. But one core lesson of 9/11, almost universally acknowledged, is that the wars initiated in its name did not fix the problems they were intended to solve. Instead, America’s military campaigns created new problems and new crises, as it proved far easier to topple malignant regimes than to replace them with stable democracies.

I lived through 9/11 in New York City. I recall well the climate of fear and anger that sparked a public demand for decisive military response. Yet what emerged in the “forever wars” that followed provided little in the way of repair, peace, or justice. Rather, it produced a sprawling decades-long global conflict, with hundreds of thousands of lives lost, one which is partly responsible for the decline of American democracy.

Israel enters this war with its democracy in tatters. Huge swaths of the Israeli public no longer trust the government to fulfill its basic obligations to its citizens. The situation in the West Bank, where Israel has long operated with total military dominance, is already untenable from the standpoint of both collective security and elementary justice. It is tempting to imagine 10/7 as another 9/11, a catastrophe that provided a window of opportunity for a fundamental reset of the dynamics of the conflict. Yet the lesson of 9/11 is not to let the urgency of the moment displace the work of realistic postwar planning. History counsels humility when contemplating a fantasy scenario of the IDF defeating Hamas swiftly and completely while causing minimal Palestinian civilian deaths followed by a stable peace in the environs and the larger region.

Jewish history too offers a cautionary tale. In recent days, everyone from American journalists to Israeli generals have cited the pogroms of twentieth-century Europe, particularly the 1903 Kishinev rampage in the Russian Empire or the Nazi attacks of Kristallnacht in 1938. Kishinev calls to mind a blighted urban landscape in which defenseless men, women, and children, young and old alike, fell victim to vicious antisemitic mob attacks, sparking outrage around the world. Kristallnacht evokes the beginning of the Holocaust as Nazi squads transitioned from oppressive discrimination to outright violence against the Jews of Germany. Kishinev and Kristallnacht represent two points of utter powerlessness for Jews.

As Jews, we are accustomed to looking backwards to our past to interpret our present and dream our future. The stories of our ancestors, and even the chronicles of their traumas, as my colleague Yehuda Kurtzer has rightly noted, can provide hope and meaning. Yet trauma stories can also calcify our thinking and blinker our ethical imagination. When we imagine this atrocity as merely the latest in a chain of destructions stretching back into the recesses of the Jewish past, we turn ourselves into passive victims of history rather than authors of our future.

Kishinev and Kristallnacht took place in a far different world, one in which Jews lacked a sovereign state with an army emphatically backed by the world’s strongest superpower. Those events also occurred in a world in which the modern laws of war remained in a state of infancy. That lethal antisemitism remains should not blind us to these key differences between past and present. When we imagine Jews today as the weakest of the weak, devoid of this power, we lose sight of the moral calculus that must obtain when a democracy—and a nuclear one at that —goes to war. The objectives of warfare, including the red lines not to be crossed and the definition of success, must be clarified.

What of the sheer evil of Hamas? I agree with those who say that there must be a reckoning, and justice must be achieved. But here, too, analogies promise moral certitude at the expense of critical context. The Nazi comparisons and references to the biblical enemy Amalek have led to much gallingly obscene talk in Israel and beyond about treating Gaza as if the laws of war and human rights do not apply. This is a morally perverse position. You do not suspend morality to defeat immorality. The dark fantasies of smiting Israel’s enemies once and for all should not blind us to the question of the fate of the two million people who have nowhere to flee. The savagery of Gaza’s rulers is not an answer to the question of what Israel owes the Palestinian population trapped inside its borders. The basic distinction between civilians and combatants remains. So does the responsibility to think clearly and critically about what kind of war is morally legitimate and what happens after the fighting ends.

No analogy can tell us for certain what will come next. But if history is to guide us, it must be more than a storehouse in which to rummage about and pull out a potent symbol that further inflames our emotions and overpowers our rationality. Instead, it must serve as a source of lessons and as a mirror to our own moment so that we can reason honestly about the choices before us.

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