When South Africa accused Israel at the ICJ of committing genocide during the 2023-24 war, it sent shockwaves through the field of Genocide Studies and revived public policy and academic discussions about Holocaust exceptionalism and the value of the historical comparison of atrocity. Accusing Israel, a state founded in the wake of the genocide of European Jews and home to survivors and their descendants, provoked an immediate reaction from many Holocaust scholars who rejected South Africa’s claim of genocide on the facts or out of concern that it could dilute or even defame the memory of the Shoah. Some welcomed the invocation of genocide, as either an accurate assessment of the status quo, or as a rhetorical gesture made to convey the urgent need to protect Palestinian life. In other cases, most notably when critic Masha Gessen compared Gaza to the urban ghettos where Nazis segregated and murdered Jews, it led to the recission of an award and the accusation of antisemitism. For historians of genocide and mass atrocity in the Middle East, however, the ICJ case and the war that provoked it, invited less a comparison with European genocide than an effort to compare it with other, longer histories of violence and displacement and mass atrocities against minoritized ethnic and religious communities including Armenians, Assyrians, Yazidis, and Kurds or with the brutality of the wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Sudan. In the space between the invocation of the Holocaust as abstraction and historical event and the Middle Eastern contextualization, I argue, is a way to a) respond to Uğur Ümit Üngör concerns about the possible moral inconsistency of exceptionalzing Israeli violence against Palestinians in the absence of similar outrage or empathy over other episodes of historical and contemporary mass killings and genocide especially in nearby Syria; and b) answer Michael Rothberg’s recent call to create an ethic of comparison that could evaluate productively and compassionately “provocative historical juxtapositions.” In this paper I enter a dialog with the comparative work of other historians (including those on this panel) around the current war, focusing primarily on the 1915-1922 Genocide of the Ottoman Armenians and 2014-2017 Yazidi Genocide in Iraq. Bringing these genocides together into the same frame of the Palestinian experience with mass violence and displacement will foster an approach that takes advantage of the possibilities of comparison to build historical understanding and human solidarity.