Ian Buruma is the author of The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II. In 2002, during a visit to Ramallah, Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese writer José Saramago compared the living conditions of Palestinians in the West Bank to the extermination of Jews in Auschwitz. This extraordinary remark triggered an international uproar, but Mr. Saramago asserted that as an intellectual, it was his duty to “make emotional comparisons that would shock people into understanding.” Mr. Saramago was by no means the first (and surely not the last) to invoke Nazi Germany’s attempted annihilation of the Jewish people...