US President Donald Trump is spending all his free time these days praying for a Nobel Peace Prize. After the dramatic live on prime TV handing over of proof of nomination by Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump is waiting for a call from Stockholm.
It may, or may not, come. If it does, it would be to reward him for supporting the decimation of Palestinians by Netanyahu, using American weapons, intel and lobbying support to block UN-sanctioned penalties. It will be to reward him for targeting South Africa, for example, for taking the Jewish state to the International Court of Justice for the ongoing genocide.
Beyond all these political chess games, there is, however, for me, as I watch the daily carnage in Palestine, the worrying sense of the survivors of the German extermination programme doing the same to others.
For when German Führer Adolf Hitler decided in 1941 that a permanent and final solution to the “Jewish Problem” had to be found, he convened a conference at Wannsee in Berlin, which mapped out how the extermination would unfold.
Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SchutzStaffel (SS) Police, set up office at the Am Grossen Wannsee building, situated next to the tranquil Wannsee lake. What transpired inside, however, was anything but tranquil; it was the methodical planning of the killing of at least 6 million Jews, simply because they were Jews.
There were, of course, other categories of people also targeted, but the pogrom was about ridding Germany and Europe of what was seen as the scourge of Jews, the vermin, as they were called. And so, Auschwitz, Dachau and many other concentration camps were erected and weaponised to carry out the extermination. This was done through hunger, beatings, shooting, gas chamber and general encampment in ghettoes with no food, medication or livelihood.
And in all these, the German population watched as people who had been declared sub-human were rounded up and killed. The world also watched, and only woke up six million lives too late to oppose Hitler. The survivors who walked out of concentration camps across Europe were literally skeletons scarred for life.
Two enabling factors for the mass murder of the Jews were the inculcation, particularly within Germany, of the belief that Jews were not really human and that their removal from German society was a necessity for the good of the Reich. The other was an indifferent world, willing to look the other way because either they too believed in the sub-human theory, or were too scared to enter a war with Hitler.
I have been to Himmler’s Am Groben house, which is now a museum, with all the artefacts symbolising what the final solution looked like. You cannot walk through that house and not be moved. I have also been to Dachau in Munich and walked through the eerie area, including the gas chamber.
Following the attack by Hamas and other military formations in Palestine on a number of targets within Israel, killing over 1000 people and kidnapping others in 2023, Israel launched a retaliatory attack on Gaza, the epicentre of Hamas power.
What followed was an ongoing indiscriminate massacre of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank, leaving, yes, not millions, but tens of thousands killed through bombings, shootings, and now systematic starvation.
There is now talk of creating what would be similar to an Auschwitz, where Palestinians would be herded and kept until some country offers to take them. It is the emptying of Palestine of Palestinians, just as the Fuhrer wanted to rid Germany of Jews by moving them to concentration camps.
Gaza is now a desolate heap of rubble, with Palestinians wandering around as they are told to head south, then north, then south, then north as the bombs rain down on them in supposedly safe areas. The Israeli population is by and large, silent, just as the Germans before them were, while they see the suffering and killing of Palestinians as nothing to worry about. Palestinians are, after all, not really human and deserve whatever they get and more if that will bring “security” to Israel.
And the world is again effectively muted because the Jews have moved from being “vermin” in the eyes of the Germans in the 40’s, to international royalty whose most reprehensible actions cannot be criticised.
Children are killed in schools, and those who survive and are taken to hospitals are followed and bombed as they lie in hospital beds. International aid in the form of food, medicine and fuel has been stopped for months, precipitating malnutrition and starvation akin to the Jewish ghettos.
And all the new Fuhrer in Jerusalem needs to say is that they were targeting a Hamas command centre beneath a hospital. Or that Hamas was using the aid for its own purposes. No one dares demand proof from the Führer.
Information about the war on Palestinians is censored, and only those media outlets prepared to play by the Israel Defence Force (IDF) rules are allowed to operate within Israel. An attempt is being made to create an illusional reality with no relation to the situation on the ground.
Hitler, using Himmler and his chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, thought he could fool the world with what today would be called AI-generated falsehoods. It didn’t work. Truth and justice are stubborn creatures that eventually triumph over evil.
That is why Hitler failed. And that is why the decimation of Palestinians shall stop one of these days, and those in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, who have been holding their own Wannsee conferences planning the latest bombing and starvation methods, shall have their Nuremberg equivalent.
And for enabling this, Trump now sits in front of his phone waiting for Stockholm to call. The absurdity of watching the Jerusalem tail wagging the willing Washington dog for the possibility of a Nobel Prize is mind-boggling.
But even more devastating is seeing how the survivors of genocide are themselves using the same methods to exterminate an entire nation of Palestinians from their own lands.
