The ethno-nationalist stories of Zionism and Nazism are intertwined in many ways. And the dominant form of genocidal Zionism today speaks like an echo from the dark days of Adolf Hitler and his own genocidal nationalism.

Human rights groups and numerous genocide experts have long called Israel’s crimes in Gaza a genocide. And this week, Jewish actor Wallace Shawn told the Katie Halper Show that the apartheid state has been “doing evil that is just as great as what the Nazis did”. In fact, he said:

In some ways it’s worse, because they kind of boast about it. Hitler had the decency to try to keep it secret. For some reason, Hitler didn’t want people to know he was doing these things to the Jews. The Israelis are almost proud of it

US: from genocide-stoppers to genocide-enablers

While the Soviet Union played a key role in defeating Nazism, losing millions of soldiers in the battle, the US was also a major part of the coalition that finally defeated Adolf Hitler and ended the Holocaust.

However, in the decades that followed, the US expanded on its own genocidal history at home by violently solidifying its place as the world’s foremost imperial power.

Ethnic cleansing and genocide aren’t unique to the Nazis. But they are similar war crimes that often go hand in hand. Hitler’s Nazis tried to ethnically cleanse Germany before they launched the Holocaust. Israel, meanwhile, was founded on an ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians decades before it began its full-blown genocide in Gaza.

Because Israel has loyally served as a strategic outpost, proxy, and tool of the US empire’s interests in the Middle East, Washington’s political elites have long allowed Israel’s slow ethnic cleansing of Palestinian territory.

But the Joe Biden administration’s greenlighting of the Gaza genocide from 2023 onwards exposed the US establishment’s disdain for international law and disinterest in the US’s global reputational collapse.

While Biden’s government may have tried to put on a serious face and act like it cared about Palestinians as it gave Israel billions of dollars in military aid to murder them, its behaviour was little different from Donald Trump’s public advocacy of ethnic cleansing since he replaced Biden.

From Hitler to Trump: the same rhetoric over and over again

In 1933, Zionists reached a “transfer” deal with Hitler’s government. The Jewish Agency, as “the only authorized Jewish organization in Nazi Germany”, oversaw this “transfer” of around 53,000 Jewish people to Palestine under British colonial control.

Later, a year before the start of the Second World War, in 1938, the Evian Conference brought countries together to talk about the refugee wave resulting from the ongoing persecution of Jewish people in Germany. And as the USC Shoah Foundation wrote:

Before the conference, Hitler made it known that he would help Jewish refugees migrate to different participating countries.

It quoted Hitler as saying:

We, on our part, are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries, for all I care, even on luxury ships

Likewise, far-right Zionists today talk about ‘helping Palestinians in Gaza to emigrate’. Prominent Zionists before the foundation of Israel, meanwhile, said Jewish people “must take over the land” of Palestine and the native Palestinians “must be transferred to some other place”, with one eventual prime minister (David Ben-Gurion) arguing that “it is impossible to imagine general evacuation without compulsion, and brutal compulsion”.

Because many Palestinians didn’t leave, Israel has had to maintain its power in the region for decades through many forms of settler-colonial brutality, culminating in the current genocide in Gaza.

Speaking about the Evian Conference, former American Jewish Committee leader David Harris explained that:

At a time before Auschwitz, when Adolf Hitler teased other nations, saying, in effect, if you care so much about Jews, why not open your doors to them, the response from the countries in attendance, with the notable exception of the Dominican Republic, was a resounding ‘no,’

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum director Sara J. Bloomfield, meanwhile, highlighted that:

The Nazi regime was clear in its intentions to rid the Reich of Jews by making life so unbearable that they would flee.

And she said the failure at Evian “was an enormous propaganda victory for Nazi Germany”, emboldening Nazis to increase their violence against Jewish people “after the U.S. and other governments already demonstrated that rescuing Jews was not a priority”.

Never again for anyone

During the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza, a number of Holocaust survivors and their descendants insisted on the similarities between Hitler’s Nazi Holocaust and Israel’s actions in Palestine. They wrote that:

Genocide begins with the silence of the world…

We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch. In Israel, politicians and pundits in The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post have called openly for genocide of Palestinians and right-wing Israelis are adopting Neo-Nazi insignia…

We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. We call for an immediate end to the siege against and blockade of Gaza. We call for the full economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. “Never again” must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.

Donald Trump has shocked the international community over Gaza at a joint press conference with butcher Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump has claimed that the US will “take over” the Gaza strip, with Palestinians to be moved to other countries in his plan for ethnic cleansing. He said:

The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. If it’s necessary, we’ll do that, we’re going to take over that piece, we’re going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.

Trump then claimed that Palestinians should be moved “permanently” to neighbouring states like Egypt and Jordan. This plan would constitute ethnic cleansing and, as many in the international community have noted, would be illegal under the Geneva Convention. Article 49 of the convention:

prohibits an occupying power from forcibly transferring or removing people from a territory.

But, Netanyahu has long been advocating for a similar plan. The outrage from the international community, then, must surely be aimed at more than just Trump.

Bombastic Trump want to break international law over Gaza

For his part, Netanyahu praised this plan, saying that Trump was “the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.”

In December 2023 Netanyahu discussed what he called “voluntary immigration” wherein Palestinians who “want to leave Gaza to a third country can do so.” At the time, the Middle East Eye presciently reported:

Palestinians have long said Israel’s current campaign in Gaza is aimed at ensuring their permanent expulsion from the area.

Israel’s military strategy is seemingly aimed at making Gaza uninhabitable by destroying anything that sustains life, hoping that Palestinians will then “voluntarily” leave.

Israel have spent over a year destroying basis infrastructure necessary for survival. Nevertheless, both Netanyahu and Trump are on a hiding to nowhere if they think Palestinians would every ‘voluntarily’ leave their homeland. As lawyer Noura Erakat wrote:

God is not a real estate agent,neither is the most criminal, narcissistic leader of empire. Palestinians belong to Palestine. They have survived 76 yrs of Nakba, & 15 months of its cruelest phase. They survived to return, to stay, to thrive.Their ability to do so is on all of us.

— Noura Erakat (@4noura) February 5, 2025

Also in 2023, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said:

There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language.

Earlier this month, Netanyahu repeated his opposition to a two state solution, and CNN characterised his comments as part of “a rift with the US” on what happens to Palestine next. At the time, Biden’s White House insisted that a two state solution was the US’ preferred option – in opposition to the Israeli government.

Policy vs practice

Whilst headlines in mainstream media will present Trump’s remarks as a swerving U-turn on American policy in Palestine the reality is quite different.

Whilst Biden’s government said they supported a two-state solution, what they actually did was enable Israel’s ongoing attempt at ethnic cleansing.

The reason Gaza is in a state of such destruction, with bodies still waiting to be found under the rubble, hospitals bombed, schools attacked, children’s bodies blown into pieces, is because the US provided Israel with the funds, arms, and geopolitical support to decimate Gaza.

Trump may have said the quiet part out loud, but it’s Biden who laid the ground work.

Trump has said that he believes Palestinians have “no alternative” but to leave their country. Biden may not have said it out loud, but he has the same blood on his hands that Netanyahu does.

There should have been outcry from the international community at each step of Israeli attempts at ethnically cleansing Palestine.

Instead, in spite of Netanyahu consistently advocating for the erasure of Palestine, US officials have hedged their bets. In 2024 Truthout reported:

Even as the [US] administration offered milquetoast criticism of Netanyahu’s vow of ethnic cleansing and mass death, State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller reiterated that the administration’s “support for Israel remains ironclad,” even if there are “differences between our two countries.”

Trump is not a renegade. He is a product of the US system of expansionism and colonialism. Netanyahu has never tried to hide his intentions for Palestine – now it appears the US government is matching rhetoric with policy.

Featured image via the Canary

By Maryam Jameela

This post was originally published on Canary.