Himmler with a Clip-On Foreskin

In March 2024, the members of the United States Congress — elected representatives of the world's pre-eminent democracy, self-appointed guardians of the international rules-based order, the people who built the Nuremberg tribunals and coined the phrase Never Again — rose to their feet twenty-nine times for Benjamin Netanyahu. Twenty-nine standing ovations. More than any foreign leader in the history of that institution. More than Churchill received during the Second World War. For a man who was, at that precise moment, overseeing the destruction of sixty percent of Gaza's buildings, the deliberate blockade of food and medicine to 2.3 million people, the targeted killing of journalists, doctors, and children, and the systematic demolition of every hospital in the territory — all thirty-six of them. The representatives stood and applauded. The cameras recorded it. History will not forget it, though history may struggle to explain it.

Let us be precise about what is being claimed here, because precision matters and the charge is serious. This essay does not compare Israel to Nazi Germany. Nations are not usefully compared to other nations across eighty years of divergent history. What is being compared — specifically, forensically, with the documentary evidence on the table — is Benjamin Netanyahu to Heinrich Himmler. Two men. Two programmes. Two sets of methods, rhetoric, and outcomes applied to two populations at two moments in history. The comparison is not rhetorical. It is structural. And it holds.

Reichsführer-SS. Architect of the Holocaust. The man who converted antisemitic ideology into industrial-scale murder — gas chambers, mass shootings, deliberate starvation, the systematic destruction of Jewish infrastructure, and the creation of conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of European Jewry. His justification was that Jews constituted an existential threat to civilisation, that they were conspiring to destroy the Aryan race, that they were vermin and subhumans who needed to be eliminated for the safety of Germany and the survival of the German people. Six million Jews murdered. Sixty-six percent of European Jewry annihilated. Communities that had existed for centuries erased. The word genocide invented, specifically, to describe what he had done. He died with a cyanide capsule between his teeth in a barn in Lüneburg, having spent his final days in disguise, hunted, having destroyed evidence and used euphemisms and operated in as much secrecy as the industrial scale of his enterprise permitted. He is remembered as the definitional war criminal. The monument to the unacceptable. The face on the poster that reads Never Again.

Prime Minister of Israel since 1996, intermittently, with the tenacity of a recurring condition. Currently subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. His current project — the systematic destruction of Gaza, initiated in October 2023 following the Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis — has produced the following documented outcomes.

His methods: aerial bombardment using two-thousand-pound bombs on residential areas, refugee camps, and hospitals; total siege cutting food, water, medicine, and fuel; deliberate blockade of humanitarian aid; systematic destruction of water treatment facilities, power infrastructure, and agricultural capacity; the creation of conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the Palestinian population of Gaza. His justification: Palestinians are an existential threat to Israel, Hamas is ISIS, Gazans are human animals, there are no uninvolved civilians, they must be eliminated for the safety of Israel and the survival of the Jewish people.

Different tools. Same outcome. Both men figured out that you do not need gas chambers if you have bombs and starvation. Efficiency has improved since the 1940s.

Place the two records side by side and the structural identity becomes visible. Himmler used gas chambers; Netanyahu uses two-thousand-pound bombs on refugee camps. Himmler used the Einsatzgruppen for mass shootings; Netanyahu's forces shoot journalists, doctors, and children in documented incidents that have produced ICC charges. Himmler imposed deliberate starvation in the ghettos; Netanyahu has imposed a total siege blocking food aid and destroyed the bakeries, farms, and water systems that might have supplemented it. Himmler destroyed synagogues, Jewish schools, and community infrastructure; Netanyahu has destroyed all thirty-six hospitals in Gaza, the universities, the mosques, the water treatment plants, the power grid. Himmler described Jews as Untermenschen — subhumans; Netanyahu's Defence Minister described Gazans as human animals, his Heritage Minister stated that Gaza would be erased, his Finance Minister called for a Nakba, his President declared there were no uninvolved civilians. One set of quotes is in German. The other is in Hebrew. The content is identical.

On the numbers: Himmler killed sixty-six percent of European Jewry over four years — a monthly rate of approximately 1.375 percent of the targeted population. Netanyahu has killed ten to thirteen percent of Gaza's population in sixteen months — a monthly rate of approximately 0.7 percent. Netanyahu is running at roughly half Himmler's efficiency. He is working with twenty-first century technology — precision-guided munitions, drone strikes, AI-targeted kill lists — and has the advantage of conducting his operation in full view of global media without consequence. If The Lancet's projections hold and the siege continues another year, Netanyahu reaches twenty to thirty-three percent of Gaza's population. That is worse than Rwanda. That approaches Cambodia. Himmler's record remains, proportionally, the benchmark. But the trajectory is clear, and the man has the tools, the funding, and the congressional applause to continue.

Here is where Netanyahu surpasses Himmler, not in scale but in audacity. Himmler was honest. He believed in racial ideology, in Aryan supremacy, in Jews as existential threat. His genocide was coherent within the framework of his convictions — monstrous, but not hypocritical. He did not claim to be acting in the name of Jewish safety. He did not invoke Jewish suffering as the justification for the suffering he inflicted. He did not weaponise the memory of his victims to silence his critics.

Netanyahu does all of these things. He commits genocide while performing Jewish victimhood. He uses the Holocaust — the very programme that Himmler ran, the one that produced the six million dead whose memory he claims to honour — to justify what he is doing to Palestinians. He wraps himself in Jewish trauma to deflect scrutiny of the trauma he is producing. He has made Never Again mean Never Again To Us, But Always Acceptable When We Do It To Others. He invokes antisemitism against anyone who objects to the body count. He has constructed a system in which the moral authority generated by Jewish suffering is deployed, in real time, to protect the perpetration of equivalent suffering on a different population.

This is the clip-on foreskin. Netanyahu has not perverted a tradition of ethical purity. He has taken the logic of Jewish exceptionalism — three thousand years of a priestly class administering its own moral authority in its own interest, generating the theology of chosenness that justified the claim, and deploying that theology against anyone who questioned the arrangement — and applied it with a literalism that the tradition's more sophisticated operators always preferred to keep implicit. He has made visible what was always there. That is his crime in the eyes of those who benefited from the invisibility. He presents himself as the guardian of Jewish survival and uses that presentation to conduct, in plain sight, on live television, with American weapons, an operation that meets every legal and historical definition of genocide that the post-Nuremberg international order established specifically to prevent the repetition of what Himmler did. In the eyes of Gaza, the distinction between the implicit and the explicit is not a distinction that changes very much.

Himmler had to hide in a barn. Netanyahu gets fourteen billion dollars and a speech to Congress. The difference is not the crime. The difference is the marketing. Himmler was honest about being a monster. Netanyahu is a monster with a public relations operation. Same genocide. Better branding.

The United States is not a bystander to this. The framing of American involvement as passive observation, or as the awkward position of a friend trying to moderate an ally's excesses, is a lie of the first order and should be named as such. Every two-thousand-pound bomb Netanyahu has dropped on a residential building in Gaza is American-made. Every missile that has destroyed a hospital is American-made. Every bullet that has killed a journalist or a doctor or a child wearing a press vest is American-made. The United States provides three point eight billion dollars annually in military aid to Israel, approved an additional fourteen billion in October 2023 specifically for the Gaza operation, and has used its Security Council veto to block ceasefire resolutions on multiple occasions, providing the diplomatic cover without which the military operation could not have continued at this scale.

The comparison that history will be required to make is this: imagine that the United States had, in 1943, provided Himmler with three point eight billion dollars annually in military assistance, approved an additional fourteen billion for the Final Solution, vetoed League of Nations resolutions calling for a ceasefire, and invited him to address Congress to twenty-nine standing ovations. The proposition is monstrous. It is also precisely what has happened, with the names changed and the population changed and the weapons updated for the twenty-first century.

The standard American response — we didn't know, the numbers are disputed, Israel has a right to defend itself, it's complicated — does not survive contact with the documented record. The Lancet published its methodology. The ICC issued its arrest warrants. South Africa brought genocide charges before the International Court of Justice. United Nations rapporteurs confirmed the famine. Médecins Sans Frontières documented the hospital destruction. The knowledge was available. The decision not to act on it was a decision. Complicity of this kind does not require malice. It requires only the calculation that the political cost of objection — the donor relationships, the evangelical votes, the career consequences of opposing the Israel lobby — exceeds the moral cost of funding a genocide. That calculation was made. It will be in the record.

Let three things be stated clearly, because the argument does not require their omission and is stronger for their inclusion. This essay does not implicate all Israelis. Thousands have protested. Hundreds of soldiers have refused orders. Israeli human rights organisations have documented the crimes at considerable personal risk. Brave Israelis are on the record. This essay does not implicate all Jews. The majority of diaspora Jews are appalled. Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and countless individual Jews of conscience have fought Zionism's capture of Jewish identity with everything available to them. This essay does not implicate Judaism. Judaism is a three-thousand-year ethical tradition that survived without a state, that placed justice and the protection of the stranger at its centre, and that produced the intellectual and moral framework that the post-war international order drew on when it built the institutions now being used to charge Netanyahu. Netanyahu has not expressed Judaism. He has perverted it — stripped its ethics, weaponised its trauma, and worn its identity as cover for acts it spent three millennia developing the language to condemn.

What this essay implicates is a single man and the governments that have armed, funded, and defended him. The charge is genocide. The evidence is in the public record. The comparison to Himmler is not made to provoke — it is made because it is the most precise comparison available, and because precision, in the face of two hundred and thirty-five thousand dead, is the minimum standard of intellectual honesty the moment demands.

The genocide deniers — and they exist, and they will read this, and they will reach for their objections — will need to answer one question before their objections can be taken seriously. If this is not genocide, what is? How many must die — fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, five hundred thousand — before the threshold is crossed? How much infrastructure must be destroyed? How explicit must the stated intent be? Human animals is not enough? Erase Gaza is not enough? No uninvolved civilians is not enough? How deliberate must the conditions be? A total siege blocking food and medicine to 2.3 million people is not deliberate enough? The destruction of every hospital in the territory is not systematic enough?

The genocide deniers of 1944 needed Allied armies to liberate the camps, film the corpses, and put the evidence in front of their faces before some of them conceded the point. Some never did. The structure of motivated disbelief is the same in every generation — it is not that the evidence is insufficient, it is that the consequences of accepting it are too uncomfortable to bear. It is easier to say it is complicated. It is easier to say Israel has a right to defend itself. It is easier to say Never Again while funding Again than to accept what funding Again makes you.

Himmler's ghost, if such a thing can be imagined, would find the current situation instructive. The man who industrialised the killing of Jews, watching a Jewish state industrialise the killing of Palestinians using his methods, his rhetoric, and his logic — but celebrated rather than condemned, armed rather than opposed, applauded rather than prosecuted. He had to operate in secrecy, destroy evidence, use euphemisms, and ultimately die in a barn. Netanyahu posts videos on social media, gives press conferences explaining the body count, and receives standing ovations. The difference is not the crime. The difference is that Himmler was on the wrong side of the people writing the cheques.

Never Again was the promise. Again is what is happening. The only question left — the one that will echo through whatever institutions survive the current moment to pass judgment on it — is the one the twenty-nine standing ovations will have to answer for.

If Himmler had been Jewish, claimed to be acting in Jewish self-defence, and had the full backing of the United States Congress — would you have opposed him?

Or would you have clapped?