Referring to war-torn Gaza as “The Riviera of the Middle East” may be easy to dismiss as pure insanity. After all, President Donald Trump says a lot, but doesn’t act on most of what he says. When he continues to double down, however, most recently by posting an extremely disrespectful and unrealistic AI-generated video on Instagram depicting what a “Trump Gaza” could look like — with towering golden Trump statues in the streets and Elon Musk bathing in money on the beaches of the West Bank — we’d better listen.
I’ve been listening. His words are hateful and not based in reality. If Trump wants to see where his evil plans for Gaza will lead, he needs to take a field trip to the National Holocaust Museum. It’s just a mile down the street from the White House. He can even walk there, if he’d like. He should go alone. No aides; no photographers; no distractions. The insight he gains would be eye-opening.
When I was 13, my parents took me to the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. for the first time. We crowded into a packed elevator with more strangers than could comfortably fit. A guide gave us a pamphlet that told the life story of someone who was persecuted or who just barely survived. A short video of survivors reliving their horrors played above the doors.
When the doors opened, all I heard were voices of German rage. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and other Nazi leaders who spouted their antisemitic ideology and propaganda to the masses during their rise to power in Germany, were spewing the same rhetoric across the room. Not a single person said a word. Hateful Nazi speech pierced the horrified silence as we all tried to process what we were witnessing.
As we moved through the different floors, I watched the horrors of the Holocaust unfold.
A dark, musty train-car used to transport millions to their deaths.
The metal gate to a concentration camp.
Gruesome images of bodies burning in mass graves.
Piles of hundreds of burnt shoes.
Walls covered with portraits belonging to families that no longer exist felt as if they extended up to the heavens.
At the end of the museum was a white marble room full of hundreds of candles to light in honor of the lives lost. In the center stood a quote from the Book of Deuteronomy etched into the wall:
“Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life. And you shall make them known to your children, and to your children’s children.”
Reading that quote made everything clear. My parents brought me there for one reason.
We must never forget.
These words are etched into the identity of the Jewish people. Never forget. They are echoed through generations. Never forget. Six million Jews killed at the hands of the Nazis. Never forget. Millions more displaced from their homelands. Never forget. No other single group of people has experienced persecution as immense and brutal. Never forget.
I, like all Jews, was taught to acknowledge this part of our history; to learn rather than run from it so that we can ensure it never happens again. As news of Trump’s plans for Gaza first unfolded, the lack of an outcry from American Jews made it clear we may be forgetting what we once promised we would never forget, and what Trump seems never to have known.
On Feb. 4, Trump declared that the United States should take control of the Gaza Strip — displacing 2.2 million Palestinians — and rebuild the land in his design. “I don’t think people should be going back to Gaza,” Trump said. “I heard that Gaza has been very unlucky to them. They live like hell. They live like they’re living in hell. Gaza is not a place for people to be living, and the only reason they want to go back, and I believe this strongly, is because they have no alternative.”
This is absurd. Regardless of your views on the Israel-Palestine conflict, displacing people from their own land is a despicable and genocidal act. We Jews should know this truth better than anyone. Trump repeats a dangerous assertion that the Palestinian people have been so wounded by the Israeli government’s destruction of their homeland that they would be better off somewhere else. However, unlike the Jewish people fleeing Nazi persecution who settled in Israel in 1948, the Palestinians are already in their homeland. They aren’t looking for somewhere else to go. And like the Jews before the Nazis came marching up their front doorsteps, the Palestinians don’t want to be forced out simply because their oppressor doesn’t want to share the land.
If we know it was wrong to displace our own people from their homelands — even if it ultimately led to the creation of the first Jewish state — then it is only right we speak up whenever our government suggests doing the same to another group of people.
Some 400 rabbis, Jewish religious leaders, activists and celebrities came together to take out a full page ad in the New York Times on Feb. 13, that read, “Trump has called for the removal of all Palestinians from Gaza. Jewish people say no to ethnic cleansing!”
These are important steps to take in holding Trump and Israel’s government accountable. But not enough people are following suit.
For my fellow Jews in America and Israel who still support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Israeli government, or remain silent on the matter entirely — we must separate our support of the concept of Israel from the current actions of its right-wing government.
This is a government that seems to have forgotten its history. Would a government remembering the horrors that created their country appoint a finance minister who said “There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language?”
Would they allow their soldiers to say, “We are occupying, deporting, and settling?”
Would they support a prime minister who says “I will not compromise on full Israeli security control over the entire area in the west of Jordan – and this is contrary to a Palestinian state?”
Would they seek aid from a foreign president who says he is “committed to buying and owning Gaza?”
I unequivocally support the concept of Israel. I care deeply for the Jewish people living there. I have friends with family currently living there. The Jewish people, my people, who have been fleeing persecution our entire existence, absolutely deserve our own state where we can live freely and safely.
The Palestinian people deserve the same. There is no reason why they should not be given the same opportunity of a homeland we were once given at their expense. Hamas can be eradicated and a two-state solution can still be reached. One does not have to come at the cost of the other.
Once we accept this and recognize that Netanyahu and his government are weaponizing what Hamas did on Oct. 7, 2023 — the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, more monstrous than can be put into words—as an excuse to carry out genocidal actions with the intent of erasing the Palestinian people from existence, then we can take the right steps forward.
If you are one of those American Jews who still believes that Israel’s government and military should be carrying out their actions in the Gaza Strip because “war is war” and innocent lives always have to perish as a result, consider our history: Did all of the Jews who lived in Germany and other European countries under Nazi occupation deserve to die or be displaced from their homes simply because they were living there at the time?
If you can admit that it’s wrong when it happens to our own people, then why shouldn’t you hold the same belief for others?
There is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Regardless of the actions of Hamas—which are also deplorable—millions of innocent Palestinians should not be uprooted and put through more pain. Especially not because Donald Trump wants some nice new beachfront property that he thinks he and the U.S. can use for profit.
Again, many Americans, Jewish or not, will be quick to dismiss Trump’s words as simply “all bark, no bite.” It’s especially easy to do when his plan depends on Egypt and Jordan taking in displaced Palestinians, something both countries vehemently refused, immediately nipping his plan in the bud. Still, we should object when Trump continues to tell the American people to see Gaza as a big piece of “real estate,” and push his idea forward with AI-generated videos such as the one posted Tuesday night.
If more Holocaust survivors were still alive to witness this, they’d be the ones urging us to sound the alarms. In this case, I’m afraid that if we don’t, Trump’s bark will be followed by a powerful and destructive bite. And that bite may not even be from Trump himself.
Netanyahu, after Trump’s declaration, called the President the “greatest friend to Israel.” What he really means by this is that Trump is the greatest friend to Israel’s government, not the people.
“You see things others refuse to see,” Netanyahu told Trump when they met on February 4. “You say things others refuse to say, and after the jaws dropped, people scratch their heads and they say, ‘You know, he’s right’…This is the kind of thinking that will reshape the Middle East and bring peace.”
Netanyahu isn’t saying all of this because Trump cares about Israel, the Jewish people or even peace in the Middle East. He’s saying this because Trump is doing exactly what he wants him to do: eradicate Gaza for Israel and exile all who come with it.
We promised never to forget what was done to our people 80 years ago. What is happening in Gaza — and what could happen if Trump’s monstrous declaration is seen through — is hauntingly similar. If we want to uphold our promise, we must intervene now before a future generation of Palestinians must walk through their own remembrance museum and hear our voices as they enter.