In the ashes of World War II, the world told itself a comforting story. The Nazi regime was crushed, Adolf Hitler was dead and the ideology of racial supremacy, industrialized slaughter and ruthless domination had been defeated. The Holocaust was declared a moral turning point for humanity. The refrain “Never Again” became a pledge repeated in classrooms, parliaments and memorials across the globe. For decades, this promise was held up as proof that the victims of history would never allow themselves or others to suffer such horrors again. But today, as we watch the genocide of Palestinians unfold in Gaza and the West Bank, it is impossible to ignore the unbearable truth.

Those who once bore the brunt of Hitler’s cruelty have now adopted elements of his very playbook.

The most evil thing the world has witnessed since the Holocaust is being carried out by the state of Israel, and it tells me that Hitler in the end won.

This is not a claim made lightly. It is not an attempt to erase the suffering of Jews under the Third Reich. Rather, it is an acknowledgment of the tragic irony that the descendants of a people who endured the ghettos, the mass deportations and the death camps now inflict a mirror image of that suffering upon another population. The parallels are not abstract. They are concrete, visible and undeniable. The siege of Gaza is the ghettoization of an entire people, sealed off from the outside world, starved of food, medicine and fuel. The bombing campaigns that target civilian neighborhoods, hospitals and schools recall the systematic destruction of Jewish communities in occupied Europe. The propaganda that depicts Palestinians as an existential threat to be neutralized is hauntingly reminiscent of Nazi portrayals of Jews as vermin and saboteurs.

The tragedy here is not only in the suffering of the Palestinians but in the moral collapse of a people whose history should have made them the loudest opponents of such crimes. The Holocaust was supposed to have seared into the global conscience the idea that the deliberate targeting of an ethnic group for destruction was the ultimate evil. Yet in Israel’s actions we see the same cold calculus that once defined Nazi policy, the belief that the survival and expansion of one group justifies the annihilation of another.

This is the true measure of Hitler’s victory — not in the survival of his state, but in the survival of his methods.

The scale of devastation in Gaza is staggering. Families are obliterated in an instant by airstrikes. Children die not only from bombs but from hunger and thirst, trapped in the open-air prison that Gaza has become. Hospitals are bombed or left without power, ensuring that the wounded succumb to their injuries. This is not random chaos. It is deliberate, systematic and aimed at breaking the will of an entire people. In the eyes of those carrying it out, Palestinian lives are expendable just as Jewish lives were in Nazi ideology. The perpetrators claim self-defense, just as Hitler claimed he was defending Germany from a supposed Jewish conspiracy. The words have changed but the reasoning is the same.

Even more disturbing is the dehumanization that underpins this violence. Just as Nazi propaganda taught Germans to see Jews as a dangerous other, much of Israeli political and military rhetoric portrays Palestinians as obstacles to be removed rather than human beings with inherent dignity. When leaders describe Palestinians as human animals or speak openly about the need to erase entire neighborhoods, they are channeling the same moral poison that fueled the Final Solution. The fact that such rhetoric comes from a nation born out of the ashes of the Holocaust is a profound moral catastrophe.

The world’s response to this genocide mirrors the moral failures of the 1930s and 1940s. Then, most nations turned away Jewish refugees, ignored reports of mass killings and acted only when it served their political interests. Today, the United States and its allies send billions in military aid to Israel while blocking efforts at the United Nations to stop the slaughter. They cloak their complicity in the language of diplomacy and security, but at its core, this is the same cowardice and hypocrisy that allowed the Holocaust to unfold.

The promise of Never Again has been broken — not by Hitler’s followers, but by those who should have understood it best.

For decades, Israel has used the memory of the Holocaust as both shield and sword. It has been shielded from criticism by invoking the horrors of its past while wielding that same history as a weapon to silence those who would call out its crimes. But history is not a blank check for oppression. Surviving the Holocaust does not grant moral immunity. If anything, it should bind one to a higher standard of justice. That standard has been abandoned. In its place stands a worldview that borrows the worst of the Nazi playbook — collective punishment, dehumanization and the belief that military might can erase a people’s existence.

To say Hitler won is not to suggest that he achieved his political goals in 1945. It is to say that his underlying philosophy — the idea that the strong have the right to crush the weak and that entire populations can be branded enemies and targeted for destruction — was not buried with him in the Führerbunker. It lives on in the rubble of Gaza. Every time a Palestinian child is killed and the world shrugs, every time an Israeli politician calls for the erasure of Gaza and faces no consequence, every time aid is blocked and a hospital goes dark, the moral victory belongs to Hitler. The promise of Never Again has been broken, not by his followers, but by those who should have understood it best.

Some will recoil at this comparison, arguing that no modern conflict can be equated to the Holocaust. But this is precisely the trap that allows genocide to repeat. Evil does not need to copy the past perfectly. It only needs to adapt its tactics to the present. What matters is not the specific uniforms, symbols or language, but the underlying logic of domination and extermination. In Gaza, that logic is alive and thriving. The victims have become the oppressors — not because they were destined to, but because the world allowed it.

This is the bitter truth. The Holocaust did not end in 1945. Its methods, its propaganda and its cold moral arithmetic survived. They crossed borders, changed languages and found new hosts. In Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, we see the final proof that the defeat of Nazi Germany was a military event, not a moral one. The Allied victory toppled a regime, but it did not uproot the poison at the heart of its ideology. That poison has found new soil in the very land that was meant to be a refuge from it.

When the history of this era is written, it will record the suffering of the Palestinians as one of humanity’s greatest betrayals. It will tell of how the world’s most famous promise, Never Again, was twisted into a selective vow that applied only to some. It will tell of how a people who knew the taste of genocide chose to administer it to others. And it will tell of how, in the most profound sense, Hitler’s legacy endured.