During their recent meetings, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he was nominating Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

No, this wasn’t a joke from late-night TV or a story from the satirical newspaper The Onion. This actually happened.

Netanyahu: The Criminal Absurdity

On one level Netanyahu nominating Trump for a peace prize is criminally absurd.

For starters, Netanyahu shouldn’t have the right to utter the word “peace,” let alone nominate anyone for an international peace prize.

After decades of oppressing and terrorizing the Palestinian people, Netanyahu seized on Hamas’ reactionary attack of October 7, 2023 to launch an unrelenting, full-scale genocide against the 2.2 million Palestinians living in Gaza which continues to this day. In the 20-plus months since then, Israel has slaughtered over 58,000 Palestinians—most of them civilians. It has killed or wounded some 50,000 children.¹ It has destroyed homes, schools, hospitals, farms, bakeries, and universities. It has violently displaced nearly 2 million Gazans and is now preparing the ground to expel them from Gaza altogether.

All these actions are war crimes—not “peace prize" material—which is why Netanyahu is under indictment by the International Criminal Court.

As if this weren’t enough, Netanyahu has been spearheading a regional onslaught during which Israel has bombed Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. In Lebanon alone, over 4,000 have been killed. 

Trump: The Criminal Absurdity

It’s also criminally absurd for anyone to nominate the genocidal fascist Trump for any kind of peace prize, let alone the Nobel. 

It’s not at all surprising that Trump was honored that Netanyahu had nominated him—“Wow…coming from you, in particular, this is very meaningful.”

Trump has fully backed and enabled the towering crimes and mass slaughter Israel has been carrying out in Gaza—as well as its atrocities in the Palestinian West Bank and across the Middle East. Since taking office, the Trump regime has approved some $12 billion in weapons for Israel. In February, Trump even outdid Netanyahu by calling for the expulsion of all the Palestinians in Gaza and turning the whole territory into a giant resort destination and casino.  

In June, Trump duplicitously unleashed a massive, unprovoked bombing attack on Iran—after promising to negotiate with them. This, too, was a war crime.

During his recent mutual admiration dinner with Netanyahu, Trump praised Harry Truman’s nuclear obliteration of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, which incinerated some 210,000 to 220,000 people, comparing it to his bombing of Iran as if it was something to emulate. And recently CNN reported that Trump threatened Putin that he would “bomb the shit out of Moscow,” and made similar threats to Chinese President Xi Jinping.²

As the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian put the relationship between these two in the title of a a social media message earlier this year, “Trump and Netanyahu—Nazi Madmen on a Mission of Destruction.”

The Criminal Horror

It isn’t as if the Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t have its own blood-stained history. During the 1961-75 Vietnam War, an unjust war of U.S. aggression, Henry Kissinger presided over the carpet-bombing, napalming, and systematic murder of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians, which mercilessly snuffed out the lives of two to three million human beings. Then he shared the Nobel Peace Prize when the U.S. was finally forced to negotiate an end to the war with North Vietnam.

Barack Obama won the prize in 2009 and then went on to bomb seven different countries during his presidency—Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Syria. Obama was also infamous for secret “kill lists” of people—in countries around the world—targeted for possible assassination, with no legal justification or due process whatsoever. Every Tuesday, like the Roman Emperor Caligula, he would choose—thumbs up or down—who would live and who would die. These bombings and assassinations had nothing to do with building “fraternity between nations,” as the Nobel Peace Prize calls for. They were part of the U.S.’s so-called “War on Terror,” which was actually a war of terror and empire. 

But today, there’s a serious purpose behind the ludicrous display of Trump and Netanyahu singing each other’s praises—and agitating for Trump to win the Nobel Peace Prize. 

The future of humanity is up for grabs. Trump and Netanyahu are deadly serious about normalizing fascism and genocide, creating a world in which they have unchecked power to rain down death and destruction on whomever they choose. A world in which a genocidal mass murderer like Donald Trump could be awarded a peace prize. 

And that’s no joke at all.