More than 6,000 political and public figures in the arts, academia, government, civil liberties, religious and other organizations have issued an open letter condemning the slander that Israel is responsible for “genocide” when it defends itself and the Jews who live there from murderous pogroms by Hamas.
“We the undersigned are outraged and sickened by the latest blood libel to be inflicted on the Jewish people: the lie that Israel committed ‘genocide’ in Gaza. We reject this accusation with contempt,” the letter says. The ancient blood libel that Jews drank Christian blood was long used by reactionary groups to justify the repeated slaughters visited on Jews.
The letter was published Sept. 9 by the Creative Community for Peace, a Los Angeles-based coalition seeking “to build bridges through the arts, to educate and counter rising antisemitism,” and “to galvanize support against the cultural boycott of Israel.”
The four authors of the document are writer Yossi Klein Halevi, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, Rabbi Micha Odenheimer and Jonathan Karp, professor of history and Judaic studies at Binghamton University in New York.
Introducing the letter on the community’s website, Ari Ingel, the organization’s executive director, said, “Falsely branding the Jewish state as genocidal carries consequences, and Jews around the world are living with them.” The website points out, “The letter places the current accusation within a longer history of false claims about Jews and warns against such rhetoric to become normalized in public life.”
“The unprecedented combat conditions of the war — hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, thousands of boobytrapped homes — the conflating of combatants with ‘journalists’ and ‘human rights workers,’ the ratio of civilian-to-terrorist casualties, considered low for asymmetrical urban warfare, the absence of mass starvation despite repeated claims of imminent catastrophe, the warnings given to civilians before attack: All these factors were erased in the eagerness to indict Israel for genocide,” the letter says.
“In this war, only one side intended to commit genocide, and that is Hamas.”
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas thugs, armed and financed by Tehran, systematically slaughtered over 1,200 people, overwhelmingly Jewish civilians, took more than 250 hostages and raped and mutilated dozens of women in Israel, and have threatened to do so “again and again.”
This was “the darkest day in Israel’s history,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he addressed the U.N. General Assembly Sept. 24. “Hamas terrorists committed the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.”
‘Turn the Jewish state into a pariah’
“To accuse Israel of genocide, the massacre of October 7 has been systematically downplayed, while Israeli actions have been distorted and amplified,” the letter states. “Israel went to war on October 8 not out of vengeance, as its detractors claim, but to break the Iranian-led siege of terror enclaves on its borders, and to restore its deterrence, without which it cannot survive in the long term in the Middle East. Thousands of rockets and missiles were fired at Israel in the weeks following the massacre, while Hamas starved and tortured 250 Israelis, some of whom were murdered in captivity.”
The large number signing the letter shows that more people are standing up to speak out against Jew-hatred, despite the growth of Jew-hatred today.
Some of the prominent signers include former U.S. diplomat Elliott Abrams; former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson; former Canadian government minister Irwin Cotler; Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry; the Anti-Defamation League and its CEO Jonathan Greenblatt; Harvard professor and author Steven Pinker; Soraya Deen, founder of the Muslim Women Speakers Movement; TV host Bill Maher; actors Debra Messing, Maureen Lipman, Anthony Edwards, Patricia Heaton and Mayim Bialik; and singer Boy George.
“Already on October 8, as Israel was still fighting terrorists within its border communities and hadn’t yet begun burying its dead, anti-Zionists began raising the cry of ‘genocide,’” the letter says. “In fact, Israel’s enemies have been accusing it of genocide for decades.”
Genocide is the systematic attempt to exterminate an entire people. That is what the Nazis tried to do during World War II when they murdered 6 million Jews, two out of every three Jews in Europe, 40% of the world’s entire Jewish population.
“The accusation of genocide has become a pretext for excluding, attacking and even murdering Jews around the world,” the Creative Community for Peace-initiated letter explains. “Its purpose is to delegitimize Jewish self-determination and to turn the only Jewish state into the world’s arch criminal and pariah.”
The letter closes, “We urge our fellow Jews and our non-Jewish friends to treat the accusation of genocide with revulsion — as the latest in a long history of lies about the Jewish people. ‘A lie has no legs,’ notes the ancient Hebrew proverb.
“We will not allow this lie to stand.”