In the following statement, over 55 scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence deplore the atrocity crimes against civilians committed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on 7 October and by Israeli forces since then. The starvation, mass killing, and forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is ongoing, raising the question of genocide, especially in view of the intentions expressed by Israeli leaders. Israeli President Isaac Herzog used particularly loaded language in an interview on MSNBC just a few days ago, on 5 December: “This war is a war that is not only between Israel and Hamas. It’s a war that is intended, really, truly, to save western civilization. … We are attacked by [a] Jihadist network, an empire of evil. … and this empire wants to conquer the entire Middle East, and if it weren’t for us, Europe would be next, and the United States follows.” Herzog builds on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s association of Israel’s attack on Gaza with the Biblical evil of Amalek, but he places it on a modern scale as the last stand against global apocalypse and the demise of “western civilization.” Both Herzog and Netanyahu are secular Jews. Their use of religious language and symbolism in this case reflects a dangerous intersection in the case of Israel of the exclusionary modern nation state with a settler colonial project in a place infused with multiple religious histories and meanings. The scholars who have signed the statement are signaling their alarm about the mass violence underway in Gaza and the inflammatory language that threatens to escalate it further. They call for urgent action to stop Israel’s attack on Gaza and to work towards a future that will guarantee the equality, freedom, dignity, and security of all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
***
Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in Israel and Palestine since 7 October
December 9, 2023
We, scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence, feel compelled to warn of the danger of genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza. We also note that, should the Israeli attack continue and escalate, Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens of Israel face grave danger as well.
We are deeply saddened and concerned by the mass murder of over 1,200 Israelis and migrant workers by Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and others on 7 October, with more than 830 civilians among them. We also note the evidence of gender-based and sexual violence during the attack, the wounding of thousands of Israelis, the destruction of Israeli kibbutzim and towns, and the abduction of more than 240 hostages into the Gaza Strip. These acts constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. We recognize that violence in Israel and Palestine did not begin on 7 October. If we are to try to understand the mass murder of 7 October, we should place it within the context of Israeli settler colonialism, Israeli military occupation violence against Palestinians since 1967, the sixteen-year siege on the Gaza Strip since 2007, and the rise to power in Israel in the last year of a government made up of politicians who speak proudly about Jewish supremacy and exclusionary nationalism. Explaining is not justifying, and this context in no way excuses the targeting of Israeli civilians and migrant workers by Palestinians on 7 October.
We are also deeply saddened and concerned by the Israeli attack on Gaza in response to the Hamas attack. Israel’s assault has caused death and destruction on an unprecedented level, according to a New York Times article on 26 November. In two months, the Israeli assault has killed more than 16,000 Palestinians (with thousands more buried under the rubble)—nearly half of them children and youth, with a Palestinian child killed every ten minutes on average before the ceasefire—and wounded over 40,000. Considering that the total population of Gaza stands at 2.3 million people, the killing rate so far is about 0.7 percent in less than two months. The killing rate of civilians in Russia’s bombing and invasion of Ukraine in the areas most affected by the violence are probably similar—but over a longer period of time. A number of experts have therefore described Israel’s attack on Gaza as the most intense and deadliest of its kind since World War II, but while Russia’s attack on Ukraine has, for very good reason, prompted western leaders to support the people under attack, the same western leaders now support the violence of the Israeli state rather than the Palestinians under attack.
Israel has also forcibly displaced more than 1.8 million Palestinians within the Gaza Strip, while destroying almost half of all buildings and leaving the northern part of the Strip an “uninhabitable moonscape.” Indeed, the Israeli army has dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza since 7 October, which is equivalent to two Hiroshima bombs, and according to Human Rights Watch, deployed white phosphorous bombs. It has systematically targeted hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches, bakeries, and agricultural fields. The state has also killed many essential professionals, including more than 220 healthcare workers, over 100 UN personnel, and dozens of journalists. The forced displacement has, furthermore, created in the southern part of the Strip severe overcrowding, with the risk of outbreak of infectious diseases, exacerbated by shortages of food, clean water, fuel, and medical supplies, due to Israel’s “total siege” measures since 7 October.
The unprecedented level of destruction and killing points to large-scale war crimes in Israel’s attack on Gaza. There is also evidence of a “widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack” that the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines as a crime against humanity. Moreover, dozens of statements of Israeli leaders, ministers in the war cabinet, and senior army officers since 7 October—that is, people with command authority—suggest an “intent to destroy” Palestinians “as such,” in the language of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The statements include depictions of all Palestinians in Gaza as responsible for the Hamas attack on 7 October and therefore legitimate military targets, as expressed by Israeli President Herzog on 13 October and by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu when he invoked, on 29 October, the Biblical story of the total destruction of Amalek by the Israelites, just as Israel began its ground invasion. Casting an entire civilian population as enemies marks the history of modern genocide, with the Armenian genocide (1915-1918) and the Rwanda genocide (1994) as well-known examples. The statements also include dehumanizing language, such as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s reference to “human animals” when he proclaimed “total siege” on Gaza on 9 October. The slippage between seeing Hamas as “human animals” to seeing all Palestinians in Gaza in this way is evident in what Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian promised to people in Gaza the next day: “Hamas has turned into ISIS, and the residents of Gaza, instead of being appalled, are celebrating. … Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
These expressions of intent need to be understood also in relation to the widespread incitement to genocide in Israeli media since 7 October. Israeli journalist David Mizrachi Wertheim, for instance, wrote on social media on 7 October that “If all the captives are not returned immediately, then turn the [Gaza] Strip into a slaughterhouse. If a hair falls from their head – execute security prisoners. Violate all norms on the way to victory.” He also added, “we are facing human animals.” Four days later, another Israeli journalist, Roy Sharon, commented on social media “that if, in order to finally eliminate the military capabilities of Hamas, including Sinwar and Deif, we need a million bodies, then let there be a million bodies.” Annihilatory language now also appears in public spaces, such as banners on bridges in Tel Aviv that call “to annihilate Gaza” and explain that “the picture of triumph is 0 people in Gaza.” There are dozens of examples of incitement in Israeli media, which recalls the incitement to genocide in Rwanda as genocide was unfolding there in 1994.
This incitement points to the grave danger that Palestinians everywhere under Israeli rule now face. Israeli army and settler violence in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which has intensified markedly from the beginning of 2023, has entered a new stage of brutality after 7 October. Sixteen Palestinian communities—over a thousand people—have been forcibly displaced in their entirety, continuing the policy of “ethnic cleansing” in Area C that comprises 60 percent of the West Bank. Israeli soldiers and settlers have furthermore killed more than 220 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, while arresting thousands. The violence against Palestinians also includes acts of torture.
Palestinian citizens of Israel—almost 2 million people—are also facing a state assault against them, with hundreds of arrests since 7 October for any expression of identification with Palestinians in Gaza. There is widespread intimidation and silencing of Palestinian students, faculty, and staff in Israeli universities, and the Israeli Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai threatened to expel to Gaza Israeli Palestinians identifying with Palestinians in Gaza. These alarming developments and measures build on a view of Palestinian citizens of Israel as potential enemies that stretches back to the military rule imposed on the 156,000 Palestinians who survived the Nakba and remained within the territory that became Israel in 1948. This iteration of military rule lasted until 1966, but the image of Israeli Palestinians as a threat has persisted. In May 2021, as many Israeli Palestinians came out to protest an attack on Palestinians in East Jerusalem and another attack on Gaza, the Israeli police responded with massive repression and violence, arresting hundreds. The situation deteriorated quickly, as Jewish and Palestinian citizens clashed across Israel—in some places, as in Haifa, with Jewish citizens attacking Palestinian citizens on the streets and breaking into houses of Palestinian citizens. And now, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right settler who serves as Israeli minister of national security, has put Israeli Palestinians in even more danger by the distribution of thousands of weapons to Israeli civilians who have formed hundreds of self-defense units after 7 October.
The escalating violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the exclusion and violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel are particularly worrying in the context of calls in Israel after 7 October for a “second Nakba.” The reference is to the massacres and “ethnic cleansing” of more than 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of villages and towns by Israeli forces in the 1948 war, when Israel was established. The language that member of the Israeli Knesset (parliament) Ariel Kallner from the ruling Likud party used in a social media post on 7 October is instructive: “Nakba to the enemy now. … Now, only one goal: Nakba! Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to whoever dares to join [them].” We know that genocide is a process, and we recognize that the stage is thus set for violence more severe than the Nakba and not spatially limited to Gaza.
Thus, the time for concerted action to prevent genocide is now. We call on governments to uphold their legal obligations under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to intervene and prevent genocide (Article 1) by (1) implementing an arms embargo on Israel; (2) working to end Israel’s military assault on Gaza; (3) pressuring the Israeli government to stop immediately the intensifying army and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which constitute clear violations of international law; (4) demanding the continued release of all hostages held in Gaza and all Palestinians imprisoned unlawfully in Israel, without charges or trial; (5) calling on the International Criminal Court to investigate and issue arrest warrants against all perpetrators of mass violence on 7 October and since then, both Palestinians and Israelis; and (6) initiating a political process in Israel and Palestine based on a truthful reckoning with Israeli mass violence against Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba and a future that will guarantee the equality, freedom, dignity, and security of all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
We also call on businesses and labor unions to ensure that they do not aid and abet Israeli mass violence, but rather follow the example of workers in Belgium transport unions who refused in late October to handle flights that ship arms to Israel.
Finally, we call on scholars, programs, centers, and institutes in Holocaust and Genocide Studies to take a clear stance against Israeli mass violence and join us in efforts to stop it and prevent its further escalation.
Mohamed Adhikari, University of Cape Town
Taner Akçam, Director, Armenian Genocide Research Program, The Promise Armenian Institute, UCLA
Ayhan Aktar, Professor of Sociology (Retired), Istanbul Bilgi University
Yassin Al Haj Saleh, Syrian Writer, Berlin
Sebouh David Aslanian, Professor of History and Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, UCLA
Karyn Ball, Professor of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton
Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, Professorial Research Associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Cathie Carmichael, Professor Emerita, School of History, University of East Anglia
Daniele Conversi, Professor, Department of Contemporary History, University of the Basque Country
Catherine Coquio, Professeure de littérature comparée à Université Paris Cité, France
John Cox, Associate Professor of History and Global Studies and Director of the Center for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Martin Crook, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of the West of England
Ann Curthoys, Honorary Professor, School of Humanities, The University of Sydney
Sarah K. Danielsson, Professor of History, Queensborough, CUNY
John Docker, Sydney, Australia
John Duncan, affiliated with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Didier Fassin, Professor at the Collège de France and the Institute for Advanced Study
Joanne Smith Finley, Reader in Chinese Studies, Newcastle University, UK
Shannon Fyfe, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, George Mason University; Faculty Fellow, Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy
William Gallois, Professor of the Islamic Mediterranean, University of Exeter
Fatma Muge Gocek, Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Svenja Goltermann, Professor of Modern History, University of Zurich
Andrei Gómez-Suarez, Senior Research Fellow, Centre of Religion, Reconciliation and Peace, University of Winchester
Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation and Director of the International State Crime Initiative, Queen Mary University of London
John-Paul Himka, Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta
Marianne Hirschberg, Professor, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Kassel, Germany
Anna Holian, Associate Professor, School of Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Arizona State University
Rachel Ibreck, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Department of Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths, University of London
Adam Jones, Professor, Political Science, University of British Columbia Okanagan
Rachel Killean, Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney Law School
Brian Klug, Hon. Fellow in Social Philosophy, Campion Hall, University of Oxford, and Hon. Fellow, Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton
Mill Lake, Associate Professor, International Relations Department, London School of Economics
Mark Levene, Emeritus Fellow, University of Southampton
Yosefa Loshitzky, Professorial Research Associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Thomas MacManus, Senior Lecturer in State Crime, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London
Zachariah Mampilly, Professor, Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Benjamin Meiches, Associate Professor of Security Studies and Conflict Resolution, University of Washington-Tacoma
Dirk Moses, Professor of International Relations, City College of New York, CUNY
Eva Nanopoulos, Senior Lecturer in Law, Queen Mary University of London
Jeffrey Ostler, Professor of History Emeritus, University of Oregon
Thomas Earl Porter, Professor of History, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC
Michael Rothberg, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Holocaust Studies, UCLA
Colin Samson, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex
Victoria Sanford, Lehman Professor of Excellence, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Raz Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide, Stockton University
Elyse Semerdjian, Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies, Clark University
Martin Shaw, University of Sussex/Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals
Damien Short, Co-Director of the Human Rights Consortium and Professor of Human Rights and Environmental Justice at the School of Advanced Study, University of London
Ronald Grigor Suny, William H. Sewell, Jr. Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of History and Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan
Adam Sutcliffe, Professor of European History, King’s College London
Barry Trachtenberg, Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History, Wake Forest University
Enzo Traverso, Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University
Jeremy Varon, Professor of History, The New School, New York
Ernesto Verdeja, Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Global Politics, University of Notre Dame
Johanna Ray Vollhardt, Associate Professor of Psychology, Clark University
Pauline Wakeham, Associate Professor, Department of English, Western University (Canada)
Keith David Watenpaugh, Professor and Director, Human Rights Studies, University of California, Davis
Louise Wise, Lecturer in International Security, University of Sussex
Andrew Woolford, Professor of Sociology and Criminology, University of Manitoba
Ran Zwigenberg, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, History, and Jewish Studies, Pennsylvania State University
Raz Segal knows that most of these statements (especially those of Herzog, Netanyahu and Gallant) targeted Hamas, not the Gaza population as a whole. As for those who made Alian and others, they were disavowed by the government, which reiterated that it was fighting Hamas not civilians.
If you need to rely on distorted statements to prove Israel’s genocidal intentions, you really are deceitful, but you also that there is no genocidal intention.
Interestingly, there is not a word about the peace plans rejected by the Palestinians that would have allowed them to recover the equivalent of 100% of the West Bank (in 2001, 2008 and 2014).
And what does “settler colonialism” have to do with this? This analytical framework is both simplistic and caricatural (by the Second Aliyah the Zionist movement identified as a colonization movement without colonialism, and Jews had nowhere else to go). But, Segal’s real purpose is to claim that the Zionist enterprise was illegitimate. The onus is on him to explain what Jews should have done to survive, if Zionism was so evil!
I fully endorse this statement.
Forty-two scholars (including myself) and lawyers working in the fields of international criminal law, international human rights law, and/or international humanitarian law in Japan sent an open letter to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in November, calling on him to promptly investigate and request arrest warrants for the grave violations of international law committed in Israel/Palestine since October 7:
https://note.com/lucky_bear337/n/ne63e68de754f
NATIONALITY & INTERNATIONAL LAW | Was the “Oct 7 Massacre” a “Response” or a Genocide ?
In international law, the distinction between a genocide and a ‘response’ involves assessing the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Intent is a crucial factor.
As manifested in their charter, and in subsequent repeated public calls by Hamas leadership, the attacks of Oct 7 were perpetrated with a stated goal of destroying the nation state of Israel, purging it of its 9 million residents from “River to Sea”.
The acts of Oct 7, included targeted attacks on Israeli communities resulting in the deaths of over 1,000 civilians, 5,000 civilian injuries including the mass rape of women and young girls, the abduction of 240 hostages, and the forced displacement of almost 250,000 civilians from surrounding communities who as of the date of this writing remain unable to return to their homesteads to rebuild their destroyed communities, or even to bury their dead in their home townships.
The legal criteria for genocide -as outlined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was approved and proposed for signature and ratification or accession by General Assembly resolution 260 A (III) of 9 December 1948 and entered into force on 12 January 1951, in accordance with article XIII- under Article II quoted here:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
In a live interview on November 29th Mossab Youssef expressed his dismay at the level of trauma within Israel’s society lamenting his fears that “Israel itself still hasn’t woken up to the reality that a genocide and ethnic cleansing was perpetrated against them”.
Let us be clear-eyed in classifying the massacres of October 7. This was nothing less than a genocide. Not an “attempted genocide”, and certainly not a “response”. Attempts to co-opt the term in maligning the subsequent military response of the IDF, acting solely under its mandate to the nation state of Israel and its citizens, are an extension of the same genocide perpetrated by Hamas against the citizens of Israel and those they perceived as Israeli collaborators. Not only was a genocide perpetrated, but the perpetrators then coopted the term in an effort to silence and further psychologically harm Israel.
Citations/Sources:
– UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide – un.org/en/genocidepre…
-The October 7th Geo-visualization Project -oct7map.com
Have any other groups or organizations issued similar statements?
What impact will this statement have on public opinion in Israel, Palestine, and internationally?
It is astonishing that people still have the gall to question qualified members of this panel on this genocide. it is clear that they have studied the evidence beyond the snippets they provided in a statement (not an official report, from my understanding) in the days following Oct. 7. The comments on this panel statement deflect the severity and gravity of panel members’ words by making Israel out to be the bigger victim when they are so clearly the aggressor that brought this panel together in the first place.
On the one hand, I am glad to see that this statement warns of the “danger of genocide” rather than falling victim to the temptation to declare, like the ubiquitous street protestors, that Israel is now, today, already committing genocide. Such accusations are rhetorically excessive to the point of constituting incitement to antisemitic violence.
But I want to highlight two instances where the statement raises significant concern about a bias on the part of the authors toward one side of this century-long conflict in which neither side can fairly be seen as blameless.
1) In characterizing the events of 10/7, the statement reads, “These acts [by Hamas] constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.” This sentence should have added “and possibly constitute acts of genocide.” There is certainly at least as much evidence of genocidal intent on the part of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as on the Israeli side, if not considerably more. For a statement by genocide scholars focused on the dangers of genocide to fail to mention the ample evidence of genocidal intent on the part of Hamas and Islamic Jihad is puzzling, to say the least.
2) The second instance occurs later in the same paragraph, in the authors’ attempt to contextualize the atrocities of 10/7. The authors write: “If we are to try to understand the mass murder of 7 October, we should place it within the context of Israeli settler colonialism” etc. But they fail to mention one key contextual element in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the stream of Palestinian political praxis that completely rejects the two-state solution. Rejectionism was the dominant stream in Palestinian political discourse for most of the 20th century, with disastrous consequences for the Palestinian people, most obviously in the Nakba of 1948. In 1988, rejectionism lost its primacy in Palestinian political discourse as the PLO embraced the two-state solution. But in that same year, Hamas picked up the rejectionist baton and has run with it ever since, culminating in the atrocities of 10/7.
Thus the authors’ decision to omit the genocidal intent behind the 10/7 attack and the ways that the Palestinians have themselves contributed over the last century to their current dire circumstances betrays a bias that undermines the statement’s power and ability to reach open-minded members of the public who may otherwise be willing to acknowledge and act against the danger of genocide that does exist in the current circumstances.
Thank you to all professors and scholars who contributed to this panel statement with objective evidence, and are disclosing the severity of crimes and genocide in the case of Gaza. I echo the comments of Ames Ju about the commentators here, who deny the overt dehumanization,
massacres, ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide of the Palestinian people including women and children. Over 10,000 Palestinian children have been massacred as of the writing of this comment, in this ongoing genocide in the name of Israel’s “self-defence.”
Yet these commentators casually turn a blind eye as if those children are not human beings worth any salt. As an Armenian whose more than 1.5 million ancestors went through the first genocide of the 20th century by Ottomon Turks who used similar dehumanizing political tactics, it is deplorable to see such blatant attacks on human life at such a massive, public international stage with impunity and nearly full consent of U.S. -backed Israel without any Western or European government involvement to stop the ongoing slaughter. There is no question that the October 7th massacres of the Jewish people were horrendous. But Israel cannot and does not have the power to blindly convince any educated scholar or human being globally that all of this started in a vacuum, no matter how much money they spend on false propaganda. In the age of digital technology where research studies and objective historical archives are accessible to all, most people cannot be stuped or fooled. Any human being who has been to a library and read history is well versed in the fact that the October 7th crimes were preceded by 75 years of illegal settlements based on disastrous and inhumane agreements signed by British authorities and Zionist fringe movements to give the post-WWII Jews a land, at the expense of the existing Palestinians who lived there for centuries, thereby setting precedent for illegal settlements, military attacks and massacres, ethnic cleansing and the great Nakba of the Palestinian people where over 750,000 people were driven out of their own ancestral lands, slaughtered like animals, and families and children shot to death point blank by Israeli soldiers and officers as they please, until this very day where an active apartheid has been taking place. Numerous educated and well respected doctors, professors and scholars of Jewish background including the renowned Gabor Mate and Norman Finkelstein also denounce these horrendous war crimes and genocidal actions by the Israeli state. In fact, the overwhelmingly educated Jews and the practicing orthodox Hasidic Jews (rabbis and families), living in our own New York City denounce this barbaric stance by Israel and pro-Israeli states, consistently stating these actions as forbidden in the Jewish religion and done “not in our name.” These phenomenal Jews, along with anyone fighting for peace and justice, are the true heroes! So no amount of crying, screaming or foot-stomping by pro-Israeli commentators here can justify the heinous crimes of the Israeli state against Palestinian civilians, smeared with genocidal comments by prime minister Natenyahu, the president and military officers on such a public stage, against human beings whose ancestral lands they have illegally occupied, starved and destroyed. They go so far as to claim that any opposing sentiments, including those of Jews to stop the bloodshed and to fight for peace and coexistence, are anti-semitic. Zionist oppressors killing off the oppressed and stating these actions to be for self-defence is absolutely sick, and any decent human being in the world will not stand for this twisted rhetoric. Zionist Israel’s actions towards the Palestinian peoples are akin to Nazi Germany towards innocent Jews that suffered incredibly during the Holocaust. Bear in mind, Israeli Zionism is not equivalent to Jewishness; it is a political tool. In fact, Israel has gone to great lengths not to recognize the Armenian Genocide, nor the genocides of the Rwandans, Bosnians and Cambodians, to name a few – in order to glorify itself as the great world victim of genocide as if it’s a badge of honor. It isn’t – and it is rife with trauma and pain for any country whose people have history of genocide. As Armenians whose yearly genocide march slogans of “Never Again” infer to prevent genocide for any human being globally, we find this absolutely deplorable and inhumane to the highest degree.
In sum, Israel has exposed itself as an illegal terrorist state and has lost full respect of the world community. We Armenians stand for the Palestinian cause and for all of humanity (including Jewish families and children) to live in a peaceful, coexitent world free from genocide and war crimes. Because evey child deserves to grow up and live without fear. Barring the Western propaganda machine of governments backed by pro-Zionist lobbyists, the majority of the world full of decent human beings are marching and peacefully protesting for a free Palestine. Thank goodness for the decency of everyday humans to stand for what’s right and just. May the exposure of these crimes against humanity on a global stage, however horrendous, be a wake-up call for us to fight the fight for a greater, more humane and peaceful world for our children and future generations to come.
This was written in early December. It is now the end of January. It’s a genocide. – a descendant of Armenian genocide survivors
Statements from scholars in Holocaust and genocide studies are crucial for preserving historical memory, educating future generations, and advocating for human rights globally.
I am curious why you didn’t list the hundreds of Palestinian attacks on Israelis including from Hamass and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PFLP hijacking planes, Black September, PLO, PA published pay for slay program. They perpetrated bus, restaurant, countless su*cide bombings, stabbing infitada, first and second infitada, refusing peace agreements or not even coming to the table to negotiate even when more land is being offered, 1948, 67,72 war. Consistent missle attacks from Gaza since Hamass took power and immediately they killed 600 Palestinians during the Gazan civil war, Hezbollah attacks consistently in Israel. If Israel didn’t have the Iron Dome. All of Israel would have died by now with terror proxies surrounding it all funded by Iran. Why did you leave out Palestinian violence? And that they’re still firing rockets into Israel, refuse to return the hostages or surrender. They also did not build one bomb shelter for their people but used billions in aid and materials to make terror tunnels. Why has all of that been left out? I see who signed your letter. Seems extremely one sided as far as Arab support. A few others in there but the support to make Israel the villain here is undoubtly the people from the countries who constantly perpetuate war on Israel and expect no retaliation and when there is retaliation it’s Israel’s fault and they take no blame for starting the aggression in the first place. Strange how bias this is.
I hope from this article it can open their eyes in Palestine
May the world always be granted peace!
This is a powerful and deeply reflective statement on the current violence in Israel and Palestine. It’s impactful to see the perspectives of scholars in Holocaust and genocide studies weighing in on the issue, especially in highlighting the devastating effects of mass violence and the troubling rhetoric used by leaders. The historical comparisons provide a thought-provoking framework for understanding the severity of these events and the potential for escalated violence.
One question that comes to mind is whether other international bodies, besides the UN, have mechanisms to intervene in situations like this, especially to prevent further violence or address human rights violations. Could organizations outside the UN framework contribute to peace-building or accountability measures in meaningful ways?
-Chris G. (TheLavatory)
The world should save itself from war.