Stop the Genocide!

After eighteen month of war, with over 50,000 Palestinians dead, most of them women, children, and the elderly and countless wounded and maimed, infrastructure and housing stock widely destroyed, and the remaining population of the Gaza Strip traumatized and starving, we are facing a climate where even stating basic facts seems no longer possible without fear of persecution. 

Instead of an extension of the ceasefire and negotiations for release of the remaining hostages, we are seeing a renewal and escalation of violence pursued by an Israeli government that ignores its own people and shunts aside the urgent calls by thousands of reservists to end the war and bring back the hostages. 

Meanwhile, the US government aids and abets the Israeli right wing regime by labeling legitimate protests domestic terrorism and a threat to the security of this country. Abusing the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of anti-Semitism, the government is going after students, depriving them of due process and first amendment rights, revoking their visas, and unlawfully abducts and detains them. Criticism of Israel and vocal calls for an end to war on Palestinian civilians and the recognition of Palestinian rights are turned into un-American activities, with the clear aim to silence our students while gratuitously dismantling our institutions of higher education. 

At such a time, those of us secure in their rights as citizens and committed to the Torah's commandment to love the stranger must raise our voices on behalf of those silenced by fear and repression of speech. We must restore moral clarity and say it loudly and clearly: not in our name!

We cannot sit down and celebrate the Passover this week, remembering our own liberation from slavery, without looking toward a different, better future for all, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze and others, in the Holy Land. 

All people, individually and collectively, have rights, rights proclaimed and protected by international law. We all have the right to life, liberty, shelter, protection from violence, and everything else we all need to live in dignity and safety. 

Depriving the population of Gaza or the West Bank of these rights and threatening them with whole-sale expulsion or deportation has a name. It is called genocide.

If you're not sure what that term refers to, here, from the UN Convention on Genocide website, is its internationally recognized definition:

Definition

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

Article II

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:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Source: https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition