“The difference between the Nazi ghettos in Europe and Gaza is that there are still many people alive in Gaza and the world still has the opportunity to do something.” The sentence almost cost the Jewish writer Mascha Gessen the opportunity to to take part in the award ceremony of the Hannah Arendt Prize, which had been awarded to her for her political thought. In the end, the event could take place as planned in the German city of Bremen, although in a less solemn location than originally announced. For weeks, tens of thousands of people around the world have been trying to take action, to reach a ceasefire to end the brutal humanitarian crisis inflicted on the Palestinians. These thousands of people are joined by important Jewish voices like Gessen. Voices that strongly criticize the actions of the Israeli government of Netanyahu, not only because of the cruelty with which it attacks the Palestinian population, but also because of the damage it causes in Israel.
Omer Bartov, an Israeli-born professor at Brown University who has dedicated his life to studying mass murder, explained in The Chronicle of Higher Education that if Israel continues on its current course with its current government, “so be it .” to fear that future generations of Israelis will inherit an “authoritarian, Sparta-like” country whose sense of national identity is fundamentally “based on bloodshed.”
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According to polls, the majority of Israelis support the Netanyahu government and the actions of its Defense Forces (IDF), but there are more and more voices in Israel that are afraid of the human degeneracy of these soldiers who shoot half-naked people with white flags who walk over the rubble walking into a recently bombed building knowing that under their boots there are still men and women, children, alive, trapped and frightened, soldiers and officers aiming a rocket at a house where they know there is only one doctor lives with his family or a United Nations employee. Soldiers and officers calmly watching a journalist bleed to death and humiliating imprisoned civilians. These soldiers and officers will soon return to Israel and will be their children's teachers, the friendly official behind the window, the waiter serving coffee to the tourist… (A list with the names of 40 officers who planned and carried Loud Kenneth Roth, former director of Human Rights Watch, is already referring the operation to the International Criminal Court.)
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Bartov distinguishes between ethnic cleansing, which “aims at the often violent expulsion of a population from an area” and genocide, which “aims at the extermination of that population wherever it is located,” but warns that the dehumanizing rhetoric that Netanyahu, using the latter approach, urges the international Jewish community to “raise its voice before Israel's leadership pushes it and its neighbors into the abyss.”
Another Israeli historian, Avi Shlaim, professor emeritus of international relations at Oxford, points out that Israel launched the so-called Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in 2008. It is important to remember, he writes in Prospect, that even then an independent fact-finding mission led by Richard Goldstone, a respected South African judge, Jew and Zionist, found that Hamas and other Palestinian groups were engaging in rocket firing and mortars had the deliberate aim of harming Israeli civilians, but also that much of the extensive damage caused by the IDF “was not justified by military needs and was done illegally and senselessly.”
“The report found,” says Shlaim, “seven incidents of shooting at civilians waving white flags in their homes; a deliberate attack on a hospital; numerous incidents in which ambulances were prevented from treating seriously injured people; “several attacks on civilian infrastructure with no military significance to deprive civilians of their basic needs.”
“The Israeli government has brought death and destruction to the people of Gaza many times,” writes Shlaim, “but this time it has created the possibility of something much worse than before: ethnic cleansing.” Given that previous violations of international law were never punished, the Netanyahu government took the step this time. Many Jewish voices warn: Help stop them now.
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