After 57 years of occupation, accompanied by humiliations, expulsions from their homes and lands, arbitrary detentions, several killings, the creation of colonies and the failure of various peaceful actions, we can understand that many Palestinians refuse to accept the Hamas action of January 7. to be sentenced in October. They consider it a legitimate act of resistance against Israel's colonization and state terrorism.
We can also understand that after the 1,200 murders, rapes, sexual violence and the kidnapping of almost two hundred hostages, most of whom were civilians, many Israelis support the army's murderous actions and see them as a legitimate response to the actions of Hamas. However, we condemn all these acts of terrorism.
It is not because we are Jews that we condemn acts of terrorism and war crimes such as murders, rapes, sexual violence and kidnappings of civilians by Hamas commandos. We do not, as Jews, condemn the terrorist attacks and war crimes that have been committed in Gaza and the West Bank for more than 30 years in the form of bombings, destruction and massive massacres of the vast majority of women and children by the Israeli army and settlers in three months.
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Because we care about the dignity of every human being, we condemn them without considering that Palestinians or Israelis are criminals or terrorists by nature.
In the name of this past
This condemnation is not unrelated to our Jewishness, a component among our multiple identities, a family legacy that links some of the signatories to the history of the genocide of the Jews of Europe. Many of our families from Central and Eastern Europe were murdered by the Nazis and their local collaborators during the Holocaust.
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Some of us, our parents and grandparents, survived the hunt for Jews by the Gestapo and the Vichy police. They refused to obey the demand to declare themselves Jewish and wear the yellow star and decided to resist, hide and hide their children. Many of them escaped death thanks to the solidarity and civil disobedience of non-Jewish French people who, at the risk of their lives, hid them without asking who they were or where they came from.
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