Saturday Mezze: Confronting Genocide in Gaza / Palestine
Mezze - المزة - a wide selection of small dishes served as appetizers, including such delicacies as hummus, cheese, eggplant, brains, stuffed grape leaves, calamari, and much more
Good morning Family, Friends, and Colleagues
Some days it’s a good idea to stand aside, to embrace the words and passions of others as you will read below this is one of those days.
Stay well, stand in solidarity, draw your keffiyehs close, and love each other.
Salamaat,
Robert
Confronting Genocide in Gaza / Palestine
"Yes, it is Genocide."
"In most cases of genocide," Dr. Amos Goldberg, professor of Holocaust History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote in May of 2024, "the perpetrators of the murder said they were acting in self-defense. The fact that what is happening in Gaza does not resemble the Holocaust does not mean that it is not genocide." *
"Yes, it is genocide," Goldberg continued. "Although it is so difficult and painful to admit this and despite all efforts to think otherwise, at the end of six months [written 5.2024] of a brutal war it is no longer possible to escape this conclusion. Jewish history will henceforth be stained with the mark of Cain of the 'crime of crimes,' which cannot be erased from its forehead. As such, it will stand trial for generations."
It is Genocide.
Together we read about it. Some weep, some shrug, others turn the page. Daily we witness the deaths, the forced starvation, funerals, destruction.
“This is not a war between Israel and Hamas," British-Israeli historian said last year at Rice University. "It’s a broader war between Zionist settler colonialism, backed by American imperialism, against the people of Palestine." **
“I feel that as a Jew, as an Israeli, I have a moral duty to stand by the Palestinians in this hour,” Shlaim said in concluding his speech. “This is why I am here to denounce the Israeli genocide and to show my solidarity with the Palestinian people in the struggle for dignity, freedom and independence.”
There are times, in the morning, when I dread what will appear online. It can't be worse than yesterday, I think, but it too often is.
But I log in anyway.
I must.
I have two browsers on my laptop; one opens to Al-Jazeera, the other to The Guardian. From there I move on to various media platforms, from the Washington Post to WSJ to Democracy Now - from ProPublica to Ha'aretz and beyond.
After coffee, occasional chats on WhatsApp, playing Wordle, Connections, and sometimes Letter-Boxed I move on to read some writers I follow on Substack and search Facebook for live updates on events in Gaza I might not see elsewhere.
Finally, after all other diversions, I search my spam where I occasionally find hateful, derogatory, and ignorant messages from readers who think they know more than I do.
"Israel has the most moral army in the world," I am often told, " and you are an antisemitic, racist, Jew-hating Muslim."
The most laughable comment I receive is for me to go back to where I came from.
America is where I am from, and I stand opposed to an America that abets genocide and ethnic cleansing, opposed to an America where war criminals are invited to speak to congress.
Among the unsolicited communications I receive are those from a New Hampshire resident - prosperous and prominent - who, through the articles and links they send me, exhibits the most extreme symptoms of being a PEP - Progressive Except for Palestine.
Their most recent offering was a month ago today - just after the end of Ramadan - when they sent me a vile, racist, YouTube offering featuring a hateful rant by a globally-prominent Islamophobe - as though whatever was being said about Muslims was some how related to events in Palestine.
Anything to try and deflect, try to turn the page.
However, what the inclusion of that Islamophobic rant did was to highlight for me the extremes to which some supporters of Israel's genocidal attacks on Palestinians will go to ignore critics in their own home - ignore Jews and Israelis who are speaking out against the unspeakable crimes against humanity being committed in their name.
So today I thought I would make it easy for everyone: Today, every quote in this column is by a Jew and/or an Israeli, quotes from scholars and historians who know Israel well.
Today, read their words, not mine.
In 2022, B’Tselem - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, wrote that "Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation is inextricably bound up in human rights violations. B’Tselem strives to end this regime, as that is the only way forward to a future in which human rights, democracy, liberty and equality are ensured to all people, both Palestinian and Israeli, living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea." ***
In 2025 - at this very moment - the evidence that Israel has moved well beyond apartheid and occupation and the concomitant sins of ethnic cleansing, forced starvation, administrative detention, and dispossession to waging a full-blown genocide upon an occupied people is so overwhelming that failure to confront that reality speaks to an overwhelming moral failure on a global scale - including on the part of the United States of America.
As Israeli Dr. Omer Bartov, Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University wrote last week: “ … The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.
"If we take into account the killed, the wounded, the thousands buried under the rubble, the thousands of “indirect” deaths due to the destruction of most medical facilities, the thousands of children who will never fully recover from the long-term effects of starvation and trauma, we can undoubtedly conclude that Israel has deliberately subjected the Palestinian people in Gaza, most of whom are refugees from the partition of Palestine in 1948 or their descendants, to 'conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,' as stated in Article II(c) of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. The rest of the world, especially Israel’s Western allies and Jewish communities in Europe and the United States, will have to grapple with this reality for many years."
"How was it possible," Bartov asks, "well into the twenty-first century, eighty years after the end of the Holocaust and the creation of an international legal regime meant to prevent such crimes from ever happening again, that the state of Israel—seen and self-described as the answer to the genocide of the Jews—could have carried out a genocide of Palestinians with near-total impunity? How do we face up to the fact that Israel has invoked the Holocaust to shatter the legal order put into place to prevent a repetition of this 'crime of crimes'?" ****
"The long-term consequence of this travesty may," he continued, "however, be that the genocide in Gaza will finally liberate Israel of its status as a unique state rooted in a unique Holocaust. This will hardly help the tens of thousands of Palestinian victims or the victims of the Hamas massacre, the dead and dying hostages or their broken families. But the license that Israel, the land of the victims, has long enjoyed and abused may be expiring. The sons and daughters of the next generation will be free to rethink their own lives and future, beyond the memory of the Holocaust; they will also have to pay for the sins of their parents and bear the burden of the genocide perpetrated in their name. They will have to reckon with what the great, often forgotten Israeli poet Avot Yeshurun wrote in the aftermath of the Nakba, of which we are witnessing a repetition, or continuation: 'The Holocaust of the Jews of Europe and the Holocaust of the Arabs of Eretz Israel are one Holocaust of the Jewish people. The two of them stare each other directly in the face. It is of this that I speak.'”
Yes, it is Genocide.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*Prof. Amos Goldberg:
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/prof-amos-goldberg-yes-it-is-genocide/
**Prof. Avi Shlaim:
https://www.ricethresher.org/article/2024/04/historian-avi-shlaim-gives-talk-on-gaza
***B’Tselem:
https://www.btselem.org/publications/202210_not_a_vibrant_democracy_this_is_apartheid
****Prof. Omer Bartov:
https://archive.ph/HbeXa#selection-399.6-475.14
Salamaat,
Robert
Robert, Please condemn the murder of two young people associated with the Israeli Embassy in DC last night, who were mindlessly, ruthlessly shot to death by an assailant purportedly shouting, “Free Palestine.” That is the type of conduct which has caused US voters to elect Donald Trump.