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.