Genocide

Debate over whether there’s a genocide in Gaza has special resonance when your family was a victim of the crime that gave the world the term.

As Jews around the world mark the holiday of Tisha B'Av today, we reckon with a legacy of destruction and its meaning for the present day. My reflections below are presented in that spirit.

How can it be that Israel – the state founded by a people who experienced genocide – could itself be committing this most heinous of crimes?

For some in the Jewish community, it is simply inconceivable. To even raise the question is an outrage.

For others, the outrage is that a people who’ve themselves experienced genocide refuse to acknowledge that it’s happening and that they are responsible.

So – is it? Is Israel – specifically this government – committing genocide in Gaza? I spent a painful hour on Pod Save America Wednesday discussing the term and why I don’t use it.

It’s painful and it’s personal – and I, like many in the Jewish community, am struggling with the question.

I’ve read scholars, writers and lawyers who have come to believe that what Israel is doing in Gaza meets the legal and moral definition of genocide.

I’ve read the rebuttals, many rooted in disbelief that the charge would even be leveled against the Jewish people – as if we’ve earned immunity from scrutiny because of our own suffering.

I suspect my struggles resonate with Jews who grew up surrounded by family and friends whose lives were shaped by the Holocaust. On my mother’s side, everyone I knew of the older generation had fled, escaped, and survived genocide.

And all of them were haunted by the millions who didn’t survive. The grandparents sent to Theresienstadt to languish and die. The cousins shipped by train to death factories for immediate execution.

Never again, I was raised to believe.

Never again. A simple phrase – but with two radically different meanings. One meaning has led some to believe that even limited threats must be met with maximum force – a belief that finds expression in the militant nationalism on the right and context for the no-holds-barred efforts by Israel’s ‘defense’ organizations to shut down criticism of Israel in the US.

The other meaning of “never again” reinforces the strong Jewish commitment to stand up for the oppressed, to pursue justice and to work to make the world a better place through activism and philanthropy.

This school believes the lesson to draw is the one Hillel described 2000 years ago as the centerpiece of the Torah: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.” For them, Jewish people are to be a “light unto the nations” – a model for others in matters of morals and ethics.

My parents drew both lessons from their firsthand experience with genocide. My father focused on strength; my mother on compassion.

I grew up fully believing that I - and the Jewish people - could weave them together, pursuing a commitment to our security while also pursuing justice and acting with compassion.

It wasn’t till adulthood that I ran squarely into the contradictions. Only then did I learn that my people’s finding a home in Israel after 1800 years had caused such pain to another people.

I learned about occupation and the Naqba. I came to recognize that, yes, Jews like Kahane, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich could be just as racist and immoral as any other people. I absorbed the shock that a Jew would kill a Prime Minister because he sought peace.

I’ve been on a thirty year (plus) journey now, on which I’ve explored the gap between the ethics on which I was raised and the reality of Israel’s treatment of the other people rooted in the same land. Though I see that we have not succeeded in balancing calls for strength and for compassion, I remain committed to the effort.

And now we have Gaza – one of the worst moral disasters of my lifetime, and it’s being perpetrated by the state of the Jewish people.

Yes – Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.

Yes – Hamas is a horrific terrorist group guilty of the worst crimes against humanity, and it must be defeated.

Yes – the hostages they hold and whom they are starving must be released.

Yes – Hamas has acted with no regard for the impact of their actions on their own people.

Yet none of that provides any rationale for what Israel is doing now in Gaza. Denying food and basic necessities of life to civilians. Soldiers shooting at civilians trying to get food. Destruction of the entire infrastructure of Gaza. Forcing the population into intolerably small areas. Hoping to create the conditions under which an entire population will be forcibly displaced.

Until now, I have tried to deflect and defend when challenged to call this genocide.

I have, however, been persuaded rationally by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel has broken the international genocide convention.

Based on the law as I read it, the Prime Minister and others in his government will have to answer for what they have done and will be held accountable. I know Jewish organizations and leaders will charge the courts with antisemitism. But the courts will simply be applying the law.

I believe the judgment of history will be more consequential than that of the courts, and that this government and these leaders will be remembered with revulsion for the horrors they’ve overseen.

But – worst of all – the stain of this abomination will forever be on the Jewish people because we have not stopped this. Far too many have been far too silent.

The personal pain of my own family from a crime that I believe has no parallel – and my association of the word genocide exclusively with that event - means I am unlikely to use the term myself.

But I cannot and will not argue any more against those using the term. I simply won’t defend the indefensible.