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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2025-07-21 City Council EmailsDOCUMENTS IN THIS PACKET INCLUDE: LETTERS FROM CITIZENS TO THE MAYOR OR CITY COUNCIL RESPONSES FROM STAFF TO LETTERS FROM CITIZENS ITEMS FROM MAYOR AND COUNCIL MEMBERS ITEMS FROM OTHER COMMITTEES AND AGENCIES ITEMS FROM CITY, COUNTY, STATE, AND REGIONAL AGENCIES Prepared for: 7/21/2025 Document dates: 7/14/2025 - 7/21/2025 Note: Documents for every category may not have been received for packet reproduction in a given week. 701-32 From: Aram James To: assemblymember.berman(alassembly.ca.gov; Josh Becker Cc: Jeff Rosen; Jay Boyarsky; Veenker, Vicki; h.etzkof@gmail.com; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Raj Jayadev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fona; Reifschneider, James; Binder, Andrew; Gardener, Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanda Conaway; volanda; Don Austin; jgreenCaldailvnewsgroup.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonga; Baker, Rob; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlquist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Jeff Conrad; Burt, Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District9Casanjoseca.gov; District4@sanjoseca.gov; District5@sanjoseca.gov; District2@ sanioseca.gov; EPA Tocav; Gennadv Shevner; Council, City; city.councilCalmenlopark.gov; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromerof&cityofepa.orq; Cribbs, Anne; <michael.gennaccaoirgroup.com>; Stump, Molly; boardCalpausd.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Rodriguez, Miguel; Cait James; Zelkha, Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enberg, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire. Geoffrey; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberlev; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq; Greg Tanaka; Ed Lauina; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee; Mark Turner; City Attorney; CityCouncil; Michelle Bigelow; Sean Allen; Seher Awan; Pat M; Carla Torres; David Piper; joshfloshsalcman.com; board©valleywater.orq; boardfeedback©smcgov.orq; Jay Boyarsky; Linda Jolley; San Jose Spotlight; vramirez(@redwoodcity.org; Marty Wasserman Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Monday, July 21, 2025 10:59:48 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Sew Zee Palestinians Are Collapsing in Gaza's Streets From Israeli -Imposed Starvation Campaign A frontline report on a people forced to face death from starvation or being shot in a perilous quest to obtain meager rations ABDEL QADER SABBAH AND SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS JUL 21 CREAD IN APP The level of killing and forced starvation in Gaza by the Israeli military in recent days has been difficult to fathom. Journalist Abdel Qader Sabbah, who reported this story from northern Gaza, is himself struggling to fight the spreading famine. He is severely weakened and can barely stand on his own two feet anymore. On Sunday, his meal for the entire day consisted of half a loaf of bread. "There is nothing to eat," he said. His bravery and resilience in reporting on the unfolding genocide in Gaza is remarkable. We have a commitment to ensuring that our journalism is not locked behind a paywall. But the only way we can sustain this is through the voluntary support of our community of readers. If you are a free subscriber and you support our work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. You can also make a 501(c)(3) tax-deductible donation to support our work. Upgrade to paid The bodies of Palestinians killed in an Israeli attack on the Zikim area in the northern Gaza Strip are seen lying on the ground at AI-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza, on July 20, 2025. (Photo by Saeed M. M. T. Jaras/Anadolu via Getty Images) GAZA CITY —Israel's war of extermination in Gaza continues to plunge to new depths of horror. Starving Palestinians have begun to collapse in the streets and die of hunger as a result of the siege. Those who try to get food are gunned down in ever deadlier aid massacres. The Israeli military issues frequent mass expulsion orders and further expands its ground operations, slicing up the enclave and forcibly displacing Palestinians into more concentrated zones. All the while, the relentless aerial assault and ground attacks persist. Over the past five days alone, more than 550 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to ministry of health figures. The confirmed death toll since the beginning of the war crossed 59,000 on Monday in what is widely acknowledged to be a vast undercount. Over the past two months, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed as they are forced to seek aid in militarized zones in a system mostly overseen by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a shadowy U.S.- and Israeli -backed group. One of the deadliest days for aid seekers came on Sunday, when over 70 people were killed, at least 67 of them in northern Gaza where Israeli troops opened fire on crowds trying to get food from a World Food Program convoy entering through the Zikim crossing. "The tank came, surrounded us, and started shooting at us and we kept raising our hands," Ibrahim Hamada, who was wounded in the leg, told Drop Site as he lay on a hospital gurney wincing in pain. "There were many martyrs, no one was able to retrieve them. I crawled on my stomach just to reach a car to take me to the hospital," he said. "I went there to eat, because there was no food at home." Scenes from Shifa hospital after Israeli troops opened fire on Palestinians seeking aid near the Zikim crossing. Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah. July 20, 2025. Over 150 people were wounded in the attack. AI-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City was overwhelmed with the dead and wounded, most of them young men and boys. Malnourished, gaunt faces poked out of white shrouds laid over their bodies on the ground. At the nearby Sheikh Radwan clinic, more than a dozen corpses in white body bags were lined up in the courtyard. Relatives searching for their loved ones came and gingerly pulled back part of the surface of the body bags to peer inside and see if they recognized anyone. "The situation is very difficult. We transported the martyrs, as you can see, and moved the injured from a place close to the area that was targeted by quadcopter bombs, gunfire, or by the new [weaponized] crane located at the aid distribution site," said Mohammed al-Hout, an emergency medical worker with the Red Crescent. "People were shot in the head or the feet.... Some of the martyrs have shattered skulls." Scenes from Sheikh Radwan clinic after Israeli troops opened fire on Palestinians seeking aid near the Zikim crossing. Video by Abdel Qader Sabbah. July 20, 2025. The UN World Food Program said in a statement that 25 trucks carrying food entered Gaza on Sunday through the Zikim crossing "destined for starving communities in northern Gaza." "Shortly after passing the final checkpoint beyond the Zikim crossing point into Gaza, the convoy encountered large crowds of civilians anxiously waiting to access desperately needed food supplies," the WFP said. "As the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers, and other gunfire." The statement added: "These people were simply trying to access food to feed themselves and their families on the brink of starvation." Also on Sunday, nine Palestinians were killed near an "aid distribution" hub in Rafah run by the GHF. The killings happened at the same site where over 20 people had been killed a few days earlier when GHF guards gassedstarving Palestinians fenced in at the hub, causing many to die from suffocation and a stampede. These daily killings of Palestinians desperate for food and an imminent famine have combined to create an unprecedented emergency in Gaza. Israel's full -spectrum blockade imposed on March 2 was nominally lifted on May 27 when meager amounts of aid began to be distributed to four militarized GHF hubs, three of which are located in the southern end of Gaza and one in Wadi Gaza. With the entire population on the brink of famine, Palestinians have no choice but to starve or risk their lives at so-called aid distribution hubs. "People got hungry. They had no choice but to head towards the places of death. Either way, they're going to die," Abu Maher AI-Masry, who witnessed Sunday's killings near the Zikim crossing, told Drop Site. "I am a grown man who can't even walk from hunger. It has been more than a day since I last had a single bite to eat." On Sunday, the health ministry said that 18 people had died from starvation over the past day. A day earlier, the ministry issued an urgent bulletin saying "unprecedented numbers of starving people of all ages are arriving at emergency rooms in a state of extreme exhaustion and fatigue. We warn that hundreds of those whose bodies have emaciated will be at risk of certain death as a result of starvation and their bodies' ability to withstand being overwhelmed." Multiple reports have documented Palestinians sifting through garbage, scraping spilled food from the ground and eating from trash in the streets. The UN estimates that nearly one in three people is not eating for days. Journalist Nahed Hajjaj posted on social media: "Do not be surprised when we journalists stop covering news here. I swear by God that today I could not get up from the hunger. There is no food. Even if someone has money, there is nothing in the market to even purchase." Meanwhile, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif broke down in tears during a live broadcast outside AI-Shifa Hospital as a woman nearby collapsed from hunger. "People are collapsing in the streets from hunger just falling right there from extreme starvation," he said. In response, an Israeli military spokesperson jeered at AI- Sharif on social media, saying it was "nothing but crocodile tears that comes as part of a deceptive and staged Hamas performance." A total of 86 Palestinians, including 76 children, have died of hunger and malnutrition since the war began in what the health ministry on Sunday called "a silent massacre." Drop Site News is reader -supported. Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Upgrade to paid Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA)—that used to help oversee aid distribution in Gaza before Israel imposed its blockade and barred independent organizations —said on social media that the crisis was "all man-made, in total impunity." "Food is available only a few kilometers away," Lazzarini posted on X on Sunday. "UNRWA alone has enough stock available outside of #Gaza for the entire population for the next 3 months. We have not been allowed to bring any aid in since 2 March." The widening starvation and famine comes as the Israeli military continues to expand its ground invasion, issuing repeated displacement orders, with more than 86% of Gaza now in a so-called "red zone" —either under active displacement orders or in a "combat" zone. For the first time since the beginning of the war, the Israeli military on Saturday issueddisplacement orders in an area of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, stretching to the coastline, along the so-called "Kissufim corridor." Deir al- Balah is one of the few areas where Israeli ground troops have rarely operated and where the headquarters of several UN agencies and medical NGOs are based. The expulsion order effectively cuts access between Deir al- Balah and cities in the south of Khan Younis and Rafah. The Israeli military ordered people to head south to al- Mawasi, a tent camp on the southern coast that has been designated a "humanitarian zone," which Israel has regularly bombed —most recently killing over 20 people, including children, sheltering in tents in an airstrike on Sunday. Displacement orders were also reissued for northern Gaza, with the entire area north of al-Quds street and Salah Khalaf street designated an off limit "combat zone." Last week, the Israeli military announced it had finished bulldozing a 15 -kilometer (9.3 -mile) path through Khan Younis establishing what it called the "Magen Oz" corridor, cutting eastern Khan Younis off from the west side. The corridor is the latest of several zones that the Israeli military has carved through Gaza using wide -scale demolitions to divide the strip into separate regions: the Morag corridor, which adjoins Magen Oz and cuts Rafah off from Khan Younis; the Mefalsim corridor, which separates northern Gaza from Gaza City; and the Netzarim corridor, which runs along Wadi Gaza, cutting off the north from the south. There are no signs that Israel's assault will ease anytime soon and the international community has taken no steps to force Israel to end its attacks and to allow massive amounts of aid needed to stave off mass starvation. "Damn this silence. Damn this famine," said Eyad Amawi, a representative of the Gaza Relief Committee and a coordinator for local NGOs. "Damn it all —humanity has collapsed." Drop Site News Middle East Research Fellow Jawa Ahmad contributed to this report. Leave a comment A guest post by Abdel Qader Sabbah journalist and videographer in northern Gaza Subscribe to Abdel Become a Drop Site News Paid Subscriber Drop Site News is reader -supported. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. Upgrade to paid A paid subscription gets you: 15% off Drop Site store Access to our Discord, subscriber -only AMAs, chats, and invites to events, both virtual and IRL Post comments and join the community The knowledge you are supporting independent media making the lives of the powerful miserable You can also now find us on podcast platforms and on Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Telegram, and YouTube. LIKE) © 2025 Drop Site News, Inc. Drop Site News Inc., 4315 50th St, NW Ste 100 ..nit #2550, Washington, DC 20015 Unsubscribe On Mon, Ju1 21, 2025 at 10:46 AM Martin Wasserman <deeperlook@aol.com> wrote: Hi Avram, There seems to be a contradiction in your statement. You say you want Israel to be eliminated, but also say that you want it to pay reparations for 100 years. How could it pay reparations if it no longer exists? Martin Wasserman On Ju1 20, 2025, at 8:08 PM, Aram James <aajpcl@gmail.com> wrote: Subject: A Call for Change Hi Martin, I want to be very clear about my position. I support the elimination of Israel and advocate for a one -state solution. Israel must pay reparations to the Palestinian people for a hundred years and rebuild Gaza and the West Bank. The genocidal Israeli war criminals must be held fully accountable, just like the Nazi war criminals. As a secular Jew, I find no value in Hebrew scripture; to me, it is merely creative writing and fantasy at best. The nations that have stood up to the Nazi - like Israeli state are the true heroes. Avram "Eliminate Israel Now" Finkelstein On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 7:26 PM Martin Wasserman <cee-)erlook@aol.com> wrote: The Hebrew Scriptures predict a time when all the nations will gather together against Israel, and God will then intervene on Israel's behalf and judge all those nations with truth and justice. We appear to be approaching that time very rapidly, and I strongly suspect that those people and nations who have dedicated themselves to Israel's destruction will fare very poorly in those judgments! Martin Wasserman On Ju1 20, 2025, at 3:30 PM, Aram James <abjnd1@gmail.com> wrote: Condemn Israel or be complicit in genocide': Colombia's Gustavo Petro By Al Mayadeen English Source: The Guardian 8 Jul 2025 13:47 2 Shares 4 Min Read Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in a Guardian op-ed, accuses Netanyahu of genocide in Gaza and urges global action. Listen On Tuesday, The Guardian published an opinion piece by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in which he accused Israeli Prime Minister Ben'amin Netanyahu of orchestrating a "campaign of devastation" in Gaza and called on the international community to move beyond symbolic outrage toward concrete action in defense of international law. Petro has emerged as one of the most outspoken world leaders condemning "Israel's" war on Gaza, and his latest opinion piece adds to a growing series of forceful critiques directed at the ongoing Israeli genocide. Denouncing what he described as 600 days of systematic atrocities, Petro wrote that the world's inaction risks legitimizing a model of impunity where colonial violence, ethnic cleansing, and siege warfare are normalized against a captive population. "If we fail to act now," he wrote, "we not only betray the Palestinian people, we become complicit in the atrocities committed by Netanyahu's government." Moral break The president highlighted a landmark United Nations General Assembly resolution adopted in September 2024, which called for "Israel" to end its illegal occupation within 12 months. He noted that Colombia was among the 124 countries that voted in favor, thereby assuming binding obligations that include sanctions, legal action, and trade measures. "The clock is now ticking," he warned, reaffirming Colombia's commitment by recalling its concrete step: suspending coal exports to "Israel." Related News 0 650 days of genocide: 125,000 tons of bombs 2.4 min lives shattered I® Starved by 'Israel': People of Gaza are dying while the world watches In his piece, Petro mentioned that he had declared earlier this year: "We cannot fuel the machinery that slaughters Palestinian children and then claim neutrality." This is not the first bold move by the Colombian president. In May, his government formally cut dip omatic ties with "Israel," citing what Petro explicitly described as a "genocide." His administration also appointed Colombia's first ambassador to Palestine, pledging medical treatment in Colombian hospitals for injured children from Gaza. The newly appointed ambassador, Jorge Ivan Ospina, later echoed Petro's position, warning of a "macabre intention to erase the identity of a people." In Tuesday's article, Petro praised similar actions taken by countries like Malaysia, which banned Israeli ships from its ports, and South Africa, which brought "Israel" before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on charges of genocide. It is worth noting that Colombia joined that case as an intervening party, further deepening its legal opposition to "Israel's" war. Read more: US defends Israeli use of starvation as weapon of war before CJ Global reckoning Looking ahead, Petro mentioned that Colombia and South Africa, co-chairs of the Hague Group, will host an emergency summit regarding Gaza on July 15. The conference aims to develop a coordinated, multilateral strategy to isolate "Israel" diplomatically and economically while restoring credibility to the global legal order. With the UN's proposed international peace conference indefinitely postponed, Petro cast the July summit as a necessary corrective to global paralysis. The Colombian president framed the Gaza crisis not just as a moral catastrophe but as an existential test for international law and nations of the Global South. "We can either stand firm in defense of the legal principles that seek to prevent war and conflict," he wrote, "or watch helplessly as the international system collapses under the weight of unchecked power politics." He concluded his piece by stressing that the choice is between complicity in colonial violence and collective resistance against it. On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 3:12 PM Martin Wasserman <deeperlook@aol.com> wrote: Aram, Amnesty International is not a credible source on this issue. It appears that the once -respectable organization has been taken over by malevolent actors with a political axe to grind. Their anti -Israel bias is evident throughout the report. They accuse Israel of genocide but make no mention at all of Hamas' explicit genocidal policy against Jews. They accuse Israel of violating international law, but make no reference at all to the fact that Israel is facing a ruthless enemy that observes no international laws whatsoever. When they mention Hamas' transgressions at all, they do it in the mildest language possible, and then use the most damning possible language when describing Israel's actions. They take it as a given that Israel is an apartheid state, a blatantly false accusation that is very easily disproved. They take it as a given that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land, as if the territories of Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the ancient Jewish nation, don't belong to Jews at all, but are instead the property of a fictitious country called "Palestine" which has never actually existed in any historical period. In short, this entire report is a politically motivated "hatchet job" that deserves no credibility whatsoever. Martin Wasserman On Ju1 20, 2025, at 11:39 AM, Aram James <ab:pol@gmail.com> wrote: Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Amnesty International's research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today. The report, 'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman': Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity. "Amnesty International's report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them," said Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International. "Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. "States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel's atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end." Over the past two months the crisis has grown particularly acute in the North Gaza governorate, where a besieged population is facing starvation, displacement and annihilation amid relentless bombardment and suffocating restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. "Our research reveals that, for months, Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza. It continued to do so in defiance of countless warnings about the catastrophic humanitarian situation and of legally binding decisions from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering Israel to take immediate measures to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza," said Agnes Callamard. "Israel has repeatedly argued that its actions in Gaza are lawful and can be justified by its military goal to eradicate Hamas. But genocidal intent can co -exist alongside military goals and does not need to be Israel's sole intent." Amnesty International examined Israel's acts in Gaza closely and in their totality, taking into account their recurrence and simultaneous occurrence, and both their immediate impact and their cumulative and mutually reinforcing consequences. The organization considered the scale and severity of the casualties and destruction over time. It also analysed public statements by officials, finding that prohibited acts were often announced or called for in the first place by high-level officials in charge of the war efforts. "Taking into account the pre-existing context of dispossession, apartheid and unlawful military occupation in which these acts have been committed, we could find only one reasonable conclusion: Israel's intent is the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, whether in parallel with, or as a means to achieve, its military goal of destroying Hamas," said Agnes Callamard. "The atrocity crimes committed on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other armed groups against Israelis and victims of other nationalities, including deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking, can never justify Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza." International jurisprudence recognizes that the perpetrator does not need to succeed in their attempts to destroy the protected group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to have been committed. The commission of prohibited acts with the intent to destroy the group, as such, is sufficient. Amnesty International's report examines in detail Israel's violations in Gaza over nine months between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024. The organization interviewed 212 people, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, healthcare workers, conducted fieldwork and analysed an extensive range of visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery. It also analysed statements by senior Israeli government and military officials, and official Israeli bodies. On multiple occasions, the organization shared its findings with the Israeli authorities but had received no substantive response at the time of publication. Unprecedented scale and magnitude Israel's actions following Hamas's deadly attacks on 7 October 2023 have brought Gaza's population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over 97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families. It has caused unprecedented destruction, which experts say occurred at a level and speed not seen in any other conflict in the 21st century, levelling entire cities and destroying critical infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural and religious sites. It thereby rendered large swathes of Gaza uninhabitable. Mohammed, who fled with his family from Gaza City to Rafah in March 2024 and was displaced again in May 2024, described their struggle to survive in horrifying conditions: "Here in Deir al-Balah, it's like an apocalypse... You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat, and there is no clean water, no toilets, all while the bombing never stops. You feel like you are subhuman here." Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death. Israel also subjected hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza to incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment. Viewed in isolation, some of the acts investigated by Amnesty International constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law. But in looking at the broader picture of Israel's military campaign and the cumulative impact of its policies and acts, genocidal intent is the only reasonable conclusion. Intent to destroy To establish Israel's specific intent to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, Amnesty International analysed the overall pattern of Israel's conduct in Gaza, reviewed dehumanizing and genocidal statements by Israeli government and military officials, particularly those at the highest levels, and considered the context of Israel's system of apartheid, its inhumane blockade of Gaza and the unlawful 57 -year -old military occupation of the Palestinian territory. Before reaching its conclusion, Amnesty International examined Israel's claims that its military lawfully targeted Hamas and other armed groups throughout Gaza, and that the resulting unprecedented destruction and denial of aid were the outcome of unlawful conduct by Hamas and other armed groups, such as locating fighters among the civilian population or the diversion of aid. The organization concluded these claims are not credible. The presence of Hamas fighters near or within a densely populated area does not absolve Israel from its obligations to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. Its research found Israel repeatedly failed to do so, committing multiple crimes under international law for which there can be no justification based on Hamas's actions. Amnesty International also found no evidence that the diversion of aid could explain Israel's extreme and deliberate restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. In its analysis, the organization also considered alternative arguments such as ones that Israel was acting recklessly or that it simply wanted to destroy Hamas and did not care if it needed to destroy Palestinians in the process, demonstrating a callous disregard for their lives rather than genocidal intent. Our damning findings must serve as a wake- up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International However, regardless of whether Israel sees the destruction of Palestinians as instrumental to destroying Hamas or as an acceptable by-product of this goal, this view of Palestinians as disposable and not worthy of consideration is in itself evidence of genocidal intent. Many of the unlawful acts documented by Amnesty International were preceded by officials urging their implementation. The organization reviewed 102 statements that were issued by Israeli government and military officials and others between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2024 and dehumanized Palestinians, called for or justified genocidal acts or other crimes against them. Of these, Amnesty International identified 22 statements made by senior officials in charge of managing the offensive that appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts, providing direct evidence of genocidal intent. This language was frequently replicated, including by Israeli soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by audiovisual content verified by Amnesty International showing soldiers making calls to "erase" Gaza or to make it uninhabitable, and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities. Killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm Amnesty International documented the genocidal acts of killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza by reviewing the results of investigations it conducted into 15 air strikes between 7 October 2023 and 20 April 2024 that killed at least 334 civilians, including 141 children, and wounded hundreds of others. Amnesty International found no evidence that any of these strikes were directed at a military objective. In one illustrative case, on 20 April 2024, an Israeli air strike destroyed the Abdelal family house in the Al-Jneinah neighbourhood in eastern Rafah, killing three generations of Palestinians, including 16 children, while they were sleeping. While these represent just a fraction of Israel's aerial attacks, they are indicative of a broader pattern of repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects or deliberately indiscriminate attacks. The attacks were also conducted in ways designed to cause a very high number of fatalities and injuries among the civilian population. Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction The report documents how Israel deliberately inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza intended to lead, over time, to their destruction. These conditions were imposed through three simultaneous patterns that repeatedly compounded the effect of each other's devastating impacts: damage to and destruction of life - sustaining infrastructure and other objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population; the repeated use of sweeping, arbitrary and confusing mass "evacuation" orders to forcibly displace almost all of Gaza's population; and the denial and obstruction of the delivery of essential services, humanitarian assistance and other life-saving supplies into and within Gaza. After 7 October 2023, Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza cutting off electricity, water and fuel. In the nine months reviewed for this report, Israel maintained a suffocating, unlawful blockade, tightly controlled access to energy sources, failed to facilitate meaningful humanitarian access within Gaza, and obstructed the import and delivery of life- saving goods and humanitarian aid, particularly to areas north of Wadi Gaza. They thereby exacerbated an already existing humanitarian crisis. This, combined with the extensive damage to Gaza's homes, hospitals, water and sanitation facilities and agricultural land, and mass forced displacement, caused catastrophic levels of hunger and led to the spread of diseases at alarming rates. The impact was especially harsh on young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women, with anticipated long-term consequences for their health. The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International Time and again, Israel had the chance to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, yet for over a year it has repeatedly refused to take steps blatantly within its power to do so, such as opening sufficient access points to Gaza or lifting tight restrictions on what could enter the Strip or their obstruction of aid deliveries within Gaza while the situation has grown progressively worse. Through its repeated "evacuation" orders Israel displaced nearly 1.9 million Palestinians — 90% of Gaza's population — into ever -shrinking, unsafe pockets of land under inhumane conditions, some of them up to 10 times. These multiple waves of forced displacement left many jobless and deeply traumatized, especially since some 70% of Gaza's residents are refugees or descendants of refugees whose towns and villages were ethnically cleansed by Israel during the 1948 Nakba. Despite conditions quickly becoming unfit for human life, Israeli authorities refused to consider measures that would have protected displaced civilians and ensured their basic needs were met, showing that their actions were deliberate. They refused to allow those displaced to return to their homes in northern Gaza or relocate temporarily to other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory or Israel, continuing to deny many Palestinians their right to return under internationa law to areas they were displaced from in 1948. They did so knowing that there was nowhere safe for Palestinians in Gaza to flee to. Accountability for genocide "The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience," said Agnes Callamard. "Governments must stop pretending they are powerless to end this genocide, which was enabled by decades of impunity for Israel's violations of international law. States need to move beyond mere expressions of regret or dismay and take strong and sustained international action, however uncomfortable a finding of genocide may be for some of Israel's allies. "The International Criminal Court's (ICC) arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued last month offer real hope of long -overdue justice for victims. States must demonstrate their respect for the court's decision and for universal international law principles by arresting and handing over those wanted by the ICC. "We are calling on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to urgently consider adding genocide to the list of crimes it is investigating and for all states to use every legal avenue to bring perpetrators to justice. No one should be allowed to commit genocide and remain unpunished." Amnesty International is also calling for all civilian hostages to be released unconditionally and for Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups responsible for the crimes committed on 7 October to be held to account. The organization is also calling for the UN Security Council to impose targeted sanctions against Israeli and Hamas officials most implicated in crimes under international law. Background On 7 October 2023 Hamas and other armed groups indiscriminately fired rockets into southern Israe and carried out deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking there, killing 1,200 people, including over 800 civilians, and abducted 223 civilians and captured 27 soldiers. The crimes perpetrated by Hamas and other armed groups during this attack will be the focus of a forthcoming Amnesty International report. Since October 2023, Amnesty International has conducted in- depth investigations into the multiple violations and crimes under international law committed by Israeli forces, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects and deliberately indiscriminate attacks killing hundreds of civilians, as well as other unlawful attacks on and collective punishment of the civilian population. The organization has called on the Office of the ICC Prosecutor to expedite its investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine and is campaigning for an immediate ceasefire. For the Hebrew translation of this press release, click here. INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY MIDDLE EAST MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA NEWS PRESS RELEASE WAR CRIMES AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Related Content COUNTRY Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory NEWS New NATO defence commitments must not come at cost of human rights NEWS Gaza: Starvation or gunfire — this is not a humanitarian response NEWS DRC: Peace deal with Rwanda fails to address serious crimes committed in eastern DRC NEWS Gaza: Evidence points to Israel's continued use of starvation to inflict genocide against Palestinians Recently added Cambodia: Scamming crisis survivors must be protectec amic police crackcown Ireland: Amnesty's head urges Irish government to press ahead with Occupied Territories Bill Angola: Authorities must res Dect and ensure the right to freedom of peaceful assembly Russia: Proposec amencments to counter - extremism laws escalate assault on cissent EU-Israel: Refusal to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement is a `cruel and unlawful betrayal' DONATE TO PROTECT HUMAN RIGHTS Women's Day protest in Mexico Together we can fight for human rights everywhere. Your donation can transform the lives of millions. ABOUT US Contact Us How We're Run Modern Slavery Act Statement Finances RESOURCES Media Centre Human Rights Education Human Rights Courses Annual report archive GET INVOLVED Join Take Action Volunteer LATEST News Campaigns Research WORK WITH US If you are talented and passionate about human rights then Amnesty International wants to hear from you. Privacy Policy Accessibility Cookie Statement Permissions Refunds of Donations © 2025 Amnesty International Facdbe r;' FOLLOW US ON: ranlikTEllitieYkoyallirikedIn On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 10:03 AM Martin Wasserman <deeper oo.c@aol.com> wrote: Aram, If that's the definition of genocide, then Israel is clearly NOT committing genocide in Gaza. If Israel were trying to kill as many Gazans as possible, the death toll would be much, much higher than it is. They wouldn't allow any food or medicine in at all, and they wouldn't issue evacuation warnings before striking Hamas targets. The truth is, Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, but Hamas makes it very difficult by deliberately placing their command centers in civilian locations such as schools and hospitals. The only group that Israel wants to destroy is Hamas, which does have an explicit policy of genocide (by your definition) against Jews. Yes, the Gazans are suffering, but Hamas could end their suffering tomorrow if they wanted to. A11 they have to do is lay down their arms and release the hostages, and the war would be over immediately. But Hamas has no interest in ending the suffering of the Gazans. What they're actually calling for is an open-ended war of attrition against Israel, no matter what the cost to their own people. Martin Wasserman On Jul 18, 2025, at 8:26 PM, Aram James <ab pol@gmail.com> wrote: Genocide defined: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. "a campaign of genocide" On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 4:04 PM Martin Wasserman <deeperlook@aol.com> wrote: It appears that "genocide" can be defined in several different ways. Perhaps we should stop using that term altogether and stick to words that have clear and unambiguous meanings. On Jul 18, 2025, at 12:25 PM, Aram James <a1:pcl@gmail.com> wrote: I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But contrary to the cries of Israel's fiercest critics, the evidence did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide. By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished ay August. At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a From: Martin Wasserman To: Aram James Cc: Jeff Rosen; Jay Boyarsky; Veenker, Vicki; h.etzko(agmail.com; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Raj Jayadev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneider, James; Binder, Andrew; Gardener, Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanda Conaway; olv anda; Don Austin; jgreenCa�dailynewsgroup.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonga; Baker. Rob; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlouist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Jeff Conrad; Burt, Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District9Casanjoseca.gov; District4©sanjoseca.gov; District5@ sanjoseca.gov; District2©sanjoseca.gov; EPA Today; Gennadv Sheyner; Council, City; city.council©menlopark.gov; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero©cityofepa.orq; Cribbs Anne; <michael.gennaco©oirgroup.com>; Stump, Molly; boardCalpausd.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Rodriguez, Miguel; Cait James; Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman©assembly.ca.gov; Zelkha, Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enbera, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberley; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq; Greg Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauino; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee; Mark Turner; City Attorney; CityCouncil; Michelle Bigelow; Sean Allen; Seher Awan; Pat NI; Carla Torres; David Piper; josh©joshsalcman.com; board©valleywater.orq; boardfeedback(alsmcgov.orq; Jay Boyarsky; Linda Jolley; San Jose Spotlight; vramirez(alredwoodcity.orq Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Monday, July 21, 2025 10:47:06 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Hi Avram, There seems to be a contradiction in your statement. You say you want Israel to be eliminated, but also say that you want it to pay reparations for 100 years. How could it pay reparations if it no longer exists? Martin Wasserman On Jul 20, 2025, at 8:08 PM, Aram James <abjpol@gmail.com> wrote: Subject: A CaII for Change Hi Martin, I want to be very clear about my position. I support the elimination of Israel and advocate for a one -state solution. Israel must pay reparations to the Palestinian people for a hundred years and rebuild Gaza and the West Bank. The genocidal Israeli war criminals must be held fully accountable, just like the Nazi war criminals. As a secular Jew, I find no value in Hebrew scripture; to me, it is merely creative writing and fantasy at best. The nations that have stood up to the Nazi - like Israeli state are the true heroes. Avram "Eliminate Israel Now" Finkelstein On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 7:26 PM Martin Wasserman <deeperlook@aol.com> wrote: The Hebrew Scriptures predict a time when all the nations will gather together against Israel, and God will then intervene on Israel's behalf and judge all those nations with truth and justice. We appear to be approaching that time very rapidly, and I strongly suspect that those people and nations who have dedicated themselves to Israel's destruction will fare very poorly in those judgments! Martin Wasserman On Ju1 20, 2025, at 3:30 PM, Aram James <aDjpol@gmail.com> wrote: Condemn Israel or be complicit in genocide': Colombia's Gustavo Petro By Al Mayadeen English Source: The Guardian 8 Jul 2025 13:47 2 Shares 4 Min Read Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in a Guardian op-ed, accuses Netanyahu of genocide in Gaza and urges global action. Listen On Tuesday, The Guardian published an opinion piece by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in which he accused Israeli Prime Minister Ben'amin Netanyahu of orchestrating a "campaign of devastation" in Gaza and called on the international community to move beyond symbolic outrage toward concrete action in defense of international law. Petro has emerged as one of the most outspoken world leaders condemning "Israel's" war on Gaza, and his latest opinion piece adds to a growing series of forceful critiques directed at the ongoing Israeli genocide. Denouncing what he described as 600 days of systematic atrocities, Petro wrote that the world's inaction risks legitimizing a model of impunity where colonial violence, ethnic cleansing, and siege warfare are normalized against a captive population. "If we fail to act now," he wrote, "we not only betray the Palestinian people, we become complicit in the atrocities committed by Netanyahu's government." Moral break The president highlighted a landmark United Nations General Assembly resolution adopted in September 2024, which called for "Israel" to end its illegal occupation within 12 months. He noted that Colombia was among the 124 countries that voted in favor, thereby assuming binding obligations that include sanctions, legal action, and trade measures. "The clock is now ticking," he warned, reaffirming Colombia's commitment by recalling its concrete step: suspending coal exports to "Israel." Related News 650 days of genocide: 125,000 tons of bombs 2.4 min lives shattered Starved by 'Israel': People of Gaza are dying while the world watches In his piece, Petro mentioned that he had declared earlier this year: "We cannot fuel the machinery that slaughters Palestinian children and then claim neutrality." This is not the first bold move by the Colombian president. In May, his government formally cut diplomatic ties with "Israel," citing what Petro explicitly described as a "genocide." His administration also appointed Colombia's first ambassador to Palestine, pledging medical treatment in Colombian hospitals for injured children from Gaza. The newly appointed ambassador, Jorge Ivan Ospina, later echoed Petro's position, warning of a "macabre intention to erase the identity of a people." In Tuesday's article, Petro praised similar actions taken by countries like Malaysia, which banned Israeli ships from its ports, and South Africa, which brought "Israel" before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on charges of genocide. It is worth noting that Colombia joined that case as an intervening party, further deepening its legal opposition to "Israel's" war. Read more: US defends Israeli use of starvation as weapon of war before ICJ Global reckoning Looking ahead, Petro mentioned that Colombia and South Africa, co-chairs of the Hague Group, will host an emergency summit regarding Gaza on July 15. The conference aims to develop a coordinated, multilateral strategy to isolate "Israel" diplomatically and economically while restoring credibility to the global legal order. With the UN's proposed international peace conference indefinitely postponed, Petro cast the July summit as a necessary corrective to global paralysis. The Colombian president framed the Gaza crisis not just as a moral catastrophe but as an existential test for international law and nations of the Global South. "We can either stand firm in defense of the legal principles that seek to prevent war and conflict," he wrote, "or watch helplessly as the international system collapses under the weight of unchecked power politics." He concluded his piece by stressing that the choice is between complicity in colonial violence and collective resistance against it. • On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 3:12 PM Martin Wasserman <ceeperlooknaol.com> wrote: Aram, Amnesty International is not a credible source on this issue. It appears that the once -respectable organization has been taken over by malevolent actors with a political axe to grind. Their anti -Israel bias is evident throughout the report. They accuse Israel of genocide but make no mention at all of Hamas' explicit genocidal policy against Jews. They accuse Israel of violating international law, but make no reference at all to the fact that Israel is facing a ruthless enemy that observes no international laws whatsoever. When they mention Hamas' transgressions at all, they do it in the mildest language possible, and then use the most damning possible language when describing Israel's actions. They take it as a given that Israel is an apartheid state, a blatantly false accusation that is very easily disproved. They take it as a given that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land, as if the territories of Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the ancient Jewish nation, don't belong to Jews at all, but are instead the property of a fictitious country called "Palestine" which has never actually existed in any historical period. In short, this entire report is a politically motivated "hatchet job" that deserves no credibility whatsoever. Martin Wasserman On Ju1 20, 2025, at 11:39 AM, Aram James <abjpcl@gmail.com> wrote: Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Amnesty International's research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today. The report, 'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman': Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity. "Amnesty International's report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them," said Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International. "Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. "States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel's atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end." Over the past two months the crisis has grown particularly acute in the North Gaza governorate, where a besieged population is facing starvation, displacement and annihilation amid relentless bombardment and suffocating restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. "Our research reveals that, for months, Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza. It continued to do so in defiance of countless warnings about the catastrophic humanitarian situation and of legally binding decisions from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering Israel to take immediate measures to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza," said Agnes Callamard. "Israel has repeatedly argued that its actions in Gaza are lawful and can be justified by its military goal to eradicate Hamas. But genocidal intent can co -exist alongside military goals and does not need to be Israel's sole intent." Amnesty International examined Israel's acts in Gaza closely and in their totality, taking into account their recurrence and simultaneous occurrence, and both their immediate impact and their cumulative and mutually reinforcing consequences. The organization considered the scale and severity of the casualties and destruction over time. It also analysed public statements by officials, finding that prohibited acts were often announced or called for in the first place by high-level officials in charge of the war efforts. "Taking into account the pre-existing context of dispossession, apartheid and unlawful military occupation in which these acts have been committed, we could find only one reasonable conclusion: Israel's intent is the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, whether in parallel with, or as a means to achieve, its military goal of destroying Hamas," said Agnes Callamard. "The atrocity crimes committed on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other armed groups against Israelis and victims of other nationalities, including deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking, can never justify Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza." International jurisprudence recognizes that the perpetrator does not need to succeed in their attempts to destroy the protected group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to have been committed. The commission of prohibited acts with the intent to destroy the group, as such, is sufficient. Amnesty International's report examines in detail Israel's violations in Gaza over nine months between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024. The organization interviewed 212 people, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, healthcare workers, conducted fieldwork and analysed an extensive range of visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery. It also analysed statements by senior Israeli government and military officials, and official Israeli bodies. On multiple occasions, the organization shared its findings with the Israeli authorities but had received no substantive response at the time of publication. Unprecedented scale and magnitude Israel's actions following Hamas's deadly attacks on 7 October 2023 have brought Gaza's population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over 97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families. It has caused unprecedented destruction, which experts say occurred at a level and speed not seen in any other conflict in the 21st century, levelling entire cities and destroying critical infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural and religious sites. It thereby rendered large swathes of Gaza uninhabitable. Mohammed, who fled with his family from Gaza City to Rafah in March 2024 and was displaced again in May 2024, described their struggle to survive in horrifying conditions: "Here in Deir al-Balah, it's like an apocalypse... You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat, and there is no clean water, no toilets, all while the bombing never stops. You feel like you are subhuman here." Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death. Israel also subjected hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza to incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment. Viewed in isolation, some of the acts investigated by Amnesty International constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law. But in looking at the broader picture of Israel's military campaign and the cumulative impact of its policies and acts, genocidal intent is the only reasonable conclusion. Intent to destroy To establish Israel's specific intent to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, Amnesty International analysed the overall pattern of Israel's conduct in Gaza, reviewed dehumanizing and genocidal statements by Israeli government and military officials, particularly those at the highest levels, and considered the context of Israel's system of apartheid, its inhumane blockade of Gaza and the unlawful 57 -year -old military occupation of the Palestinian territory. Before reaching its conclusion, Amnesty International examined Israel's claims that its military lawfully targeted Hamas and other armed groups throughout Gaza, and that the resulting unprecedented destruction and denial of aid were the outcome of unlawful conduct by Hamas and other armed groups, such as locating fighters among the civilian population or the diversion of aid. The organization concluded these claims are not credible. The presence of Hamas fighters near or within a densely populated area does not absolve Israel from its obligations to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. Its research found Israel repeatedly failed to do so, committing multiple crimes under international law for which there can be no justification based on Hamas's actions. Amnesty International also found no evidence that the diversion of aid could explain Israel's extreme and deliberate restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. In its analysis, the organization also considered alternative arguments such as ones that Israel was acting recklessly or that it simply wanted to destroy Hamas and did not care if it needed to destroy Palestinians in the process, demonstrating a callous disregard for their lives rather than genocidal intent. Our damning findings must serve as a wake- up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International However, regardless of whether Israel sees the destruction of Palestinians as instrumental to destroying Hamas or as an acceptable by-product of this goal, this view of Palestinians as disposable and not worthy of consideration is in itself evidence of genocidal intent. Many of the unlawful acts documented by Amnesty International were preceded by officials urging their implementation. The organization reviewed 102 statements that were issued by Israeli government and military officials and others between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2024 and dehumanized Palestinians, called for or justified genocidal acts or other crimes against them. Of these, Amnesty International identified 22 statements made by senior officials in charge of managing the offensive that appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts, providing direct evidence of genocidal intent. This language was frequently replicated, including by Israeli soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by audiovisual content verified by Amnesty International showing soldiers making calls to "erase" Gaza or to make it uninhabitable, and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities. Killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm Amnesty International documented the genocidal acts of killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza by reviewing the results of investigations it conducted into 15 air strikes between 7 October 2023 and 20 April 2024 that killed at least 334 civilians, including 141 children, and wounded hundreds of others. Amnesty International found no evidence that any of these strikes were directed at a military objective. In one illustrative case, on 20 April 2024, an Israeli air strike destroyed the Abdelal family house in the Al-Jneinah neighbourhood in eastern Rafah, killing three generations of Palestinians, including 16 children, while they were sleeping. While these represent just a fraction of Israel's aerial attacks, they are indicative of a broader pattern of repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects or deliberately indiscriminate attacks. The attacks were also conducted in ways designed to cause a very high number of fatalities and injuries among the civilian population. Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction The report documents how Israel deliberately inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza intended to lead, over time, to their destruction. These conditions were imposed through three simultaneous patterns that repeatedly compounded the effect of each other's devastating impacts: damage to and destruction of life - sustaining infrastructure and other objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population; the repeated use of sweeping, arbitrary and confusing mass "evacuation" orders to forcibly displace almost all of Gaza's population; and the denial and obstruction of the delivery of essential services, humanitarian assistance and other life-saving supplies into and within Gaza. After 7 October 2023, Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza cutting off electricity, water and fuel. In the nine months reviewed for this report, Israel maintained a suffocating, unlawful blockade, tightly controlled access to energy sources, failed to facilitate meaningful humanitarian access within Gaza, and obstructed the import and delivery of life- saving goods and humanitarian aid, particularly to areas north of Wadi Gaza. They thereby exacerbated an already existing humanitarian crisis. This, combined with the extensive damage to Gaza's homes, hospitals, water and sanitation facilities and agricultural land, and mass forced displacement, caused catastrophic levels of hunger and led to the spread of diseases at alarming rates. The impact was especially harsh on young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women, with anticipated long-term consequences for their health. The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International Time and again, Israel had the chance to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, yet for over a year it has repeatedly refused to take steps blatantly within its power to do so, such as opening sufficient access points to Gaza or lifting tight restrictions on what could enter the Strip or their obstruction of aid deliveries within Gaza while the situation has grown progressively worse. Through its repeated "evacuation" orders Israel displaced nearly 1.9 million Palestinians — 90% of Gaza's population — into ever -shrinking, unsafe pockets of land under inhumane conditions, some of them up to 10 times. These multiple waves of forced displacement left many jobless and deeply traumatized, especially since some 70% of Gaza's residents are refugees or descendants of refugees whose towns and villages were ethnically cleansed by Israel during the 1948 Nakba. Despite conditions quickly becoming unfit for human life, Israeli authorities refused to consider measures that would have protected displaced civilians and ensured their basic needs were met, showing that their actions were deliberate. They refused to allow those displaced to return to their homes in northern Gaza or relocate temporarily to other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory or Israel, continuing to deny many Palestinians their right to return under international law to areas they were displaced from in 1948. They did so knowing that there was nowhere safe for Palestinians in Gaza to flee to. Accountability for genocide "The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience," said Agnes Callamard. "Governments must stop pretending they are powerless to end this genocide, which was enabled by decades of impunity for Israel's violations of international law. States need to move beyond mere expressions of regret or dismay and take strong and sustained international action, however uncomfortable a finding of genocide may be for some of Israel's allies. "The International Criminal Court's (ICC) arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued last month offer real hope of long -overdue justice for victims. States must demonstrate their respect for the court's decision and for universal international law principles by arresting and handing over those wanted by the ICC. "We are calling on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to urgently consider adding genocide to the list of crimes it is investigating and for all states to use every legal avenue to bring perpetrators to justice. No one should be allowed to commit genocide and remain unpunished." Amnesty International is also calling for all civilian hostages to be released unconditionally and for Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups responsible for the crimes committed on 7 October to be held to account. The organization is also calling for the UN Security Council to impose targeted sanctions against Israeli and Hamas officials most implicated in crimes under international law. Background On 7 October 2023 Hamas and other armed groups indiscriminately fired rockets into southern Israel and carried out deliberate mass killings and hostage-takina there, killing 1,200 people, including over 800 civilians, and abducted 223 civilians and captured 27 soldiers. The crimes perpetrated by Hamas and other armed groups during this attack will be the focus of a forthcoming Amnesty International report. Since October 2023, Amnesty International has conducted in- depth investigations into the multiple violations and crimes under international law committed by Israeli forces, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects and deliberately indiscriminate attacks killing hundreds of civilians, as well as other unlawful attacks on and collective punishment of the civilian population. The organization has called on the Office of the ICC Prosecutor to expedite its investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine and is campaigning for an immediate ceasefire. For the Hebrew translation of this press release, click here. INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY MIDDLE EAST MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA NEWS PRESS RELEASE WAR CRIMES AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Related Content COUNTRY Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory NEWS New NATO defence commitments must not come at cost of human rights NEWS Gaza: Starvation or gunfire — this is not a humanitarian response NEWS DRC: Peace deal with Rwanda fails to address serious crimes committed in eastern DRC NEWS Gaza: Evidence points to Israel's continued use of starvation to inflict genocide against Palestinians Recently added Cambodia: Scamming crisis survivors must be protected amid police crackdown Ireland: Amnesty's head urges Irish government to press aheac with Occupiec Territories Bi11 Angola: Authorities must res sect and ensure the right to freecom of peaceful assembly Russia: Proposed amendments to counter - extremism laws escalate assault on dissent EU-Israel: Refusal to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement is a `cruel and unlawful betrayal' DONATE TO PROTECT HUMAN RIGHTS Women's Day protest in Mexico Together we can fight for human rights everywhere. Your donation can transform the lives of millions. ABOUT US Contact Us How We're Run Modern Slavery Act Statement Finances RESOURCES Media Centre Human Rights Education Human Rights Courses Annual report archive GET INVOLVED Join Take Action Volunteer LATEST News Campaigns Research WORK WITH US If you are talented and passionate about human rights then Amnesty International wants to hear from you. Privacy Policy Accessibility Cookie Statement Permissions Refunds of Donations © 2025 Amnesty International F ,y�y FOLLOW ys ON: R° N"s x iTik On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 10:03 AM Martin Wasserman <deeperlook@aol.com> wrote: Aram, If that's the definition of genocide, then Israel is clearly NOT committing genocide in Gaza. If Israel were trying to kill as many Gazans as possible, the death toll would be much, much higher than it is. They wouldn't allow any food or medicine in at all, and they wouldn't issue evacuation warnings before striking Hamas targets. The truth is, Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, but Hamas makes it very difficult by deliberately placing their command centers in civilian locations such as schools and hospitals. The only group that Israel wants to destroy is Hamas, which does have an explicit policy of genocide (by your definition) against Jews. Yes, the Gazans are suffering, but Hamas could end their suffering tomorrow if they wanted to. All they have to do is lay down their arms and release the hostages, and the war would be over immediately. But Hamas has no interest in ending the suffering of the Gazans. What they're actually calling for is an open-ended war of attrition against Israel, no matter what the cost to their own people. Martin Wasserman On Jul 18, 2025, at 8:26 PM, Aram James <abjpol@gmail.com> wrote: Genocide defined: the celiberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. "a campaign of genocide" On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 4:04 PM Martin Wasserman <deeDerlook@aol.com> wrote: It appears that "genocide" can be defined in several different ways. Perhaps we should stop using that term altogether and stick to words that have clear and unambiguous meanings. On Jul 18, 2025, at 12:25 PM, Aram James <abjpol@gmail.com> wrote: I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But contrary to the cries of Israel's fiercest critics, the evidence did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide. By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August. At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a " From: City Mgr To: Council, City; Shikada. Ed Cc: Executive Leadership Team; City Mgr; Clerk, City Subject: City Council Bundle - July 21 Date: Monday, July 21, 2025 10:43:09 AM Attachments: image001.pnq image002.pnq FW Creek Encampments Endangering PA Home Owners.msq RE Formal Complaint of city employee David Hernandez.msq RE Loss of trees in Palo Alto.msq RE Another example why residents are losina faith in local oovernment.msq FW Proclamation Recuest.msq RE IndustrialTransportCommercial Safety.msq Dear Mayor and Council Members, On behalf of City Manager Ed Shikada, please see the attached staff responses to emails received in the Council inbox through July 21, 2025. Respectfully, Danille CITY OF PALO ALTO Danille Rice Administrative Assistant City Manager's Office l Human Resources l Transportation (650) 329-2229 l danille.rice@PaloAlto.aov www.PaloAlto.gov Please click here to provide feedback on our City's services From: Martin Wasserman To: Sean Allen Cc: Aram James; Jeff Rosen; Jay Boyarsky; Veenker, Vicki; h.etzko@gmail.com; jessica@speiser.net; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Raj Javacev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneider, James; Binder, Andrew; Gardener, Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanda Conaway; oly anda; Don Austin; jason.green@bayareanewsgroup.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robe Salonga; roberta ahlquist; Rob Baker; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlquist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Freddie.Quintana@sen.ca.gov; Jeff Conrad; Burt Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmemper Chappie Jones; District9@sanjoseca.gov; District4@sanjoseca.gov; District5@sanjoseca.gov; District2@sanjoseca.gov; Today EPA; Gennady Sheyner; Council, City; city.council@menlopark.gov; Betsy Nash; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero@citvofepa.orq; Cribbs, Anne; michael.aennaco@oirgroun.com; Stump, Molly; boarc@pausc.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Miguel Rodriguez; Cait James; Tim James; Josh Becker; Assemblvmember.Berman@assemblv.ca.aov; Zelkha, Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enbero, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Greg Tanaka; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberley; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq; Greg Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauinq; Yi C en; Donna Wallach; Mic ie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee; Mark Turner; City Attorney; CityCouncil; Michelle Bigelow; Seher Awan; Pat M; Carla Torres; David Piper Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Monday, July 21, 2025 10:35:00 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Sean, I appreciate your concern for humanitarian issues. However, the reality is that when a nation is fighting for its very existence, as Israel is doing right now, its highest priority has to be to defeat the enemy, and caring for the humanitarian needs of enemy civilians has to be a much lower priority. In fact, most nations would ridicule the idea of helping enemy civilians while a war is ongoing, arguing that it's equivalent to helping the enemy himself. During World War II, for example, the overriding imperative was victory, and the US showed no concern for the humanitarian well-being of the enemy civilians it was bombing, nor did any other nation involved in that conflict. Humanitarian concerns could be addressed after the war, but not during it. It's also worth noting that Israelis don't necessarily see Gazan civilians as innocent bystanders. They remember how they voted Hamas into power, and how many of them followed Hamas into Israel on October 7 and took direct part in the plunder and pillage of that day. They also recall the outbursts of delirious joy as the Israeli hostages were paraded through the streets of Gaza, and how not a single Gazan did anything to help the Israeli hostages escape from their captivity. Nevertheless, Israel has shown more concern for humanitarian issues than virtually any other country in a similar situation. Earlier in the war, it allowed huge amounts of food and supplies into Gaza, even though it knew that most of the aid was being stolen by Hamas, thereby prolonging the war and making victory more difficult to achieve. Incidentally, there were many in Israel who thought this policy was very foolish and highly counterproductive. Regards, Martin Wasserman On Ju1 20, 2025, at 8:34 PM, Sean Allen <sallen6444@yahoo.com> wrote: Martin, Thank you for sharing your perspective. While it's important to consider the complex dynamics at play, the impact of rationing food and resources cannot be overlooked. Limiting access to basic necessities can lead to dire consequences for the civilian population, contributing to significant suffering and hardship, irrespective of intent. Historically, we have seen that during crises, people instinctively fight and even resort to violence over limited resources. This was evident in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the United States, where widespread desperation for food, water, and safety led to chaos and alarming acts of violence. Reports from that time highlighted how individuals looted stores and clashed with each other as they scrambled for basic survival needs, demonstrating how fragile social order can become when resources are scarce. Similarly, in Somalia, we witnessed violence surrounding the distribution of humanitarian aid, as factions vied for control over the resources being provided to those in need. Rationing food and resources has the potential to produce outcomes that are as devastating as direct violence, akin to the effects of bombing a population. Furthermore, military units should never base their decisions to slaughter non-combatants on the basis that their opposition does not release hostages, regardless of the justification for conflict. Unless the motive is to create more chaos through infighting, which would lead to similar devastation as bombing non-combatant communities, the humane approach is to provide these individuals with the necessary amount of humanitarian aid and stop the slaughter. Bombing non-combatants is not war; it's slaughter and inhumane. Even our Constitution prohibits punishing a group of people because of the actions of others. While military objectives may focus on specific groups, we must recognize that the broader impact on civilian lives remains profound. The suffering of Gazans should not be diminished or overlooked, as their well-being is affected by the decisions made in the context of this conflict. Best, Sean Allen Sent from my iPhone On Jul 20, 2025, at 3:30 PM, Aram James <abjpol@gmail.com> wrote: Condemn Israel or be complicit in genocide': Colombia's Gustavo Petro By Al Mayadeen English Source: The Guardian 8 Jul 2025 13:47 2 Shares ® 4 Min Read Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in a Guardian op-ed, accuses Netanyahu of genocide in Gaza and urges global action. Listen On Tuesday, The Guardian published an opinion piece by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in which he accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of orchestrating a "campaign of devastation" in Gaza and called on the international community to move beyond symbolic outrage toward concrete action in defense of international law. Petro has emerged as one of the most outspoken world leaders condemning "Israel's" war on Gaza, and his latest opinion piece adds to a growing series of forceful critiques directed at the ongoing Israeli genocide. Denouncing what he described as 600 days of systematic atrocities, Petro wrote that the world's inaction risks legitimizing a model of impunity where colonial violence, ethnic cleansing, and siege warfare are normalized against a captive population. "If we fail to act now," he wrote, "we not only betray the Palestinian people, we become complicit in the atrocities committed by Netanyahu's government." Moral break The president highlighted a landmark United Nations General Assembly resolution adopted in September 2024, which called for "Israel" to end its illegal occupation within 12 months. He noted that Colombia was among the 124 countries that voted in favor, thereby assuming binding obligations that include sanctions, legal action, and trade measures. "The clock is now ticking," he warned, reaffirming Colombia's commitment by recalling its concrete step: suspending coal exports to "Israel." Related News Ei 650 days of genocide: 125,000 tons of bombs 2.4 min lives shattered Starved by 'Israel': People of Gaza are dying while the world watches In his piece, Petro mentioned that he had declared earlier this year: "We cannot fuel the machinery that slaughters Palestinian children and then claim neutrality." This is not the first bold move by the Colombian president. In May, his government formally cut diplomatic ties with "Israel," citing what Petro explicitly described as a "genocide." His administration also appointed Colombia's first ambassador to Palestine, pledging medical treatment in Colombian hospitals for injured children from Gaza. The newly appointed ambassador, Jorge Ivan Ospina, later echoed Petro's position, warning of a "macabre intention to erase the identity of a people." In Tuesday's article, Petro praised similar actions taken by countries like Malaysia, which banned Israeli ships from its ports, and South Africa, which brought "Israel" before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on charges of genocide. It is worth noting that Colombia joined that case as an intervening party, further deepening its legal opposition to "Israel's" war. Read more: US defends Israeli use of starvation as weapon of war before ICJ Global reckoning Looking ahead, Petro mentioned that Colombia and South Africa, co-chairs of the Hague Group, will host an emergency summit regarding Gaza on July 15. The conference aims to develop a coordinated, multilateral strategy to isolate "Israel" diplomatically and economically while restoring credibility to the global legal order. With the UN's proposed international peace conference indefinitely postponed, Petro cast the July summit as a necessary corrective to global paralysis. The Colombian president framed the Gaza crisis not just as a moral catastrophe but as an existential test for international law and nations of the Global South. "We can either stand firm in defense of the legal principles that seek to prevent war and conflict," he wrote, "or watch helplessly as the international system collapses under the weight of unchecked power politics." He concluded his piece by stressing that the choice is between complicity in colonial violence and collective resistance against it. • On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 3:12 PM Martin Wasserman <dee )erlook@aol.com> wrote: Aram, Amnesty International is not a credible source on this issue. It appears that the once -respectable organization has been taken over by malevolent actors with a political axe to grind. Their anti -Israel bias is evident throughout the report. They accuse Israel of genocide but make no mention at all of Hamas' explicit genocidal policy against Jews. They accuse Israel of violating international law, but make no reference at all to the fact that Israel is facing a ruthless enemy that observes no international laws whatsoever. When they mention Hamas' transgressions at all, they do it in the mildest language possible, and then use the most damning possible language when describing Israel's actions. They take it as a given that Israel is an apartheid state, a blatantly false accusation that is very easily disproved. They take it as a given that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land, as if the territories of Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the ancient Jewish nation, don't belong to Jews at all, but are instead the property of a fictitious country called "Palestine" which has never actually existed in any historical period. In short, this entire report is a politically motivated "hatchet job" that deserves no credibility whatsoever. Martin Wasserman On Ju1 20, 2025, at 11:39 AM, Aram James <a3jpol com> wrote: Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Amnesty International's research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today. The report, 'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman': Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity. "Amnesty International's report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them," said Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International. "Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. "States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel's atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end." Over the past two months the crisis has grown particularly acute in the North Gaza governorate, where a besieged population is facing starvation, displacement and annihilation amid relentless bombardment and suffocating restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. "Our research reveals that, for months, Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza. It continued to do so in defiance of countless warnings about the catastrophic humanitarian situation and of legally binding decisions from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering Israel to take immediate measures to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza," said Agnes Callamard. "Israel has repeatedly argued that its actions in Gaza are lawful and can be justified by its military goal to eradicate Hamas. But genocidal intent can co -exist alongside military goals and does not need to be Israel's sole intent." Amnesty International examined Israel's acts in Gaza closely and in their totality, taking into account their recurrence and simultaneous occurrence, and both their immediate impact and their cumulative and mutually reinforcing consequences. The organization considered the scale and severity of the casualties and destruction over time. It also analysed public statements by officials, finding that prohibited acts were often announced or called for in the first place by high-level officials in charge of the war efforts. "Taking into account the pre-existing context of dispossession, apartheid and unlawful military occupation in which these acts have been committed, we could find only one reasonable conclusion: Israel's intent is the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, whether in parallel with, or as a means to achieve, its military goal of destroying Hamas," said Agnes Callamard. "The atrocity crimes committed on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other armed groups against Israelis and victims of other nationalities, including deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking, can never justify Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza." International jurisprudence recognizes that the perpetrator does not need to succeed in their attempts to destroy the protected group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to have been committed. The commission of prohibited acts with the intent to destroy the group, as such, is sufficient. Amnesty International's report examines in detail Israel's violations in Gaza over nine months between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024. The organization interviewed 212 people, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, healthcare workers, conducted fieldwork and analysed an extensive range of visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery. It also analysed statements by senior Israeli government and military officials, and official Israeli bodies. On multiple occasions, the organization shared its findings with the Israeli authorities but had received no substantive response at the time of publication. Unprecedented scale and magnitude Israel's actions following Hamas's deadly attacks on 7 October 2023 have brought Gaza's population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over 97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families. It has caused unprecedented destruction, which experts say occurred at a level and speed not seen in any other conflict in the 21st century, levelling entire cities and destroying critical infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural and religious sites. It thereby rendered large swathes of Gaza uninhabitable. Mohammed, who fled with his family from Gaza City to Rafah in March 2024 and was displaced again in May 2024, described their struggle to survive in horrifying conditions: "Here in Deir al-Balah, it's like an apocalypse... You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat, and there is no clean water, no toilets, all while the bombing never stops. You feel like you are subhuman here." Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death. Israel also subjected hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza to incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment. Viewed in isolation, some of the acts investigated by Amnesty International constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law. But in looking at the broader picture of Israel's military campaign and the cumulative impact of its policies and acts, genocidal intent is the only reasonable conclusion. Intent to destroy To establish Israel's specific intent to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, Amnesty International analysed the overall pattern of Israel's conduct in Gaza, reviewed dehumanizing and genocidal statements by Israeli government and military officials, particularly those at the highest levels, and considered the context of Israel's system of apartheid, its inhumane blockade of Gaza and the unlawful 57 -year -old military occupation of the Palestinian territory. Before reaching its conclusion, Amnesty International examined Israel's claims that its military lawfully targeted Hamas and other armed groups throughout Gaza, and that the resulting unprecedented destruction and denial of aid were the outcome of unlawful conduct by Hamas and other armed groups, such as locating fighters among the civilian population or the diversion of aid. The organization concluded these claims are not credible. The presence of Hamas fighters near or within a densely populated area does not absolve Israel from its obligations to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. Its research found Israel repeatedly failed to do so, committing multiple crimes under international law for which there can be no justification based on Hamas's actions. Amnesty International also found no evidence that the diversion of aid could explain Israel's extreme and deliberate restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. In its analysis, the organization also considered alternative arguments such as ones that Israel was acting recklessly or that it simply wanted to destroy Hamas and did not care if it needed to destroy Palestinians in the process, demonstrating a callous disregard for their lives rather than genocidal intent. Our damning findings must serve as a wake- up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International However, regardless of whether Israel sees the destruction of Palestinians as instrumental to destroying Hamas or as an acceptable by-product of this goal, this view of Palestinians as disposable and not worthy of consideration is in itself evidence of genocidal intent. Many of the unlawful acts documented by Amnesty International were preceded by officials urging their implementation. The organization reviewed 102 statements that were issued by Israeli government and military officials and others between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2024 and dehumanized Palestinians, called for or justified genocidal acts or other crimes against them. Of these, Amnesty International identified 22 statements made by senior officials in charge of managing the offensive that appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts, providing direct evidence of genocidal intent. This language was frequently replicated, including by Israeli soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by audiovisual content verified by Amnesty International showing soldiers making calls to "erase" Gaza or to make it uninhabitable, and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities. Killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm Amnesty International documented the genocidal acts of killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza by reviewing the results of investigations it conducted into 15 air strikes between 7 October 2023 and 20 April 2024 that killed at least 334 civilians, including 141 children, and wounded hundreds of others. Amnesty International found no evidence that any of these strikes were directed at a military objective. In one illustrative case, on 20 April 2024, an Israeli air strike destroyed the Abdelal family house in the Al-Jneinah neighbourhood in eastern Rafah, killing three generations of Palestinians, including 16 children, while they were sleeping. While these represent just a fraction of Israel's aerial attacks, they are indicative of a broader pattern of repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects or deliberately indiscriminate attacks. The attacks were also conducted in ways designed to cause a very high number of fatalities and injuries among the civilian population. Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction The report documents how Israel deliberately inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza intended to lead, over time, to their destruction. These conditions were imposed through three simultaneous patterns that repeatedly compounded the effect of each other's devastating impacts: damage to and destruction of life - sustaining infrastructure and other objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population; the repeated use of sweeping, arbitrary and confusing mass "evacuation" orders to forcibly displace almost all of Gaza's population; and the denial and obstruction of the delivery of essential services, humanitarian assistance and other life-saving supplies into and within Gaza. After 7 October 2023, Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza cutting off electricity, water and fuel. In the nine months reviewed for this report, Israel maintained a suffocating, unlawful blockade, tightly controlled access to energy sources, failed to facilitate meaningful humanitarian access within Gaza, and obstructed the import and delivery of life- saving goods and humanitarian aid, particularly to areas north of Wadi Gaza. They thereby exacerbated an already existing humanitarian crisis. This, combined with the extensive damage to Gaza's homes, hospitals, water and sanitation facilities and agricultural land, and mass forced displacement, caused catastrophic levels of hunger and led to the spread of diseases at alarming rates. The impact was especially harsh on young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women, with anticipated long-term consequences for their health. The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International Time and again, Israel had the chance to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, yet for over a year it has repeatedly refused to take steps blatantly within its power to do so, such as opening sufficient access points to Gaza or lifting tight restrictions on what could enter the Strip or their obstruction of aid deliveries within Gaza while the situation has grown progressively worse. Through its repeated "evacuation" orders Israel displaced nearly 1.9 million Palestinians — 90% of Gaza's population — into ever -shrinking, unsafe pockets of land under inhumane conditions, some of them up to 10 times. These multiple waves of forced displacement left many jobless and deeply traumatized, especially since some 70% of Gaza's residents are refugees or descendants of refugees whose towns and villages were ethnically cleansed by Israel during the 1948 Nakba. Despite conditions quickly becoming unfit for human life, Israeli authorities refused to consider measures that would have protected displaced civilians and ensured their basic needs were met, showing that their actions were deliberate. They refused to allow those displaced to return to their homes in northern Gaza or relocate temporarily to other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory or Israel, continuing to deny many Palestinians their right to return under international law to areas they were displaced from in 1948. They did so knowing that there was nowhere safe for Palestinians in Gaza to flee to. Accountability for genocide "The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience," said Agnes Callamard. "Governments must stop pretending they are powerless to end this genocide, which was enabled by decades of impunity for Israel's violations of international law. States need to move beyond mere expressions of regret or dismay and take strong and sustained international action, however uncomfortable a finding of genocide may be for some of Israel's allies. "The International Criminal Court's (ICC) arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued last month offer real hope of long -overdue justice for victims. States must demonstrate their respect for the court's decision and for universal international law principles by arresting and handing over those wanted by the ICC. "We are calling on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to urgently consider adding genocide to the list of crimes it is investigating and for all states to use every legal avenue to bring perpetrators to justice. No one should be allowed to commit genocide and remain unpunished." Amnesty International is also calling for all civilian hostages to be released unconditionally and for Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups responsible for the crimes committed on 7 October to be held to account. The organization is also calling for the UN Security Council to impose targeted sanctions against Israeli and Hamas officials most implicated in crimes under international law. Background On 7 October 2023 Hamas and other armed groups indiscriminately fired rockets into southern Israel and carried out deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking there, killing 1,200 people, including over 800 civilians, and abducted 223 civilians and captured 27 soldiers. The crimes perpetrated by Hamas and other armed groups during this attack will be the focus of a forthcoming Amnesty International report. Since October 2023, Amnesty International has conducted in- depth investigations into the multiple violations and crimes under international law committed by Israeli forces, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects and deliberately indiscriminate attacks killing hundreds of civilians, as well as other unlawful attacks on and collective punishment of the civilian population. The organization has called on the Office of the ICC Prosecutor to expedite its investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine and is campaigning for an immediate ceasefire. For the Hebrew translation of this press release, click here. INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY MIDDLE EAST MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA NEWS PRESS RELEASE WAR CRIMES AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Related Content COUNTRY Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory NEWS New NATO defence commitments must not come at cost of human rights NEWS Gaza: Starvation or gunfire — this is not a humanitarian response NEWS DRC: Peace deal with Rwanda fails to address serious crimes committed in eastern DRC NEWS Gaza: Evidence points to Israel's continued use of starvation to inflict genocide against Palestinians Recently added Cam3ocia: Scamming crisis survivors must De protected amid police crackdown Ireland: Amnesty's head urges Irish government to press ahead with Occupied Territories Bill Angola: Authorities must respec and ensure the right to freedom of peaceful assembly Russia: Proposed amendments to counter - extremism laws escalate assault on dissent EU-Israel: Refusal to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement is a `cruel anc unlawful betrayal' DONATE TO PROTECT HUMAN RIGHTS Women's Day protest in Mexico i0 Together we can fight for human rights everywhere. Your donation can transform the lives of millions. ABOUT US Contact Us How We're Run Modern Slavery Act Statement Finances RESOURCES Media Centre Human Rights Education Human Rights Courses Annual report archive GET INVOLVED Join Take Action Volunteer LATEST News Campaigns Research WORK WITH US If you are talented and passionate about human rights then Amnesty International wants to hear from you. Privacy Policy Accessibility Cookie Statement Permissions Refunds of Donations © 2025 Amnesty International FOL�W US ON: On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 10:03 AM Martin Wasserman <ceeperlook@aol.com> wrote: Aram, If that's the definition of genocide, then Israel is clearly NOT committing genocide in Gaza. If Israel were trying to kill as many Gazans as possible, the death toll would be much, much higher than it is. They wouldn't allow any food or medicine in at all, and they wouldn't issue evacuation warnings before striking Hamas targets. The truth is, Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, but Hamas makes it very difficult by deliberately placing their command centers in civilian locations such as schools and hospitals. The only group that Israel wants to destroy is Hamas, which does have an explicit policy of genocide (by your definition) against Jews. Yes, the Gazans are suffering, but Hamas could end their suffering tomorrow if they wanted to. All they have to do is lay down their arms and release the hostages, and the war would be over immediately. But Hamas has no interest in ending the suffering of the Gazans. What they're actually calling for is an open-ended war of attrition against Israel, no matter what the cost to their own people. Martin Wasserman On Jul 18, 2025, at 8:26 PM, Aram James <abjpcl@gmail.com> wrote: Genocide defined: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. "a campaign of genocide" On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 4:04 PM Martin Wasserman <ceeperlook@aol.com> wrote: It appears that "genocide" can be defined in several different ways. Perhaps we should stop using that term altogether and stick to words that have clear and unambiguous meanings. On Jul 18, 2025, at 12:25 PM, Aram James <abj Ddl @gmail.com> wrote: I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But contrary to the cries of Israel's fiercest critics, the evidence did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide. By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August. At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a "huge price" for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas was operating, "into maple," and he called on "the residents of Gaza" to "leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere." Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember "what Amalek did to you," a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to "kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings" of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting "human animals" and, later, called for "total annihilation." Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on Xthat Israel's task must be "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth." Israel's actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one. This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Image People inspecting a huge pile of rubble. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend. *** The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." In determining what constitutes genocide, therefore, we must both establish intent and show that it is being carried out. In Israel's case, that intent has been publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. But intent can also be derived from a pattern of operations on the ground, and this pattern became dear by May 2024 — and has since become ever clearer — as the I.D.F. has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most genocide scholars are cautious about applying this term to contemporary events, precisely because of the tendency, since it was coined by the Jewish -Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, to attribute it to any case of massacre or inhumanity. Indeed, some argue that the categorization should be entirely discarded, because it often serves more to express outrage than to identify a particular crime. Yet as Mr. Lemkin recognized, and as the United Nations later agreed, it is crucial to be able to distinguish the attempt to destroy a particular group of people from other crimes under international law, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is because, while other crimes entail indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians as individuals, genocide denotes the killing of people as members of a group, geared at irreparably destroying the group itself so that it would never be able to reconstitute itself as a political, social or cultural entity. And, as the international community signaled by adopting the convention, it is incumbent upon all signatory states to prevent such an attempt, to do all they can to stop it while it is occurring and to subsequently punish those who were engaged in this crime of crimes — even if it occurred within the borders of a sovereign state. The designation has major political, legal and moral ramifications. Nations, politicians and military personnel suspected of, indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide are seen as beyond the pale of humanity and may compromise or lose their right to remain members of the international community. A finding by the International Court of Justice that a particular state is engaged in genocide, especially if enforced by the U.N. Security Council, can lead to severe sanctions. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox. Politicians or generals indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide or other breaches of international humanitarian law by the International Criminal Court can face arrest outside of their country. And a society that condones and is complicit in genocide, whatever the stand of its individual citizens may be, will carry this mark of Cain long after the fires of hatred and violence are put out. *** From: Sean Allen To: Aram James Cc: Martin Wasserman; Jeff Rosen; Jav Bovarskv; Veenker, Vicki; h.etzko@amail.com; iessica@speiser.net; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Raj Jayadev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneider, James; Binder, Andrew; Gardener, Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanda Conaway; yolanda; Don Austin; jason.areen@bavareanewsaroup.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonga; roberta ahlauist; Rob Baker; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlcuist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Freddie.Quintana sen.ca.gov; Jeff Conrad; Burt, Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District9 sanjoseca.gov; District4 sanjoseca.gov; District5@sanioseca.aov; District2@sanioseca.aov; Tocav EPA; Gennacv Shevner; Council, City; citv.council@menlopark.gov; Betsy Nash; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero cityofeoa.orq; Cribbs, Anne; michael.gennaco@oirgroup.com; Stump, Molly; board@pausd.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Miguel Rodriguez; Cait James; Tim James; Josh Becker; Assemblymember.Berman@assembly.ca.gov; Zelkha Mile; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enberq, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Greg Tanaka; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberley; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq; Greg Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauinq; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee; Mark Turner; City Attorney; CityCouncil; Michelle Bigelow; Seher Awan; Pat M; Carla Torres; David Piper Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Monday, July 21, 2025 8:31:09 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. This message needs your attention • This is a personal email address. • This is their first email to your company. Mark Safe Report Powered by Mimecast Martin, Thank you for sharing your perspective. While it's important to consider the complex dynamics at play, the impact of rationing food and resources cannot be overlooked. Limiting access to basic necessities can lead to dire consequences for the civilian population, contributing to significant suffering and hardship, irrespective of intent. Historically, we have seen that during crises, people instinctively fight and even resort to violence over limited resources. This was evident in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the United States, where widespread desperation for food, water, and safety led to chaos and alarming acts of violence. Reports from that time highlighted how individuals looted stores and clashed with each other as they scrambled for basic survival needs, demonstrating how fragile social order can become when resources are scarce. Similarly, in Somalia, we witnessed violence surrounding the distribution of humanitarian aid, as factions vied for control over the resources being provided to those in need. Rationing food and resources has the potential to produce outcomes that are as devastating as direct violence, akin to the effects of bombing a population. Furthermore, military units should never base their decisions to slaughter non-combatants on the basis that their opposition does not release hostages, regardless of the justification for conflict. Unless the motive is to create more chaos through infighting, which would lead to similar devastation as bombing non-combatant communities, the humane approach is to provide these individuals with the necessary amount of humanitarian aid and stop the slaughter. Bombing non-combatants is not war; it's slaughter and inhumane. Even our Constitution prohibits punishing a group of people because of the actions of others. While military objectives may focus on specific groups, we must recognize that the broader impact on civilian lives remains profound. The suffering of Gazans should not be diminished or overlooked, as their well-being is affected by the decisions made in the context of this conflict. Best, Sean Allen Sent from my iPhone On Jul 20, 2025, at 3:30 PM, Aram James <abjpol@gmail.com> wrote: Condemn Israel or be complicit in genocide': Colombia's Gustavo Petro By Al Mayadeen English Source: The Guardian 8 Jul 2025 13:47 2 Shares la 4 Min Read Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in a Guardian op-ed, accuses Netanyahu of genocide in Gaza and urges global action. Listen On Tuesday, The Guardian published an opinion piece by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in which he accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of orchestrating a "campaign of devastation" in Gaza and called on the international community to move beyond symbolic outrage toward concrete action in defense of international law. Petro has emerged as one of the most outspoken world leaders condemning "Israel's" war on Gaza, and his latest opinion piece adds to a growing series of forceful critiques directed at the ongoing Israeli genocide. Denouncing what he described as 600 days of systematic atrocities, Petro wrote that the world's inaction risks legitimizing a model of impunity where colonial violence, ethnic cleansing, and siege warfare are normalized against a captive population. "If we fail to act now," he wrote, "we not only betray the Palestinian people, we become complicit in the atrocities committed by Netanyahu's government." Moral break The president highlighted a landmark United Nations General Assembly resolution adopted in September 2024, which called for "Israel" to end its illegal occupation within 12 months. He noted that Colombia was among the 124 countries that voted in favor, thereby assuming binding obligations that include sanctions, legal action, and trade measures. "The clock is now ticking," he warned, reaffirming Colombia's commitment by recalling its concrete step: suspending coal exports to "Israel." Related News il 650 days of genocide: 125,000 tons of bombs 2.4 min lives shattered 0 Starved by 'Israel': People of Gaza are dying while the world watches In his piece, Petro mentioned that he had declared earlier this year: "We cannot fuel the machinery that slaughters Palestinian children and then claim neutrality." This is not the first bold move by the Colombian president. In May, his government formally cut diplomatic ties with "Israel," citing what Petro explicitly described as a "genocide." His administration also appointed Colombia's first ambassador to Palestine, pledging medical treatment in Colombian hospitals for injured children from Gaza. The newly appointed ambassador, Jorge Ivan Ospina, later echoed Petro's position, warning of a "macabre intention to erase the identity of a people." In Tuesday's article, Petro praised similar actions taken by countries like Malaysia, which banned Israeli ships from its ports, and South Africa, which brought "Israel" before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on charges of genocide. It is worth noting that Colombia joined that case as an intervening party, further deepening its legal opposition to "Israel's" war. Read more: US defends Israeli use of starvation as weapon of war before ICJ Global reckoning Looking ahead, Petro mentioned that Colombia and South Africa, co-chairs of the Hague Group, will host an emergency summit regarding Gaza on July 15. The conference aims to develop a coordinated, multilateral strategy to isolate "Israel" diplomatically and economically while restoring credibility to the global legal order. With the UN's proposed international peace conference indefinitely postponed, Petro cast the July summit as a necessary corrective to global paralysis. The Colombian president framed the Gaza crisis not just as a moral catastrophe but as an existential test for international law and nations of the Global South. "We can either stand firm in defense of the legal principles that seek to prevent war and conflict," he wrote, "or watch helplessly as the international system collapses under the weight of unchecked power politics." He concluded his piece by stressing that the choice is between complicity in colonial violence and collective resistance against it. On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 3:12 PM Martin Wasserman <dee Derlook@aol.com> wrote: Aram, Amnesty International is not a credible source on this issue. It appears that the once -respectable organization has been taken over by malevolent actors with a political axe to grind. Their anti -Israel bias is evident throughout the report. They accuse Israel of genocide but make no mention at all of Hamas' explicit genocidal policy against Jews. They accuse Israel of violating international law, but make no reference at all to the fact that Israel is facing a ruthless enemy that observes no international laws whatsoever. When they mention Hamas' transgressions at all, they do it in the mildest language possible, and then use the most damning possible language when describing Israel's actions. They take it as a given that Israel is an apartheid state, a blatantly false accusation that is very easily disproved. They take it as a given that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land, as if the territories of Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the ancient Jewish nation, don't belong to Jews at all, but are instead the property of a fictitious country called "Palestine" which has never actually existed in any historical period. In short, this entire report is a politically motivated "hatchet job" that deserves no credibility whatsoever. Martin Wasserman On Ju1 20, 2025, at 11:39 AM, Aram James <abjpdl@gmail.com> wrote: Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Amnesty International's research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today. The report, 'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman': Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity. "Amnesty International's report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them," said Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International. "Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. "States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel's atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end." Over the past two months the crisis has grown particularly acute in the North Gaza governorate, where a besieged population is facing starvation, displacement and annihilation amid relentless bombardment and suffocating restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. "Our research reveals that, for months, Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza. It continued to do so in defiance of countless warnings about the catastrophic humanitarian situation and of legally binding decisions from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering Israel to take immediate measures to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza," said Agnes Callamard. "Israel has repeatedly argued that its actions in Gaza are lawful and can be justified by its military goal to eradicate Hamas. But genocidal intent can co -exist alongside military goals and does not need to be Israel's sole intent." Amnesty International examined Israel's acts in Gaza closely and in their totality, taking into account their recurrence and simultaneous occurrence, and both their immediate impact and their cumulative and mutually reinforcing consequences. The organization considered the scale and severity of the casualties and destruction over time. It also analysed public statements by officials, finding that prohibited acts were often announced or called for in the first place by high-level officials in charge of the war efforts. "Taking into account the pre-existing context of dispossession, apartheid and unlawful military occupation in which these acts have been committed, we could find only one reasonable conclusion: Israel's intent is the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, whether in parallel with, or as a means to achieve, its military goal of destroying Hamas," said Agnes Callamard. "The atrocity crimes committed on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other armed groups against Israelis and victims of other nationalities, including deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking, can never justify Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza." International jurisprudence recognizes that the perpetrator does not need to succeed in their attempts to destroy the protected group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to have been committed. The commission of prohibited acts with the intent to destroy the group, as such, is sufficient. Amnesty International's report examines in detail Israel's violations in Gaza over nine months between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024. The organization interviewed 212 people, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, healthcare workers, conducted fieldwork and analysed an extensive range of visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery. It also analysed statements by senior Israeli government and military officials, and official Israeli bodies. On multiple occasions, the organization shared its findings with the Israeli authorities but had received no substantive response at the time of publication. Unprecedented scale and magnitude Israel's actions following Hamas's deadly attacks on 7 October 2023 have brought Gaza's population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over 97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families. It has caused unprecedented destruction, which experts say occurred at a level and speed not seen in any other conflict in the 21st century, levelling entire cities and destroying critical infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural and religious sites. It thereby rendered large swathes of Gaza uninhabitable. Mohammed, who fled with his family from Gaza City to Rafah in March 2024 and was displaced again in May 2024, described their struggle to survive in horrifying conditions: "Here in Deir al-Balah, it's like an apocalypse... You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat, and there is no clean water, no toilets, all while the bombing never stops. You feel like you are subhuman here." Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death. Israel also subjected hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza to incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment. Viewed in isolation, some of the acts investigated by Amnesty International constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law. But in looking at the broader picture of Israel's military campaign and the cumulative impact of its policies and acts, genocidal intent is the only reasonable conclusion. Intent to destroy To establish Israel's specific intent to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, Amnesty International analysed the overall pattern of Israel's conduct in Gaza, reviewed dehumanizing and genocidal statements by Israeli government and military officials, particularly those at the highest levels, and considered the context of Israel's system of apartheid, its inhumane blockade of Gaza and the unlawful 57 -year -old military occupation of the Palestinian territory. Before reaching its conclusion, Amnesty International examined Israel's claims that its military lawfully targeted Hamas and other armed groups throughout Gaza, and that the resulting unprecedented destruction and denial of aid were the outcome of unlawful conduct by Hamas and other armed groups, such as locating fighters among the civilian population or the diversion of aid. The organization concluded these claims are not credible. The presence of Hamas fighters near or within a densely populated area does not absolve Israel from its obligations to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. Its research found Israel repeatedly failed to do so, committing multiple crimes under international law for which there can be no justification based on Hamas's actions. Amnesty International also found no evidence that the diversion of aid could explain Israel's extreme and deliberate restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. In its analysis, the organization also considered alternative arguments such as ones that Israel was acting recklessly or that it simply wanted to destroy Hamas and did not care if it needed to destroy Palestinians in the process, demonstrating a callous disregard for their lives rather than genocidal intent. Our damning findings must serve as a wake- up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International However, regardless of whether Israel sees the destruction of Palestinians as instrumental to destroying Hamas or as an acceptable by-product of this goal, this view of Palestinians as disposable and not worthy of consideration is in itself evidence of genocidal intent. Many of the unlawful acts documented by Amnesty International were preceded by officials urging their implementation. The organization reviewed 102 statements that were issued by Israeli government and military officials and others between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2024 and dehumanized Palestinians, called for or justified genocidal acts or other crimes against them. Of these, Amnesty International identified 22 statements made by senior officials in charge of managing the offensive that appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts, providing direct evidence of genocidal intent. This language was frequently replicated, including by Israeli soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by audiovisual content verified by Amnesty International showing soldiers making calls to "erase" Gaza or to make it uninhabitable, and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities. Killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm Amnesty International documented the genocidal acts of killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza by reviewing the results of investigations it conducted into 15 air strikes between 7 October 2023 and 20 April 2024 that killed at least 334 civilians, including 141 children, and wounded hundreds of others. Amnesty International found no evidence that any of these strikes were directed at a military objective. In one illustrative case, on 20 April 2024, an Israeli air strike destroyed the Abdelal family house in the Al-Jneinah neighbourhood in eastern Rafah, killing three generations of Palestinians, including 16 children, while they were sleeping. While these represent just a fraction of Israel's aerial attacks, they are indicative of a broader pattern of repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects or deliberately indiscriminate attacks. The attacks were also conducted in ways designed to cause a very high number of fatalities and injuries among the civilian population. Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction The report documents how Israel deliberately inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza intended to lead, over time, to their destruction. These conditions were imposed through three simultaneous patterns that repeatedly compounded the effect of each other's devastating impacts: damage to and destruction of life - sustaining infrastructure and other objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population; the repeated use of sweeping, arbitrary and confusing mass "evacuation" orders to forcibly displace almost all of Gaza's population; and the denial and obstruction of the delivery of essential services, humanitarian assistance and other life-saving supplies into and within Gaza. After 7 October 2023, Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza cutting off electricity, water and fuel. In the nine months reviewed for this report, Israel maintained a suffocating, unlawful blockade, tightly controlled access to energy sources, failed to facilitate meaningful humanitarian access within Gaza, and obstructed the import and delivery of life- saving goods and humanitarian aid, particularly to areas north of Wadi Gaza. They thereby exacerbated an already existing humanitarian crisis. This, combined with the extensive damage to Gaza's homes, hospitals, water and sanitation facilities and agricultural land, and mass forced displacement, caused catastrophic levels of hunger and led to the spread of diseases at alarming rates. The impact was especially harsh on young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women, with anticipated long-term consequences for their health. The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International Time and again, Israel had the chance to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, yet for over a year it has repeatedly refused to take steps blatantly within its power to do so, such as opening sufficient access points to Gaza or lifting tight restrictions on what could enter the Strip or their obstruction of aid deliveries within Gaza while the situation has grown progressively worse. Through its repeated "evacuation" orders Israel displaced nearly 1.9 million Palestinians — 90% of Gaza's population — into ever -shrinking, unsafe pockets of land under inhumane conditions, some of them up to 10 times. These multiple waves of forced displacement left many jobless and deeply traumatized, especially since some 70% of Gaza's residents are refugees or descendants of refugees whose towns and villages were ethnically cleansed by Israel during the 1948 Nakba. Despite conditions quickly becoming unfit for human life, Israeli authorities refused to consider measures that would have protected displaced civilians and ensured their basic needs were met, showing that their actions were deliberate. They refused to allow those displaced to return to their homes in northern Gaza or relocate temporarily to other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory or Israel, continuing to deny many Palestinians their right to return under international law to areas they were displaced from in 1948. They did so knowing that there was nowhere safe for Palestinians in Gaza to flee to. Accountability for genocide "The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience," said Agnes Callamard. "Governments must stop pretending they are powerless to end this genocide, which was enabled by decades of impunity for Israel's violations of international law. States need to move beyond mere expressions of regret or dismay and take strong and sustained international action, however uncomfortable a finding of genocide may be for some of Israel's allies. "The International Criminal Court's (ICC) arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued last month offer real hope of long -overdue justice for victims. States must demonstrate their respect for the court's decision and for universal international law principles by arresting and handing over those wanted by the ICC. "We are calling on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to urgently consider adding genocide to the list of crimes it is investigating and for all states to use every legal avenue to bring perpetrators to justice. No one should be allowed to commit genocide and remain unpunished." Amnesty International is also calling for all civilian hostages to be released unconditionally and for Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups responsible for the crimes committed on 7 October to be held to account. The organization is also calling for the UN Security Council to impose targeted sanctions against Israeli and Hamas officials most implicated in crimes under international law. Background On 7 October 2023 Hamas and other armed groups indiscriminately fired rockets into southern Israel and carried out deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking there, killing 1,200 people, including over 800 civilians, and abducted 223 civilians and captured 27 soldiers. The crimes perpetrated by Hamas and other armed groups during this attack will be the focus of a forthcoming Amnesty International report. Since October 2023, Amnesty International has conducted in- depth investigations into the multiple violations and crimes under international law committed by Israeli forces, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects and deliberately indiscriminate attacks killing hundreds of civilians, as well as other unlawful attacks on and collective punishment of the civilian population. The organization has called on the Office of the ICC Prosecutor to expedite its investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine and is campaigning for an immediate ceasefire. For the Hebrew translation of this press release, click here. INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY MIDDLE EAST MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA NEWS PRESS RELEASE WAR CRIMES AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Related Content COUNTRY Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory NEWS New NATO defence commitments must not come at cost of human rights NEWS Gaza: Starvation or gunfire — this is not a humanitarian response NEWS DRC: Peace deal with Rwanda fails to address serious crimes committed in eastern DRC NEWS Gaza: Evidence points to Israel's continued use of starvation to inflict genocide against Palestinians Recently added Cambodia: Scamming crisis survivors must be protected amid police crackdown Ireland: Amnesty's head urges Irish government to press ahead with Occupied Territories Bi11 Angola: Authorities must respect and ensure the right to freedom of -peaceful assembly Russia: Pro posed amendments to counter - extremism laws escalate assault on dissent EU-Israel: Refusal to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement is a `cruel and unlawful betrayal' DONATE TO PROTECT HUMAN RIGHTS Women's Day protest in Mexico Together we can fight for human rights everywhere. Your donation can transform the lives of millions. ABOUT US Contact Us How We're Run Modern Slavery Act Statement Finances RESOURCES Media Centre Human Rights Education Human Rights Courses Annual report archive GET INVOLVED Join Take Action Volunteer LATEST News Campaigns Research WORK WITH US If you are talented and passionate about human rights then Amnesty International wants to hear from you. Privacy Policy Accessibility Cookie Statement Permissions Refunds of Donations © 2025 Amnesty International Facdbe r,, FOLLOW US ON: rarii i kT e's*Dirlt d I n On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 10:03 AM Martin Wasserman <deeperlook@aol.com> wrote: Aram, If that's the definition of genocide, then Israel is clearly NOT committing genocide in Gaza. If Israel were trying to kill as many Gazans as possible, the death toll would be much, much higher than it is. They wouldn't allow any food or medicine in at all, and they wouldn't issue evacuation warnings before striking Hamas targets. The truth is, Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, but Hamas makes it very difficult by deliberately placing their command centers in civilian locations such as schools and hospitals. The only group that Israel wants to destroy is Hamas, which does have an explicit policy of genocide (by your definition) against Jews. Yes, the Gazans are suffering, but Hamas could end their suffering tomorrow if they wanted to. All they have to do is lay down their arms and release the hostages, and the war would be over immediately. But Hamas has no interest in ending the suffering of the Gazans. What they're actually calling for is an open-ended war of attrition against Israel, no matter what the cost to their own people. Martin Wasserman On Jul 18, 2025, at 8:26 PM, Aram James <abjpd 1 @gmail.com> wrote: Genocide defined: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. "a campaign of genocide" On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 4:04 PM Martin Wasserman <dee-jerlook@aol.com> wrote: It appears that "genocide" can be defined in several different ways. Perhaps we should stop using that term altogether and stick to words that have clear and unambiguous meanings. On Jul 18, 2025, at 12:25 PM, Aram James <abjldl@gmail.com> wrote: I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But contrary to the cries of Israel's fiercest critics, the evidence did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide. By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August. At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a "huge price" for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas was operating, "into rubble," and he called on "the residents of Gaza" to "leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere." Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember "what Amalek did to you;" a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to "kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings" of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting "human animals" and, later, called for "total annihilation." Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on Xthat Israel's task must be "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth." Israel's actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one. This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Image People inspecting a huge pile of rubble. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend. *** The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." In determining what constitutes genocide, therefore, we must both establish intent and show that it is being carried out. In Israel's case, that intent has been publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. But intent can also be derived from a pattern of operations on the ground, and this pattern became clear by May 2024 — and has since become ever clearer — as the I.D.F. has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most genocide scholars are cautious about applying this term to contemporary events, precisely because of the tendency, since it was coined by the Jewish -Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, to attribute it to any case of massacre or inhumanity. Indeed, some argue that the categorization should be entirely discarded, because it often serves more to express outrage than to identify a particular crime. Yet as Mr. Lemkin recognized, and as the United Nations later agreed, it is crucial to be able to distinguish the attempt to destroy a particular group of people from other crimes under international law, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is because, while other crimes entail indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians as individuals, genocide denotes the killing of people as members of a group, geared at irreparably destroying the group itself so that it would never be able to reconstitute itself as a political, social or cultural entity. And, as the international community signaled by adopting the convention, it is incumbent upon all signatory states to prevent such an attempt, to do all they can to stop it while it is occurring and to subsequently punish those who were engaged in this crime of crimes — even if it occurred within the borders of a sovereign state. The designation has major political, legal and moral ramifications. Nations, politicians and military personnel suspected of, indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide are seen as beyond the pale of humanity and may compromise or lose their right to remain members of the international community. A finding by the International Court of Justice that a particular state is engaged in genocide, especially if enforced by the U.N. Security Council, can lead to severe sanctions. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox. Politicians or generals indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide or other breaches of international humanitarian law by the International Criminal Court can face arrest outside of their country. And a society that condones and is complicit in genocide, whatever the stand of its individual citizens may be, will carry this mark of Cain long after the fires of hatred and violence are put out. *** From: Postmaster To: Council, City Subject: You have new held messages Date: Monday, July 21, 2025 7:14:42 AM I o You have new held messages You can release all of your held messages and permit or block future emails from the senders, or manage messages individually. Release all Permit all Block all You can also manage held messages in your Personal Portal. Spam Policy sallen6444@yahoo.com Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet 2025-07-20 20:34 Release Permit Block Release all Permit all Block all © 2019 Mimecast Services Limited. From: Martin Wasserman To: Aram James Cc: Jeff Rosen; Jay Boyarsky; Veenker, Vicki; h.etzko@gmail.com; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Foley, Michael; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Raj Jayadev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneider, James; Binder, Andrew; Gardener, Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanda Conaway; olv nda; Don Austin; jgreen©dailynewsgroup.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonaa; Baker. Rob; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlcuist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Jeff Conrad; Burt, Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chaaoie Jones; District9@sanjoseca.gov; District4@sanjoseca.gov; District5©sanjoseca.gov; Districtaaa sanjoseca.gov; EPA Today; Gennady Sheyner; Council, City; city.council@menlopark.gov; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero©cityofeDa.orq; Cribbs, Anne; <michael.gennaco©oirgroup.com>; Stump, Molly; board©pausd.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Rodriguez, Miguel; Cait James; Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman@ assembly.ca.gov; Zelkha, Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enbero, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberley; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq; Greg Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauina; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee; Mark Turner; City Attorney; CityCouncil; Michelle Bigelow; Sean Allen; Seher Awan; Pat M; Carla Torres; David Piper; josh@ajoshsalcman.com; board©valleywater.orq; boardfeedbackCalsmcgov.orq; Jay Boyarsky; Linda Jolley; San Jose Spotlight; vramirez(alredwoodcity.orq; Lori Meyers; Sheree Roth; Ellen Fox Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Sunday, July 20, 2025 9:14:04 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Avram, You're entitled to your opinions and you'll bear the consequences of them one way or another. Martin Wasserman On Ju120, 2025, at 8:08 PM, Aram James <abjpol@gmail.com> wrote: Subject: A Call for Change Hi Martin, I want to be very clear about my position. I support the elimination of Israel and advocate for a one -state solution. Israel must pay reparations to the Palestinian people for a hundred years and rebuild Gaza and the West Bank. The genocidal Israeli war criminals must be held fully accountable, just like the Nazi war criminals. As a secular Jew, I find no value in Hebrew scripture; to me, it is merely creative writing and fantasy at best. The nations that have stood up to the Nazi - like Israeli state are the true heroes. Avram "Eliminate Israel Now" Finkelstein On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 7:26 PM Martin Wasserman <deenerlook@aol.com> wrote: The Hebrew Scriptures predict a time when all the nations will gather together against Israel, and God will then intervene on Israel's behalf and judge all those nations with truth and justice. We appear to be approaching that time very rapidly, and I strongly suspect that those people and nations who have dedicated themselves to Israel's destruction will fare very poorly in those judgments! Martin Wasserman On Ju1 20, 2025, at 3:30 PM, Aram James <abj?c.1 @gmail.com> wrote: Condemn Israel or be complicit in genocide': Colombia's Gustavo Petro By Al Mayadeen English Source: The Guardian 8 Jul 2025 13:47 2 Shares 4 Min Read Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in a Guardian op-ed, accuses Netanyahu of genocide in Gaza and urges global action. Listen On Tuesday, The Guardian published an opinion piece by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in which he accused Israeli Prime Minister Ben'amin Netanyahu of orchestrating a "campaign of devastation" in Gaza and called on the international community to move beyond symbolic outrage toward concrete action in defense of international law. Petro has emerged as one of the most outspoken world leaders condemning "Israel's" war on Gaza, and his latest opinion piece adds to a growing series of forceful critiques directed at the ongoing Israeli genocide. Denouncing what he described as 600 days of systematic atrocities, Petro wrote that the world's inaction risks legitimizing a model of impunity where colonial violence, ethnic cleansing, and siege warfare are normalized against a captive population. "If we fail to act now," he wrote, "we not only betray the Palestinian people, we become complicit in the atrocities committed by Netanyahu's government." Moral break The president highlighted a landmark United Nations General Assembly resolution adopted in September 2024, which called for "Israel" to end its illegal occupation within 12 months. He noted that Colombia was among the 124 countries that voted in favor, thereby assuming binding obligations that include sanctions, legal action, and trade measures. "The clock is now ticking," he warned, reaffirming Colombia's commitment by recalling its concrete step: suspending coal exports to "Israel." Related News 650 days of genocide: 125,000 tons of bombs 2.4 min lives shattered Starved by 'Israel': People of Gaza are dying while the world watches In his piece, Petro mentioned that he had declared earlier this year: "We cannot fuel the machinery that slaughters Palestinian children and then claim neutrality." This is not the first bold move by the Colombian president. In May, his government formally cut diplomatic ties with "Israel," citing what Petro explicitly described as a "genocide." His administration also appointed Colombia's first ambassador to Palestine, pledging medical treatment in Colombian hospitals for injured children from Gaza. The newly appointed ambassador, Jorge Ivan Ospina, later echoed Petro's position, warning of a "macabre intention to erase the identity of a people." In Tuesday's article, Petro praised similar actions taken by countries like Malaysia, which banned Israeli ships from its ports, and South Africa, which brought "Israel" before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on charges of genocide. It is worth noting that Colombia joined that case as an intervening party, further deepening its legal opposition to "Israel's" war. Read more: US defends Israeli use of starvation as weapon of war before ICJ Global reckoning Looking ahead, Petro mentioned that Colombia and South Africa, co-chairs of the Hague Group, will host an emergency summit regarding Gaza on July 15. The conference aims to develop a coordinated, multilateral strategy to isolate "Israel" diplomatically and economically while restoring credibility to the global legal order. With the UN's proposed international peace conference indefinitely postponed, Petro cast the July summit as a necessary corrective to global paralysis. The Colombian president framed the Gaza crisis not just as a moral catastrophe but as an existential test for international law and nations of the Global South. "We can either stand firm in defense of the legal principles that seek to prevent war and conflict," he wrote, "or watch helplessly as the international system collapses under the weight of unchecked power politics." He concluded his piece by stressing that the choice is between complicity in colonial violence and collective resistance against it. • On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 3:12 PM Martin Wasserman <ceeperlooknaol.com> wrote: Aram, Amnesty International is not a credible source on this issue. It appears that the once -respectable organization has been taken over by malevolent actors with a political axe to grind. Their anti -Israel bias is evident throughout the report. They accuse Israel of genocide but make no mention at all of Hamas' explicit genocidal policy against Jews. They accuse Israel of violating international law, but make no reference at all to the fact that Israel is facing a ruthless enemy that observes no international laws whatsoever. When they mention Hamas' transgressions at all, they do it in the mildest language possible, and then use the most damning possible language when describing Israel's actions. They take it as a given that Israel is an apartheid state, a blatantly false accusation that is very easily disproved. They take it as a given that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land, as if the territories of Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the ancient Jewish nation, don't belong to Jews at all, but are instead the property of a fictitious country called "Palestine" which has never actually existed in any historical period. In short, this entire report is a politically motivated "hatchet job" that deserves no credibility whatsoever. Martin Wasserman On Ju1 20, 2025, at 11:39 AM, Aram James <abjpcl@gmail.com> wrote: Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Amnesty International's research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today. The report, 'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman': Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity. "Amnesty International's report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them," said Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International. "Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. "States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel's atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end." Over the past two months the crisis has grown particularly acute in the North Gaza governorate, where a besieged population is facing starvation, displacement and annihilation amid relentless bombardment and suffocating restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. "Our research reveals that, for months, Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza. It continued to do so in defiance of countless warnings about the catastrophic humanitarian situation and of legally binding decisions from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering Israel to take immediate measures to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza," said Agnes Callamard. "Israel has repeatedly argued that its actions in Gaza are lawful and can be justified by its military goal to eradicate Hamas. But genocidal intent can co -exist alongside military goals and does not need to be Israel's sole intent." Amnesty International examined Israel's acts in Gaza closely and in their totality, taking into account their recurrence and simultaneous occurrence, and both their immediate impact and their cumulative and mutually reinforcing consequences. The organization considered the scale and severity of the casualties and destruction over time. It also analysed public statements by officials, finding that prohibited acts were often announced or called for in the first place by high-level officials in charge of the war efforts. "Taking into account the pre-existing context of dispossession, apartheid and unlawful military occupation in which these acts have been committed, we could find only one reasonable conclusion: Israel's intent is the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, whether in parallel with, or as a means to achieve, its military goal of destroying Hamas," said Agnes Callamard. "The atrocity crimes committed on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other armed groups against Israelis and victims of other nationalities, including deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking, can never justify Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza." International jurisprudence recognizes that the perpetrator does not need to succeed in their attempts to destroy the protected group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to have been committed. The commission of prohibited acts with the intent to destroy the group, as such, is sufficient. Amnesty International's report examines in detail Israel's violations in Gaza over nine months between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024. The organization interviewed 212 people, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, healthcare workers, conducted fieldwork and analysed an extensive range of visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery. It also analysed statements by senior Israeli government and military officials, and official Israeli bodies. On multiple occasions, the organization shared its findings with the Israeli authorities but had received no substantive response at the time of publication. Unprecedented scale and magnitude Israel's actions following Hamas's deadly attacks on 7 October 2023 have brought Gaza's population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over 97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families. It has caused unprecedented destruction, which experts say occurred at a level and speed not seen in any other conflict in the 21st century, levelling entire cities and destroying critical infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural and religious sites. It thereby rendered large swathes of Gaza uninhabitable. Mohammed, who fled with his family from Gaza City to Rafah in March 2024 and was displaced again in May 2024, described their struggle to survive in horrifying conditions: "Here in Deir al-Balah, it's like an apocalypse... You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat, and there is no clean water, no toilets, all while the bombing never stops. You feel like you are subhuman here." Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death. Israel also subjected hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza to incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment. Viewed in isolation, some of the acts investigated by Amnesty International constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law. But in looking at the broader picture of Israel's military campaign and the cumulative impact of its policies and acts, genocidal intent is the only reasonable conclusion. Intent to destroy To establish Israel's specific intent to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, Amnesty International analysed the overall pattern of Israel's conduct in Gaza, reviewed dehumanizing and genocidal statements by Israeli government and military officials, particularly those at the highest levels, and considered the context of Israel's system of apartheid, its inhumane blockade of Gaza and the unlawful 57 -year -old military occupation of the Palestinian territory. Before reaching its conclusion, Amnesty International examined Israel's claims that its military lawfully targeted Hamas and other armed groups throughout Gaza, and that the resulting unprecedented destruction and denial of aid were the outcome of unlawful conduct by Hamas and other armed groups, such as locating fighters among the civilian population or the diversion of aid. The organization concluded these claims are not credible. The presence of Hamas fighters near or within a densely populated area does not absolve Israel from its obligations to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. Its research found Israel repeatedly failed to do so, committing multiple crimes under international law for which there can be no justification based on Hamas's actions. Amnesty International also found no evidence that the diversion of aid could explain Israel's extreme and deliberate restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. In its analysis, the organization also considered alternative arguments such as ones that Israel was acting recklessly or that it simply wanted to destroy Hamas and did not care if it needed to destroy Palestinians in the process, demonstrating a callous disregard for their lives rather than genocidal intent. Our damning findings must serve as a wake- up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International However, regardless of whether Israel sees the destruction of Palestinians as instrumental to destroying Hamas or as an acceptable by-product of this goal, this view of Palestinians as disposable and not worthy of consideration is in itself evidence of genocidal intent. Many of the unlawful acts documented by Amnesty International were preceded by officials urging their implementation. The organization reviewed 102 statements that were issued by Israeli government and military officials and others between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2024 and dehumanized Palestinians, called for or justified genocidal acts or other crimes against them. Of these, Amnesty International identified 22 statements made by senior officials in charge of managing the offensive that appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts, providing direct evidence of genocidal intent. This language was frequently replicated, including by Israeli soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by audiovisual content verified by Amnesty International showing soldiers making calls to "erase" Gaza or to make it uninhabitable, and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities. Killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm Amnesty International documented the genocidal acts of killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza by reviewing the results of investigations it conducted into 15 air strikes between 7 October 2023 and 20 April 2024 that killed at least 334 civilians, including 141 children, and wounded hundreds of others. Amnesty International found no evidence that any of these strikes were directed at a military objective. In one illustrative case, on 20 April 2024, an Israeli air strike destroyed the Abdelal family house in the Al-Jneinah neighbourhood in eastern Rafah, killing three generations of Palestinians, including 16 children, while they were sleeping. While these represent just a fraction of Israel's aerial attacks, they are indicative of a broader pattern of repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects or deliberately indiscriminate attacks. The attacks were also conducted in ways designed to cause a very high number of fatalities and injuries among the civilian population. Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction The report documents how Israel deliberately inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza intended to lead, over time, to their destruction. These conditions were imposed through three simultaneous patterns that repeatedly compounded the effect of each other's devastating impacts: damage to and destruction of life - sustaining infrastructure and other objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population; the repeated use of sweeping, arbitrary and confusing mass "evacuation" orders to forcibly displace almost all of Gaza's population; and the denial and obstruction of the delivery of essential services, humanitarian assistance and other life-saving supplies into and within Gaza. After 7 October 2023, Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza cutting off electricity, water and fuel. In the nine months reviewed for this report, Israel maintained a suffocating, unlawful blockade, tightly controlled access to energy sources, failed to facilitate meaningful humanitarian access within Gaza, and obstructed the import and delivery of life- saving goods and humanitarian aid, particularly to areas north of Wadi Gaza. They thereby exacerbated an already existing humanitarian crisis. This, combined with the extensive damage to Gaza's homes, hospitals, water and sanitation facilities and agricultural land, and mass forced displacement, caused catastrophic levels of hunger and led to the spread of diseases at alarming rates. The impact was especially harsh on young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women, with anticipated long-term consequences for their health. The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International Time and again, Israel had the chance to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, yet for over a year it has repeatedly refused to take steps blatantly within its power to do so, such as opening sufficient access points to Gaza or lifting tight restrictions on what could enter the Strip or their obstruction of aid deliveries within Gaza while the situation has grown progressively worse. Through its repeated "evacuation" orders Israel displaced nearly 1.9 million Palestinians — 90% of Gaza's population — into ever -shrinking, unsafe pockets of land under inhumane conditions, some of them up to 10 times. These multiple waves of forced displacement left many jobless and deeply traumatized, especially since some 70% of Gaza's residents are refugees or descendants of refugees whose towns and villages were ethnically cleansed by Israel during the 1948 Nakba. Despite conditions quickly becoming unfit for human life, Israeli authorities refused to consider measures that would have protected displaced civilians and ensured their basic needs were met, showing that their actions were deliberate. They refused to allow those displaced to return to their homes in northern Gaza or relocate temporarily to other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory or Israel, continuing to deny many Palestinians their right to return under international law to areas they were displaced from in 1948. They did so knowing that there was nowhere safe for Palestinians in Gaza to flee to. Accountability for genocide "The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience," said Agnes Callamard. "Governments must stop pretending they are powerless to end this genocide, which was enabled by decades of impunity for Israel's violations of international law. States need to move beyond mere expressions of regret or dismay and take strong and sustained international action, however uncomfortable a finding of genocide may be for some of Israel's allies. "The International Criminal Court's (ICC) arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued last month offer real hope of long -overdue justice for victims. States must demonstrate their respect for the court's decision and for universal international law principles by arresting and handing over those wanted by the ICC. "We are calling on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to urgently consider adding genocide to the list of crimes it is investigating and for all states to use every legal avenue to bring perpetrators to justice. No one should be allowed to commit genocide and remain unpunished." Amnesty International is also calling for all civilian hostages to be released unconditionally and for Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups responsible for the crimes committed on 7 October to be held to account. The organization is also calling for the UN Security Council to impose targeted sanctions against Israeli and Hamas officials most implicated in crimes under international law. Background On 7 October 2023 Hamas and other armed groups indiscriminately fired rockets into southern Israel and carried out deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking there, killing 1,200 people, including over 800 civilians, and abducted 223 civilians and captured 27 soldiers. The crimes perpetrated by Hamas and other armed groups during this attack will be the focus of a forthcoming Amnesty International report. Since October 2023, Amnesty International has conducted in- depth investigations into the multiple violations and crimes under international law committed by Israeli forces, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects and deliberately indiscriminate attacks killing hundreds of civilians, as well as other unlawful attacks on and collective punishment of the civilian population. The organization has called on the Office of the ICC Prosecutor to expedite its investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine and is campaigning for an immediate ceasefire. For the Hebrew translation of this press release, click here. INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY MIDDLE EAST MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA NEWS PRESS RELEASE WAR CRIMES AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Related Content COUNTRY Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory NEWS New NATO defence commitments must not come at cost of human rights NEWS Gaza: Starvation or gunfire — this is not a humanitarian response NEWS DRC: Peace deal with Rwanda fails to address serious crimes committed in eastern DRC NEWS Gaza: Evidence points to Israel's continued use of starvation to inflict genocide against Palestinians Recently added Cambodia: Scamming crisis survivors must be protected amid police crackdown Ireland: Amnesty's head urges Irish government to press aheac with Occupied Territories Bi11 Angola: Authorities must res sect and ensure the right to freecom of peaceful assembly Russia: Proposed amendments to counter - extremism laws escalate assault on dissent EU-Israel: Refusal to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement is a `cruel and unlawful betrayal' DONATE TO PROTECT HUMAN RIGHTS Women's Day protest in Mexico Together we can fight for human rights everywhere. Your donation can transform the lives of millions. ABOUT US Contact Us How We're Run Modern Slavery Act Statement Finances RESOURCES Media Centre Human Rights Education Human Rights Courses Annual report archive GET INVOLVED Join Take Action Volunteer LATEST News Campaigns Research WORK WITH US If you are talented and passionate about human rights then Amnesty International wants to hear from you. Privacy Policy Accessibility Cookie Statement Permissions Refunds of Donations © 2025 Amnesty International PO. FOLI,pW US ON: iTdk k�s ou On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 10:03 AM Martin Wasserman <deeperlook@aol.com> wrote: Aram, If that's the definition of genocide, then Israel is clearly NOT committing genocide in Gaza. If Israel were trying to kill as many Gazans as possible, the death toll would be much, much higher than it is. They wouldn't allow any food or medicine in at all, and they wouldn't issue evacuation warnings before striking Hamas targets. The truth is, Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, but Hamas makes it very difficult by deliberately placing their command centers in civilian locations such as schools and hospitals. The only group that Israel wants to destroy is Hamas, which does have an explicit policy of genocide (by your defmition) against Jews. Yes, the Gazans are suffering, but Hamas could end their suffering tomorrow if they wanted to. All they have to do is lay down their arms and release the hostages, and the war would be over immediately. But Hamas has no interest in ending the suffering of the Gazans. What they're actually calling for is an open-ended war of attrition against Israel, no matter what the cost to their own people. Martin Wasserman On Jul 18, 2025, at 8:26 PM, Aram James <abjpol@gmail.com> wrote: Genocide defined: the celiberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. "a campaign of genocide" On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 4:04 PM Martin Wasserman <deeDerlook@aol.com> wrote: It appears that "genocide" can be defined in several different ways. Perhaps we should stop using that term altogether and stick to words that have clear and unambiguous meanings. On Jul 18, 2025, at 12:25 PM, Aram James <abjpol@gmail.com> wrote: I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But contrary to the cries of Israel's fiercest critics, the evidence did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide. By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August. At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a " From: Aram James To: Martin Wasserman Cc: Jeff Rosen; Jay Boyarsky; Veenker, Vicki; h.etzko@gmail.com; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Raj Jayadev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa. Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneider, James; Binder, Andrew; Gardener Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanca Conaway; volanca; Don Austin; jareen@cailvnewsaroup.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonaa; Baker Rob; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlouist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Jeff Conrad; Burt, Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District9@sanjoseca.gov; District4@sanjoseca.gov; District5@sanjoseca.gov; District2@sanjoseca.gov; EPA Today; Gennady Sheyner; Council, City; city.council@menlopark.gov; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero@cityofepa.ora; Cribbs, Anne; <michael.gennaco@oirgroup.com>; Stump, Molly; board@pausd.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Rodriguez, Miguel; Cait James; Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman@assembly.ca.gov; Zelkha Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enbera, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberlev; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq; Grea Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauinq; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee; Mark Turner; City Attorney; CityCouncil; Michelle Bigelow; Sean Allen; Seher Awan; Pat M; Carla Torres; David Piper; josh@joshsalcman.com; board@valleywater.org; boardfeedback smcgov.orq; Jay Bovarsky; Linda Jolley; San Jose Spotlight; vra m i rez @redwood city. orq Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Sunday, July 20, 2025 8:14:20 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Subject: A Call for Change Hi Martin, I want to be very clear about my position. I support the elimination of Israel and advocate for a one -state solution. Israel must pay reparations to the Palestinian people for a hundred years and rebuild Gaza and the West Bank. The genocidal Israeli war criminals must be held fully accountable, just like the Nazi war criminals. As a secular Jew, I find no value in Hebrew scripture; to me, it is merely creative writing and fantasy at best. The nations that have stood up to the Nazi - like Israeli state are the true heroes. Avram "Eliminate Israel Now" Finkelstein On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 7:26 PM Martin Wasserman <ceeperlook@aol.com> wrote: The Hebrew Scriptures predict a time when all the nations will gather together against Israel, and God will then intervene on Israel's behalf and judge all those nations with truth and justice. We appear to be approaching that time very rapidly, and I strongly suspect that those people and nations who have dedicated themselves to Israel's destruction will fare very poorly in those judgments! Martin Wasserman On Jul 20, 2025, at 3:30 PM, Aram James <abj Dd1@gmail.com> wrote: Condemn Israel or be complicit in genocide': Colombia's Gustavo Petro By Al Mayadeen English Source: The Guardian 8 Jul 2025 13:47 2 Shares ®i 4 Min Read Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in a Guardian op-ed, accuses Netanyahu of genocide in Gaza and urges global action. Listen On Tuesday, The Guardian published an opinion piece by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in which he accused Israeli Prime Minister Ben'amin Netanyahu of orchestrating a "campaign of devastation" in Gaza and called on the international community to move beyond symbolic outrage toward concrete action in defense of international law. Petro has emerged as one of the most outspoken world leaders condemning "Israel's" war on Gaza, and his latest opinion piece adds to a growing series of forceful critiques directed at the ongoing Israeli genocide. Denouncing what he described as 600 days of systematic atrocities, Petro wrote that the world's inaction risks legitimizing a model of impunity where colonial violence, ethnic cleansing, and siege warfare are normalized against a captive population. "If we fail to act now," he wrote, "we not only betray the Palestinian people, we become complicit in the atrocities committed by Netanyahu's government." Moral break The president highlighted a landmark United Nations General Assembly resolution adopted in September 2024, which called for "Israel" to end its illegal occupation wi-hin 12 months. He noted that Colombia was among the 124 countries that voted in favor, thereby assuming binding obligations that include sanctions, legal action, and trade measures. "The clock is now ticking," he warned, reaffirming Colombia's commitment by recalling its concrete step: suspending coal exports to "Israel." Related News 19 650 days of genocide: 125,000 tons of bombs 2.4 min lives shattered Starved by 'Israel': People of Gaza are dying while the world watches In his piece, Petro mentioned that he had declared earlier this year: "We cannot fuel the machinery that slaughters Palestinian children and then claim neutrality." This is not the first bold move by the Colombian president. In May, his government formally cut diplomatic ties with "Israel," citing what Petro explicitly described as a "genocide." His administration also appointed Colombia's first ambassador to Palestine, pledging medical treatment in Colombian hospitals for injured children from Gaza. The newly appointed ambassador, Jorge Ivan Ospina, later echoed Petro's position, warning of a "macabre intention to erase the identity of a people." In Tuesday's article, Petro praised similar actions taken by countries Tike Malaysia, which banned Israeli ships from its ports, and South Africa, which brought "Israel" before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on charges of genocide. It is worth noting that Colombia joined that case as an intervening party, further deepening its legal opposition to "Israel's" war. Read more: US defends Israeli use of starvation as weapon of war before ICJ Global reckoning Looking ahead, Petro mentioned that Colombia and South Africa, co-chairs of the Hague Group, will host an emergency summit regarding Gaza on July 15. The conference aims to develop a coordinated, multilateral strategy to isolate "Israel" diplomatically and economically while restoring credibility to the global legal order. With the UN's proposed international peace conference indefinitely postponed, Petro cast the July summit as a necessary corrective to global paralysis. The Colombian president framed the Gaza crisis not just as a moral catastrophe but as an existential test for international law and nations of the Global South. "We can either stand firm in defense of the legal principles that seek to prevent war and conflict," he wrote, "or watch helplessly as the international system collapses under the weight of unchecked power politics." He concluded his piece by stressing that the choice is between complicity in colonial violence and collective resistance against it. On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 3:12 PM Martin Wasserman <cee )erlook@aol.com> wrote: Aram, Amnesty International is not a credible source on this issue. It appears that the once -respectable organization has been taken over by malevolent actors with a political axe to grind. Their anti -Israel bias is evident throughout the report. They accuse Israel of genocide but make no mention at all of Hamas' explicit genocidal policy against Jews. They accuse Israel of violating international law, but make no reference at all to the fact that Israel is facing a ruthless enemy that observes no international laws whatsoever. When they mention Hamas' transgressions at all, they do it in the mildest language possible, and then use the most damning possible language when describing Israel's actions. They take it as a given that Israel is an apartheid state, a blatantly false accusation that is very easily disproved. They take it as a given that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land, as if the territories of Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the ancient Jewish nation, don't belong to Jews at all, but are instead the property of a fictitious country called "Palestine" which has never actually existed in any historical period. In short, this entire report is a politically motivated "hatchet job" that deserves no credibility whatsoever. Martin Wasserman On Ju1 20, 2025, at 11:39 AM, Aram James <a3jpol@gmail.com> wrote: Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Amnesty International's research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today. The report, 'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman': Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity. "Amnesty International's report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them," said Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International. "Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. "States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel's atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end." Over the past two months the crisis has grown particularly acute in the North Gaza governorate, where a besieged population is facing starvation, displacement and annihilation amid relentless bombardment and suffocating restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. "Our research reveals that, for months, Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza. It continued to do so in defiance of countless warnings about the catastrophic humanitarian situation and of legally binding decisions from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering Israel to take immediate measures to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza," said Agnes Callamard. "Israel has repeatedly argued that its actions in Gaza are lawful and can be justified by its military goal to eradicate Hamas. But genocidal intent can co -exist alongside military goals and does not need to be Israel's sole intent." Amnesty International examined Israel's acts in Gaza closely and in their totality, taking into account their recurrence and simultaneous occurrence, and both their immediate impact and their cumulative and mutually reinforcing consequences. The organization considered the scale and severity of the casualties and destruction over time. It also analysed public statements by officials, finding that prohibited acts were often announced or called for in the first place by high-level officials in charge of the war efforts. "Taking into account the pre-existing context of dispossession, apartheid and unlawful military occupation in which these acts have been committed, we could find only one reasonable conclusion: Israel's intent is the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, whether in parallel with, or as a means to achieve, its military goal of destroying Hamas," said Agnes Callamard. "The atrocity crimes committed on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other armed groups against Israelis and victims of other nationalities, including deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking, can never justify Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza." International jurisprudence recognizes that the perpetrator does not need to succeed in their attempts to destroy the protected group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to have been committed. The commission of prohibited acts with the intent to destroy the group, as such, is sufficient. Amnesty International's report examines in detail Israel's violations in Gaza over nine months between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024. The organization interviewed 212 people, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, healthcare workers, conducted fieldwork and analysed an extensive range of visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery. It also analysed statements by senior Israeli government and military officials, and official Israeli bodies. On multiple occasions, the organization shared its findings with the Israeli authorities but had received no substantive response at the time of publication. Unprecedented scale and magnitude Israel's actions following Hamas's deadly attacks on 7 October 2023 have brought Gaza's population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over 97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families. It has caused unprecedented destruction, which experts say occurred at a level and speed not seen in any other conflict in the 21st century, levelling entire cities and destroying critical infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural and religious sites. It thereby rendered large swathes of Gaza uninhabitable. Mohammed, who fled with his family from Gaza City to Rafah in March 2024 and was displaced again in May 2024, described their struggle to survive in horrifying conditions: "Here in Deir al-Balah, it's like an apocalypse... You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat, and there is no clean water, no toilets, all while the bombing never stops. You feel like you are subhuman here." Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death. Israel also subjected hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza to incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment. Viewed in isolation, some of the acts investigated by Amnesty International constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law. But in looking at the broader picture of Israel's military campaign and the cumulative impact of its policies and acts, genocidal intent is the only reasonable conclusion. Intent to destroy To establish Israel's specific intent to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, Amnesty International analysed the overall pattern of Israel's conduct in Gaza, reviewed dehumanizing and genocidal statements by Israeli government and military officials, particularly those at the highest levels, and considered the context of Israel's system of apartheid, its inhumane blockade of Gaza and the unlawful 57 -year -old military occupation of the Palestinian territory. Before reaching its conclusion, Amnesty International examined Israel's claims that its military lawfully targeted Hamas and other armed groups throughout Gaza, and that the resulting unprecedented destruction and denial of aid were the outcome of unlawful conduct by Hamas and other armed groups, such as locating fighters among the civilian population or the diversion of aid. The organization concluded these claims are not credible. The presence of Hamas fighters near or within a densely populated area does not absolve Israel from its obligations to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. Its research found Israel repeatedly failed to do so, committing multiple crimes under international law for which there can be no justification based on Hamas's actions. Amnesty International also found no evidence that the diversion of aid could explain Israel's extreme and deliberate restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. In its analysis, the organization also considered alternative arguments such as ones that Israel was acting recklessly or that it simply wanted to destroy Hamas and did not care if it needed to destroy Palestinians in the process, demonstrating a callous disregard for their lives rather than genocidal intent. Our damning findings must serve as a wake- up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International However, regardless of whether Israel sees the destruction of Palestinians as instrumental to destroying Hamas or as an acceptable by-product of this goal, this view of Palestinians as disposable and not worthy of consideration is in itself evidence of genocidal intent. Many of the unlawful acts documented by Amnesty International were preceded by officials urging their implementation. The organization reviewed 102 statements that were issued by Israeli government and military officials and others between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2024 and dehumanized Palestinians, called for or justified genocidal acts or other crimes against them. Of these, Amnesty International identified 22 statements made by senior officials in charge of managing the offensive that appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts, providing direct evidence of genocidal intent. This language was frequently replicated, including by Israeli soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by audiovisual content verified by Amnesty International showing soldiers making calls to "erase" Gaza or to make it uninhabitable, and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities. Killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm Amnesty International documented the genocidal acts of killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza by reviewing the results of investigations it conducted into 15 air strikes between 7 October 2023 and 20 April 2024 that killed at least 334 civilians, including 141 children, and wounded hundreds of others. Amnesty International found no evidence that any of these strikes were directed at a military objective. In one illustrative case, on 20 April 2024, an Israeli air strike destroyed the Abdelal family house in the Al-Jneinah neighbourhood in eastern Rafah, killing three generations of Palestinians, including 16 children, while they were sleeping. While these represent just a fraction of Israel's aerial attacks, they are indicative of a broader pattern of repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects or deliberately indiscriminate attacks. The attacks were also conducted in ways designed to cause a very high number of fatalities and injuries among the civilian population. Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction The report documents how Israel deliberately inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza intended to lead, over time, to their destruction. These conditions were imposed through three simultaneous patterns that repeatedly compounded the effect of each other's devastating impacts: damage to and destruction of life - sustaining infrastructure and other objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population; the repeated use of sweeping, arbitrary and confusing mass "evacuation" orders to forcibly displace almost all of Gaza's population; and the denial and obstruction of the delivery of essential services, humanitarian assistance and other life-saving supplies into and within Gaza. After 7 October 2023, Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza cutting off electricity, water and fuel. In the nine months reviewed for this report, Israel maintained a suffocating, unlawful blockade, tightly controlled access to energy sources, failed to facilitate meaningful humanitarian access within Gaza, and obstructed the import and delivery of life- saving goods and humanitarian aid, particularly to areas north of Wadi Gaza. They thereby exacerbated an already existing humanitarian crisis. This, combined with the extensive damage to Gaza's homes, hospitals, water and sanitation facilities and agricultural land, and mass forced displacement, caused catastrophic levels of hunger and led to the spread of diseases at alarming rates. The impact was especially harsh on young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women, with anticipated long-term consequences for their health. The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International Time and again, Israel had the chance to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, yet for over a year it has repeatedly refused to take steps blatantly within its power to do so, such as opening sufficient access points to Gaza or lifting tight restrictions on what could enter the Strip or their obstruction of aid deliveries within Gaza while the situation has grown progressively worse. Through its repeated "evacuation" orders Israel displaced nearly 1.9 million Palestinians — 90% of Gaza's population — into ever -shrinking, unsafe pockets of land under inhumane conditions, some of them up to 10 times. These multiple waves of forced displacement left many jobless and deeply traumatized, especially since some 70% of Gaza's residents are refugees or descendants of refugees whose towns and villages were ethnically cleansed by Israel during the 1948 Nakba. Despite conditions quickly becoming unfit for human life, Israeli authorities refused to consider measures that would have protected displaced civilians and ensured their basic needs were met, showing that their actions were deliberate. They refused to allow those displaced to return to their homes in northern Gaza or relocate temporarily to other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory or Israel, continuing to deny many Palestinians their right to return under international law to areas they were displaced from in 1948. They did so knowing that there was nowhere safe for Palestinians in Gaza to flee to. Accountability for genocide "The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience," said Agnes Callamard. "Governments must stop pretending they are powerless to end this genocide, which was enabled by decades of impunity for Israel's violations of international law. States need to move beyond mere expressions of regret or dismay and take strong and sustained international action, however uncomfortable a finding of genocide may be for some of Israel's allies. "The International Criminal Court's (ICC) arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued last month offer real hope of long -overdue justice for victims. States must demonstrate their respect for the court's decision and for universal international law principles by arresting and handing over those wanted by the ICC. "We are calling on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to urgently consider adding genocide to the list of crimes it is investigating and for all states to use every legal avenue to bring perpetrators to justice. No one should be allowed to commit genocide and remain unpunished." Amnesty International is also calling for all civilian hostages to be released unconditionally and for Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups responsible for the crimes committed on 7 October to be held to account. The organization is also calling for the UN Security Council to impose targeted sanctions against Israeli and Hamas officials most implicated in crimes under international law. Background On 7 October 2023 Hamas and other armed groups indiscriminately fired rockets into southern Israel and carried out deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking there, killing 1,200 people, including over 800 civilians, and abducted 223 civilians and captured 27 soldiers. The crimes perpetrated by Hamas and other armed groups during this attack will be the focus of a forthcoming Amnesty International report. Since October 2023, Amnesty International has conducted in- depth investigations into the multiple violations and crimes under international law committed by Israeli forces, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects and deliberately indiscriminate attacks killing hundreds of civilians, as well as other unlawful attacks on and collective punishment of the civilian population. The organization has called on the Office of the ICC Prosecutor to expedite its investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine and is campaigning for an immediate ceasefire. For the Hebrew translation of this press release, click here. INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY MIDDLE EAST MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA NEWS PRESS RELEASE WAR CRIMES AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Related Content COUNTRY Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory NEWS New NATO defence commitments must not come at cost of human rights NEWS Gaza: Starvation or gunfire — this is not a humanitarian response NEWS DRC: Peace deal with Rwanda fails to address serious crimes committed in eastern DRC NEWS Gaza: Evidence points to Israel's continued use of starvation to inflict genocide against Palestinians Recently added Cambodia: Scamming crisis survivors must be ,protected amid -police crackdown Ireland: Amnesty's heat urges Irish government to press aheac. with Occu piec. Territories Bill Angola: Authorities must respect and ensure the right to freedom of peaceful assembly Russia: Pro posed amencments to counter - extremism laws escalate assault on dissent EU-Israel: Refusal to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement is a `cruel anc unlawful Defrayal' DONATE TO PROTECT HUMAN RIGHTS Women's Day protest in Mexico 0 Together we can fight for human rights everywhere. Your donation can transform the lives of millions. ABOUT US Contact Us How We're Run Modern Slavery Act Statement Finances RESOURCES Media Centre Human Rights Education Human Rights Courses Annual report archive GET INVOLVED Join Take Action Volunteer LATEST News Campaigns Research WORK WITH US If you are talented and passionate about human rights then Amnesty International wants to hear from you. Privacy Policy Accessibility Cookie Statement Permissions Refunds of Donations C 2025 Amnesty International Facdbe tr FOLLOW US ON: rarIiikTueYbyuDir dIn On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 10:03 AM Martin Wasserman <ceeperlook@aol.com> wrote: Aram, If that's the definition of genocide, then Israel is clearly NOT committing genocide in Gaza. If Israel were trying to kill as many Gazans as possible, the death toll would be much, much higher than it is. They wouldn't allow any food or medicine in at all, and they wouldn't issue evacuation warnings before striking Hamas targets. The truth is, Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, but Hamas makes it very difficult by deliberately placing their command centers in civilian locations such as schools and hospitals. The only group that Israel wants to destroy is Hamas, which does have an explicit policy of genocide (by your definition) against Jews. Yes, the Gazans are suffering, but Hamas could end their suffering tomorrow if they wanted to. All they have to do is lay down their arms and release the hostages, and the war would be over immediately. But Hamas has no interest in ending the suffering of the Gazans. What they're actually calling for is an open-ended war of attrition against Israel, no matter what the cost to their own people. Martin Wasserman On Jul 18, 2025, at 8:26 PM, Aram James <abj Dd1@gmail.com> wrote: Genocide defined: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. "a campaign of genocide" On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 4:04 PM Martin Wasserman <deeperlook@aol.com> wrote: It appears that "genocide" can be defined in several different ways. Perhaps we should stop using that term altogether and stick to words that have clear and unambiguous meanings. On Jul 18, 2025, at 12:25 PM, Aram James <a )jpc.1 @gmail.com> wrote: I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But contrary to the cries of Israel's fiercest critics, the evidence did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide. By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August. At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a " From: Martin Wasserman To: Aram James Cc: Jeff Rosen; Jav Bovarsky; Veenker, Vicki; h.etzko@amail.com; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Raj Jayadev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneider, James; Binder, Andrew; Gardener Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanca Conaway; volanda; Don Austin; jgreen@cailynewsgroup.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonaa; Baker Rob; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlquist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Jeff Conrad; Burt, Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District9@sanjoseca.gov; District4@sanjoseca.gov; District5@sanioseca.aov; District2@sanioseca.gov; EPA Today; Gennacv Shevner; Council, City; citv.council@menlooark.gov; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero citvofeoa.orq; Cribbs, Anne; <michael.gennaco@oirgrouo.com>; Stump, Molly; board@pausd.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Rodriguez, Miguel; Cait James; Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman@assembly.ca.gov; Zelkha Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enberq, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberley; Supervisor Susan Ellenberg; Greg Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauinq; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee; Mark Turner; City Attorney; CityCouncil; Michelle Bigelow; Sean Allen; Seher Awan; Pat M; Carla Torres; David Piper Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Sunday, July 20, 2025 7:30:58 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. The Hebrew Scriptures predict a time when all the nations will gather together against Israel, and God will then intervene on Israel's behalf and judge all those nations with truth and justice. We appear to be approaching that time very rapidly, and I strongly suspect that those people and nations who have dedicated themselves to Israel's destruction will fare very poorly in those judgments! Martin Wasserman On Jul 20, 2025, at 3:30 PM, Aram James <abjpdl@gmail.com> wrote: Condemn Israel or be complicit in genocide': Colombia's Gustavo Petro By Al Mayadeen English Source: The Guardian 8 Jul 2025 13:47 2 Shares 4 Min Read Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in a Guardian op-ed, accuses Netanyahu of genocide in Gaza and urges global action. Listen On Tuesday, The Guardian published an opinion piece by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in which he accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of orchestrating a "campaign of devastation" in Gaza and called on the international community to move beyond symbolic outrage toward concrete action in defense of international law. Petro has emerged as one of the most outspoken world leaders condemning "Israel's" war on Gaza, and his latest opinion piece adds to a growing series of forceful critiques directed at the ongoing Israeli genocide. Denouncing what he described as 600 days of systematic atrocities, Petro wrote that the world's inaction risks legitimizing a model of impunity where colonial violence, ethnic cleansing, and siege warfare are normalized against a captive population. "If we fail to act now," he wrote, "we not only betray the Palestinian people, we become complicit in the atrocities committed by Netanyahu's government." Moral break The president highlighted a landmark United Nations General Assembly resolution adopted in September 2024, which called for "Israel" to end its illegal occupation within 12 months. He noted that Colombia was among the 124 countries that voted in favor, thereby assuming binding obligations that include sanctions, legal action, and trade measures. "The clock is now ticking," he warned, reaffirming Colombia's commitment by recalling its concrete step: suspending coal exports to "Israel." Related News 8 650 days of genocide: 125,000 tons of bombs 2.4 min lives shattered 8 Starved by 'Israel': People of Gaza are dying while the world watches In his piece, Petro mentioned that he had declared earlier this year: "We cannot fuel the machinery that slaughters Palestinian children and then claim neutrality." This is not the first bold move by the Colombian president. In May, his government formally cut diplomatic ties with "Israel," citing what Petro explicitly described as a "genocide." His administration also appointed Colombia's first ambassador to Palestine, pledging medical treatment in Colombian hospitals for injured children from Gaza. The newly appointed ambassador, Jorge Ivan Ospina, later echoed Petro's position, warning of a "macabre intention to erase the identity of a people." In Tuesday's article, Petro praised similar actions taken by countries like Malaysia, which banned Israeli ships from its ports, and South Africa, which brought "Israel" before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on charges of genocide. It is worth noting that Colombia joined that case as an intervening party, further deepening its legal opposition to "Israel's" war. Read more: US defends Israeli use of starvation as weapon of war before ICJ Global reckoning Looking ahead, Petro mentioned that Colombia and South Africa, co-chairs of the Hague Group, will host an emergency summit regarding Gaza on July 15. The conference aims to develop a coordinated, multilateral strategy to isolate "Israel" diplomatically and economically while restoring credibility to the global legal order. With the UN's proposed international peace conference indefinitely postponed, Petro cast the July summit as a necessary corrective to global paralysis. The Colombian president framed the Gaza crisis not just as a moral catastrophe but as an existential test for international law and nations of the Global South. "We can either stand firm in defense of the legal principles that seek to prevent war and conflict," he wrote, "or watch helplessly as the international system collapses under the weight of unchecked power politics." He concluded his piece by stressing that the choice is between complicity in colonial violence and collective resistance against it. • On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 3:12 PM Martin Wasserman <deeperlook@aol.com> wrote: Aram, Amnesty International is not a credible source on this issue. It appears that the once -respectable organization has been taken over by malevolent actors with a political axe to grind. Their anti -Israel bias is evident throughout the report. They accuse Israel of genocide but make no mention at all of Hamas' explicit genocidal policy against Jews. They accuse Israel of violating international law, but make no reference at all to the fact that Israel is facing a ruthless enemy that observes no international laws whatsoever. When they mention Hamas' transgressions at all, they do it in the mildest language possible, and then use the most damning possible language when describing Israel's actions. They take it as a given that Israel is an apartheid state, a blatantly false accusation that is very easily disproved. They take it as a given that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land, as if the territories of Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the ancient Jewish nation, don't belong to Jews at all, but are instead the property of a fictitious country called "Palestine" which has never actually existed in any historical period. In short, this entire report is a politically motivated "hatchet job" that deserves no credibility whatsoever. Martin Wasserman On Ju1 20, 2025, at 11:39 AM, Aram James <ab:pd1 @gmail.com> wrote: Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Amnesty International's research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today. The report, 'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman': Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza_documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity. "Amnesty International's report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them," said Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International. "Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. "States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel's atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end." Over the past two months the crisis has grown particularly acute in the North Gaza governorate, where a besieged population is facing starvation, displacement and annihilation amid relentless bombardment and suffocating restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. "Our research reveals that, for months, Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza. It continued to do so in defiance of countless warnings about the catastrophic humanitarian situation and of legally binding decisions from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering Israel to take immediate measures to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza," said Agnes Callamard. "Israel has repeatedly argued that its actions in Gaza are lawful and can be justified by its military goal to eradicate Hamas. But genocidal intent can co -exist alongside military goals and does not need to be Israel's sole intent." Amnesty International examined Israel's acts in Gaza closely and in their totality, taking into account their recurrence and simultaneous occurrence, and both their immediate impact and their cumulative and mutually reinforcing consequences. The organization considered the scale and severity of the casualties and destruction over time. It also analysed public statements by officials, finding that prohibited acts were often announced or called for in the first place by high-level officials in charge of the war efforts. "Taking into account the pre-existing context of dispossession, apartheid and unlawful military occupation in which these acts have been committed, we could find only one reasonable conclusion: Israel's intent is the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, whether in parallel with, or as a means to achieve, its military goal of destroying Hamas," said Agnes Callamard. "The atrocity crimes committed on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other armed groups against Israelis and victims of other nationalities, including deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking, can never justify Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza." International jurisprudence recognizes that the perpetrator does not need to succeed in their attempts to destroy the protected group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to have been committed. The commission of prohibited acts with the intent to destroy the group, as such, is sufficient. Amnesty International's report examines in detail Israel's violations in Gaza over nine months between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024. The organization interviewed 212 people, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, healthcare workers, conducted fieldwork and analysed an extensive range of visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery. It also analysed statements by senior Israeli government and military officials, and official Israeli bodies. On multiple occasions, the organization shared its findings with the Israeli authorities but had received no substantive response at the time of publication. Unprecedented scale and magnitude Israel's actions following Hamas's deadly attacks on 7 October 2023 have brought Gaza's population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over 97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families. It has caused unprecedented destruction, which experts say occurred at a level and speed not seen in any other conflict in the 21st century, levelling entire cities and destroying critical infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural and religious sites. It thereby rendered large swathes of Gaza uninhabitable. Mohammed, who fled with his family from Gaza City to Rafah in March 2024 and was displaced again in May 2024, described their struggle to survive in horrifying conditions: "Here in Deir al-Balah, it's like an apocalypse... You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat, and there is no clean water, no toilets, all while the bombing never stops. You feel like you are subhuman here." Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death. Israel also subjected hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza to incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment. Viewed in isolation, some of the acts investigated by Amnesty International constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law. But in looking at the broader picture of Israel's military campaign and the cumulative impact of its policies and acts, genocidal intent is the only reasonable conclusion. Intent to destroy To establish Israel's specific intent to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, Amnesty International analysed the overall pattern of Israel's conduct in Gaza, reviewed dehumanizing and genocidal statements by Israeli government and military officials, particularly those at the highest levels, and considered the context of Israel's system of apartheid, its inhumane blockade of Gaza and the unlawful 57 -year -old military occupation of the Palestinian territory. Before reaching its conclusion, Amnesty International examined Israel's claims that its military lawfully targeted Hamas and other armed groups throughout Gaza, and that the resulting unprecedented destruction and denial of aid were the outcome of unlawful conduct by Hamas and other armed groups, such as locating fighters among the civilian population or the diversion of aid. The organization concluded these claims are not credible. The presence of Hamas fighters near or within a densely populated area does not absolve Israel from its obligations to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. Its research found Israel repeatedly failed to do so, committing multiple crimes under international law for which there can be no justification based on Hamas's actions. Amnesty International also found no evidence that the diversion of aid could explain Israel's extreme and deliberate restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. In its analysis, the organization also considered alternative arguments such as ones that Israel was acting recklessly or that it simply wanted to destroy Hamas and did not care if it needed to destroy Palestinians in the process, demonstrating a callous disregard for their lives rather than genocidal intent. Our damning findings must serve as a wake- up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International However, regardless of whether Israel sees the destruction of Palestinians as instrumental to destroying Hamas or as an acceptable by-product of this goal, this view of Palestinians as disposable and not worthy of consideration is in itself evidence of genocidal intent. Many of the unlawful acts documented by Amnesty International were preceded by officials urging their implementation. The organization reviewed 102 statements that were issued by Israeli government and military officials and others between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2024 and dehumanized Palestinians, called for or justified genocidal acts or other crimes against them. Of these, Amnesty International identified 22 statements made by senior officials in charge of managing the offensive that appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts, providing direct evidence of genocidal intent. This language was frequently replicated, including by Israeli soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by audiovisual content verified by Amnesty International showing soldiers making calls to "erase" Gaza or to make it uninhabitable, and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities. Killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm Amnesty International documented the genocidal acts of killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza by reviewing the results of investigations it conducted into 15 air strikes between 7 October 2023 and 20 April 2024 that killed at least 334 civilians, including 141 children, and wounded hundreds of others. Amnesty International found no evidence that any of these strikes were directed at a military objective. In one illustrative case, on 20 April 2024, an Israeli air strike destroyed the Abdelal family house in the Al-Jneinah neighbourhood in eastern Rafah, killing three generations of Palestinians, including 16 children, while they were sleeping. While these represent just a fraction of Israel's aerial attacks, they are indicative of a broader pattern of repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects or deliberately indiscriminate attacks. The attacks were also conducted in ways designed to cause a very high number of fatalities and injuries among the civilian population. Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction The report documents how Israel deliberately inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza intended to lead, over time, to their destruction. These conditions were imposed through three simultaneous patterns that repeatedly compounded the effect of each other's devastating impacts: damage to and destruction of life - sustaining infrastructure and other objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population; the repeated use of sweeping, arbitrary and confusing mass "evacuation" orders to forcibly displace almost all of Gaza's population; and the denial and obstruction of the delivery of essential services, humanitarian assistance and other life-saving supplies into and within Gaza. After 7 October 2023, Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza cutting off electricity, water and fuel. In the nine months reviewed for this report, Israel maintained a suffocating, unlawful blockade, tightly controlled access to energy sources, failed to facilitate meaningful humanitarian access within Gaza, and obstructed the import and delivery of life- saving goods and humanitarian aid, particularly to areas north of Wadi Gaza. They thereby exacerbated an already existing humanitarian crisis. This, combined with the extensive damage to Gaza's homes, hospitals, water and sanitation facilities and agricultural land, and mass forced displacement, caused catastrophic levels of hunger and led to the spread of diseases at alarming rates. The impact was especially harsh on young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women, with anticipated long-term consequences for their health. The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International Time and again, Israel had the chance to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, yet for over a year it has repeatedly refused to take steps blatantly within its power to do so, such as opening sufficient access points to Gaza or lifting tight restrictions on what could enter the Strip or their obstruction of aid deliveries within Gaza while the situation has grown progressively worse. Through its repeated "evacuation" orders Israel displaced nearly 1.9 million Palestinians — 90% of Gaza's population — into ever -shrinking, unsafe pockets of land under inhumane conditions, some of them up to 10 times. These multiple waves of forced displacement left many jobless and deeply traumatized, especially since some 70% of Gaza's residents are refugees or descendants of refugees whose towns and villages were ethnically cleansed by Israel during the 1948 Nakba. Despite conditions quickly becoming unfit for human life, Israeli authorities refused to consider measures that would have protected displaced civilians and ensured their basic needs were met, showing that their actions were deliberate. They refused to allow those displaced to return to their homes in northern Gaza or relocate temporarily to other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory or Israel, continuing to deny many Palestinians their right to return. under international law to areas they were displaced from in 1948. They did so knowing that there was nowhere safe for Palestinians in Gaza to flee to. Accountability for genocide "The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience," said Agnes Callamard. "Governments must stop pretending they are powerless to end this genocide, which was enabled by decades of impunity for Israel's violations of international law. States need to move beyond mere expressions of regret or dismay and take strong and sustained international action, however uncomfortable a finding of genocide may be for some of Israel's allies. "The International Criminal Court's (ICC) arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued last month offer real hope of long -overdue justice for victims. States must demonstrate their respect for the court's decision and for universal international law principles by arresting and handing over those wanted by the ICC. "We are calling on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to urgently consider adding genocide to the list of crimes it is investigating and for all states to use every legal avenue to bring perpetrators to justice. No one should be allowed to commit genocide and remain unpunished." Amnesty International is also calling for all civilian hostages to be released unconditionally and for Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups responsible for the crimes committed on 7 October to be held to account. The organization is also calling for the UN Security Council to impose targeted sanctions against Israeli and Hamas officials most implicated in crimes under international law. Background On 7 October 2023 Hamas and other armed groups indiscriminately fired rockets into southern Israel and carried out deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking there, killing 1,200 people, including over 800 civilians, and abducted 223 civilians and captured 27 soldiers. The crimes perpetrated by Hamas and other armed groups during this attack will be the focus of a forthcoming Amnesty International report. Since October 2023, Amnesty International has conducted in- depth investigations into the multiple violations and crimes under international law committed by Israeli forces, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects and deliberately indiscriminate attacks killing hundreds of civilians, as well as other unlawful attacks on and collective punishment of the civilian population. The organization has called on the Office of the ICC Prosecutor to expedite its investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine and is campaigning for an immediate ceasefire. For the Hebrew translation of this press release, lc ick here. INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY MIDDLE EAST MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA NEWS PRESS RELEASE WAR CRIMES AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Related Content COUNTRY Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory NEWS New NATO defence commitments must not come at cost of human rights NEWS Gaza: Starvation or gunfire — this is not a humanitarian response NEWS DRC: Peace deal with Rwanda fails to address serious crimes committed in eastern DRC NEWS Gaza: Evidence points to Israel's continued use of starvation to inflict genocide against Palestinians Recently added Cambodia: Scamming crisis survivors must be Protected amid Police crackdown Ireland: Amnesty's head urges Irish government to -press ahead with Occupied Territories Bill Angola: Authorities must respect and ensure the right to freedom of peaceful assembly Russia: Pro posec amendments to counter- extremism laws escalate assault on c.issent EU-Israel: Refusal to sus Dend the EU-Israel Association Agreement is a `cruel and unlawful betrayal' DONATE TO PROTECT HUMAN RIGHTS Women's Day protest in Mexico Together we can fight for human rights everywhere. Your donation can transform the lives of millions. ABOUT US Contact Us How We're Run Modern Slavery Act Statement Finances RESOURCES Media Centre Human Rights Education Human Rights Courses Annual report archive GET INVOLVED Join Take Action Volunteer LATEST News Campaigns Research WORK WITH US If you are talented and passionate about human rights then Amnesty International wants to hear from you. Privacy Policy Accessibility Cookie Statement Permissions Refunds of Donations © 2025 Amnesty International FOLLOW US ON: Os x al-6kOsWF On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 10:03 AM Martin Wasserman <deeperloo c@aol.com> wrote: Aram, If that's the definition of genocide, then Israel is clearly NOT committing genocide in Gaza. If Israel were trying to kill as many Gazans as possible, the death toll would be much, much higher than it is. They wouldn't allow any food or medicine in at all, and they wouldn't issue evacuation warnings before striking Hamas targets. The truth is, Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, but Hamas makes it very difficult by deliberately placing their command centers in civilian locations such as schools and hospitals. The only group that Israel wants to destroy is Hamas, which does have an explicit policy of genocide (by your definition) against Jews. Yes, the Gazans are suffering, but Hamas could end their suffering tomorrow if they wanted to. All they have to do is lay down their arms and release the hostages, and the war would be over immediately. But Hamas has no interest in ending the suffering of the Gazans. What they're actually calling for is an open-ended war of attrition against Israel, no matter what the cost to their own people. Martin Wasserman On Jul 18, 2025, at 8:26 PM, Aram James <abjpol@gmail.com> wrote: Genocide defined: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. "a campaign of genocide" On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 4:04 PM Martin Wasserman <ceeperlook@aol.com> wrote: It appears that "genocide" can be defined in several different ways. Perhaps we should stop using that term altogether and stick to words that have clear and unambiguous meanings. On Jul 18, 2025, at 12:25 PM, Aram James <abjpol@gmail.com> wrote: I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But contrary to the cries of Israel's fiercest critics, the evidence did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide. By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August. At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a "huge price" for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas was operating, "into rubble," and he called on "the residents of Gaza" to "leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere." Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember "what Amalek did to you," a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to "kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings" of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting "human animals" and, later, called for "total annihilation." Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on Xthat Israel's task must be "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth." Israel's actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one. This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Image People inspecting a huge pile of rubble. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend. *** The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." In determining what constitutes genocide, therefore, we must both establish intent and show that it is being carried out. In Israel's case, that intent has been publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. But intent can also be derived from a pattern of operations on the ground, and this pattern became clear by May 2024 — and has since become ever clearer — as the I.D.F. has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most genocide scholars are cautious about applying this term to contemporary events, precisely because of the tendency, since it was coined by the Jewish -Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, to attribute it to any case of massacre or inhumanity. Indeed, some argue that the categorization should be entirely discarded, because it often serves more to express outrage than to identify a particular crime. Yet as Mr. Lemkin recognized, and as the United Nations later agreed, it is crucial to be able to distinguish the attempt to destroy a particular group of people from other crimes under international law, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is because, while other crimes entail indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians as individuals, genocide denotes the killing of people as members of a group, geared at irreparably destroying the group itself so that it would never be able to reconstitute itself as a political, social or cultural entity. And, as the international community signaled by adopting the convention, it is incumbent upon all signatory states to prevent such an attempt, to do all they can to stop it while it is occurring and to subsequently punish those who were engaged in this crime of crimes — even if it occurred within the borders of a sovereign state. The designation has major political, legal and moral ramifications. Nations, politicians and military personnel suspected of, indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide are seen as beyond the pale of humanity and may compromise or lose their right to remain members of the international community. A finding by the International Court of Justice that a particular state is engaged in genocide, especially if enforced by the U.N. Security Council, can lead to severe sanctions. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox. Politicians or generals indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide or other breaches of international humanitarian law by the International Criminal Court can face arrest outside of their country. And a society that condones and is complicit in genocide, whatever the stand of its individual citizens may be, will carry this mark of Cain long after the fires of hatred and violence are put out. *** From: Aram James To: Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman@assembly.ca.gov; Veenker, Vicki Cc: Jeff Rosen; Jay Bovarskv; Veenker Vicki; h.etzko@gmail.com; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Ra Javadev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneider, James; Binder, Andrew; Gardener, Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanda Conaway; volanda; Don Austin; jgreen@dailynewsgroup.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonga; roberta ahlquist; Baker, Rob; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlcuist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Freddie.Quintana@sen.ca.gov; Jeff Conrad; Burt, Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District9@sanjoseca.gov; District4@sanjoseca.gov; District5@sanjoseca.gov; District2@sanjoseca.gov; EPA Today; Gennadv Shevner; Council, City; ciy.council@menlopark.cov; Nash, Betsy; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero@cityofepa.org; Cribbs, Anne; <michael.gennaco@oirgroup.com>; Stump, Molly; board@pausd.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Rodriguez, Miguel; Cait James; Tim James; Zelkha, Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enbera, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Tanaka, Grec; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberley; Supervisor Susan Ellenberc; Greg Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauinq; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee; Mark Turner; City Attorney; CityCouncil; Michelle Bicelow; Sean Allen; Seher Awan; Pat M; Carla Torres; David Piper; sharon .aci kson; Marty Wasserman Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Sunday, July 20, 2025 5:03:41 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 4:52 PM Aram James <abj Dd1 @gmail.com> wrote: Toddlers Trained to Die For Israel as young as five years olde i!, Toddlers Trained to die for Israel " There is a direct funnel from educating toddlers to, as soon as they turn 18 — they're of military age and they're indoctrinated and groomed and brainwashed, and they're ready to fight the battle." Tzofim "begins educating kids at five years old," said one former Zionist youth leader in Australia, who requested anonymity for fear of professional retaliation. He took part in groups affiliated with Tzofim as a teen. "There is a direct funnel from educating toddlers to, as soon as they turn 18 — they're of military age and they're indoctrinated and groomed and brainwashed, and they're ready to fight the battle." Tzofim "begins educating kids at five years old," said one former Zionist youth leader in Australia, who requested anonymity for fear of professional retaliation. He took part in groups affiliated with Tzofim as a teen. "There is a direct funnel from educating toddlers to, as soon as they turn 18 — they're of military age and they're indoctrinated and groomed and brainwashed, and they're ready to fight the battle." RESERVEDAMERICAN VOLUNTEERS FOR the Israeli army have partied with Ben Shapiro in Boca Raton, met with House Republicans Brian Mastand Mike Lawler in Washington, and joinedNew York City Mayor Eric Adams at Gracie Mansion. On a Manhattan rooftop late last year, they sipped cocktails and reconnected with people they'd met before — supporting Israel in its campaign of bombing, displacement, and starvation in Gaza. These efforts were organized by Nevut, a New York -based charity supporting American "lone soldiers" who sign up for the Israeli military. Among its upcoming events is a wellness retreat to Panama for lone soldier veterans who served in the Israeli military during its ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has killed more than 58,000 people nearly half of them children according to Gaza's health ministry. Other estimates put the death toll at 80000 or higher. Nevut, which operates across 22 states, is one of at least 20 U.S.-based charities directly funding lone soldier programs. Since 2020, according to The Intercept's analysis of their tax forms, these organizations have spent over $26 million to recruit and support lone soldiers from initial drafting to reintegration. The groups provide subsidized apartments, therapy, wellness retreats, and equipment to Israeli military units. MOST READ ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration Cou Deaaie Nathan Four CUNY Professors Say They Were Fired for Supporting Palestine Sanya Mansoor The Military Occupied LA for 40 Days and All They Did Was Detain One Guy Nick Turse The Intercept reviewed five years of tax documents that show 2023 was the most lucrative year on record for lone soldier programs. After Israel began calling up hundreds of thousands of reservists in the wake of Hamas's October 7 attack, U.S. donors poured funding into the organizations. Each year from 2002 to 2020, between 3,000 and 4,000 lone soldiers served in the Israeli military, about a third of them from North America. Since October 7, 2023, it is estimatedthat 7,000 lone soldiers from the U.S. alone have either signed up or returned to Israel to serve. The programs have helped to prop up an Israeli military now facing its biggest recruitment crisis in decades. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drags the assault on Gaza through its second year, civilians have protested his government and soldiers have refused to show up for reserve duty. With an estimated 100,000 Israeli soldiers refusing service, volunteers from the U.S. and other countries provide reinforcements. Last year, the Israeli military estimated that at least 23,000 American citizens were currently serving, a combination of lone soldiers and Americans who immigrated to Israel with their families. On social media, Nevut and other organizations post pictures, videos, and testimonies from lone soldiers serving in Gaza.Earlier this month, Nevut promoted a videoadvertising a day at a shooting range as "a little dose of enjoyable fire." A man wearing military tactical gear says: "All the guys here serve in the IDF; a majority serve in the war in Gaza." Another Instagram video encourages lone soldier veterans to reach out if they're thinking of going back into combat. One Nevut post advises viewers on "What not to ask a lone soldier," including: "Did you kill anyone?" "How many people died over there?" and "Were you in Gaza or Lebanon?" "These can potentially feel like dismissive, political, or emotionally charged questions," the post warns. A screenshot from Nevut's Instagram. Screenshot: Nevut / Instagram While the United States' steady supply of weapons shipments to Israel has come under scrutiny from elected officials to the United Nations, thousands of U.S. civilians who travel to Israel to join the army have received markedly less attention. Back at home, American lone soldiers do speaking tours to cleanse the reputation of the Israeli military. "I almost died for Palestinian children," said lone soldier Eli Wininger at an event in an Alabama church put on by the Massachusetts -based lone soldier organization Growing Wings. A Los Angeles native, Wininger has touched many sides of the lone soldier ecosystem: He was recruited after taking part in the youth scouts program Garin Tzabar, served with the Israeli military in Giaza returned to the United States, and recently started a volunteer position as a youth leader with the U.S. nonprofit Friends of the IDF. Speaking at the Growing Wings event earlier this year, he said he was instructed "not to kill Palestinian children. There is not a single soldier in there that is doing that." According to the U.N., over 50,000 childrenhave been killed or injured in Gaza since October 7, 2023 — though this is likely an undercount. Wininger did not respond to The Intercept's request for comment. Related They Went to Get Flour With Their Mother in Gaza. "She Came Back in a White Shroud." In response to questions on lone soldiers and the army's affiliation with U.S. nonprofit groups, the IDF told The Intercept it had "no comment." Neither Nevut nor Growing Wings responded to The Intercept's requests for comment. Federal law prohibits recruiting for foreign armies within U.S. borders, but it allows donations and promotion of foreign volunteering. Where, if at all, efforts to help American teens join the Israeli military run afoul of U.S. policy on foreign fighting is hard to determine, experts say. "The State Depai tuient basically says on the website that we don't want Americans serving abroad," said David Malet, an associate professor of justice, law, and criminology at American University who researches foreign fighters. "But realistically, we know it's kind of hard to enforce that." A State Depaitiiient spokesperson said U.S. citizens serving in the Israeli military are not required to register their service with the U.S. government. Dual citizens must comply with the laws of both countries of which they are a citizen, including any mandatory military service. The department said U.S. citizens are encouraged to consult current travel advisories for Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. (It recommends that people reconsider their travel to Israel and the West Bank, and not travel to Gaza.) "Our embassies overseas maintain rough estimates of U.S. citizens in their countries for contingency planning purposes, but these estimates are imperfect, can vary, and are constantly changing, which is why we do not generally disclose them publicly," a State Department spokesperson said in a statement. "U.S. citizens are not required to register their travel to a foreign country with us, so we cannot track with certainty how many U.S. citizens are in any particular country." The State Departiiient referred questions about legal implications of serving in a foreign military to the Department of Justice. DOJ referred questions to the Department of Defense, which referred questions to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. USCIS referred questions back to the State Department. Across the Jewish diaspora and in Israel, lone soldiers are receiving more recognition than ever. "I'm definitely aware of increased numbers of volunteers which are welcomed in Israel right now," Malet said. "You can see a lot more recognition and efforts to honor fallen lone soldiers than you would have seen before October 7." "I had just finished guarding a West Bank settlement," said Strober, now an anti - occupation activist. "Even then, I was like, this is such a weird experience." Strober was first introduced to the possibility of joining the Israeli military when she was 17, during a high school semester she spent in Israel. She said alumni of the semester in Israel program wearing miliary uniforms spoke to her group. "There were a lot of informal ways of talking about enlisting in the army," Strober told The Intercept. She later joined after participating in the Garin Tzabar program, which runs two majordrafting sessions each year. The program is funded by Tzofim, the biggest Zionist youth movement in Israel and the U.S. Also known as the Friends of Israel Scouts, the group has a U.S. nonprofit in New York. Tzofim "begins educating kids at five years old," said one former Zionist youth leader in Australia, who requested anonymity for fear of professional retaliation. He took part in groups affiliated with Tzofim as a teen. "There is a direct funnel from educating toddlers to, as soon as they turn 18 — they're of military age and they're indoctrinated and groomed and brainwashed, and they're ready to fight the battle." Garin Tzabar continues to recruit lone soldiers from the U.S., who often end up serving in combat in Gaza and "protecting civilians" in the West Bank where Israeli settlers and forces have killed 1,000 Palestinians since October 7, 2023. Israeli soldiers talking to settlers in the West Bank in April 2025.Photo: Georgia Gee The recruitment pipeline includes many U.S. day schools — from more conservative yeshivas to modern Jewish day schools that advertise how many alumni go on to serve in the Israeli military. The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, had5 1 alumni serving in the Israeli military as of 2023. Another school in New Jersey, the Rae Kushner Yeshiva, has congratulated an alum who became a social media manager in the IDF Spokesperson's Unit. "Her work was recognized as important for hasbara by the Israeli news," the school boasted on Facebook, using a term for Israeli public diplomacy, including propagandatailored to international audiences. Another alum of the school served as a lone soldier in the army and was a friend of the son of Netanyahu, who commemorated him after he died while traveling in 2018. One charity reviewed by The Intercept, the Lone Soldier Foundation, specifically provides funds for the children of families that attend a synagogue in northern New Jersey who join the Israeli military. According to the group's most recent tax filing, it also supports the units in which the children of members of its congregation serve. In 2023, the group spent over $80,000 on providing "non -combat and equipment to IDF units in which eligible American citizens served." .8� Read Our Complete Coverace Israel's War on Gaza North American lone soldiers are a "great example of the Zionist spirit or the Zionist dream," Strober told The Intercept. "It keeps American Jewish communities very, very close to the Israel question. It doesn't allow them to think critically because it's so close, because you know people who have been killed, or people who have served." The Charities Under heightened public scrutiny, U.S. nonprofits have distanced themselves from directly funding projects in the West Bank or other settlements, which are illegal under international law. But U.S.-based nonprofits granted $8.8 million to specific lone soldier programs in 2023 alone, The Intercept found. It's possible the real number is higher, as nonprofits only have to report foreign grants above a certain threshold. I "It doesn't allow American Jewish communities to think critically, because you know people who have been killed." The biggest known funder is Friends of the IDF, which has spent nearly $20 million on its lone soldier program since 2020, supporting more than 6 500 lone soldiers each year, according to documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service. In a statement, Friends of the IDF, an official partner of the Israeli military, said it provides more than 7,000 lone soldiers "with practical, emotional and mental health support throughout their service to make sure they never feel alone." The group said about half of the soldiers it backs are from Israel but are considered lone soldiers because they don't have family support. On its Instagram page, the group says it is the "only U.S. non-profit working directly with IDF leadership to provide critical support for Israel soldiers' health, well-being & education." Other organizations help offset the costs of living for lone soldiers. Bayit Brigade, which operates in both the U.S. and Israel, helps lone soldiers find affordable housing in Tel Aviv and raises emergency funds to help transport soldiers to their bases and provide supplies in the field. Bayit Brigade has posted videos of volunteers providing resources to the Israeli military's Yahalom Unit, which conducts "tunnel warfare" and demolitions in Gaza, including destroying areas to allow the military to operate. The organization's revenue jumped from approximately $160,000 in 2022 to $1.3 million in 2023, according to nonprofit documents. In a statement, the group told The Intercept that following October 7, it "temporarily expanded its community support efforts to address urgent needs on the ground," but have "no formal relationship with any government entity or with the IDF." The lines between support, education and recruitment of lone soldiers including what a formal relationship entails — are often blurred, said Strober, the former lone soldier. Garin Tzabar, for example, is operated in partby Israel's Ministry of Aliyah and Integration. Other efforts to finance lone soldiers, like Bayit Brigade, distance themselves from any sort of affiliation with the Israeli government. Other organizations also advertise their support for soldiers who fought in Gaza. Friends of Emek Lone Soldiers held concerts in the West Bank for women who served in Gaza. The website of the Michael Levin Lone Soldier Foundation includes testimonies of soldiers who received support while serving in Gaza. When she was part of the Israeli military, Strober still considered herself a believer in human rights, she told The Intercept. She was working for a human rights organization that supported Gazans' freedom of movement when, in 2014, Israel launched a series of attacks on Gaza that killed more than 2,000 Palestinians in under two months. "I didn't really know anything about Gaza," Strober said. "It was kind of the first time that I had any concept of who Palestinians were on the other side and how much control Israel had." Strober said she watched her friends get called up from the reserves and realized she didn't want to go serve in Gaza. "I just remember thinking, I'm not going to go zero in guns to kill Gazans when I'm talking to Gazans on the phone every day," she said. WE'RE INDEPENDENT OF CORPORATE INTERESTS AND POWERED BY MEMBERS. JOIN US. BECOME A MEMBER These efforts were organized by Nevut, a New York -based charity supporting American "lone soldiers" who sign up for the Israeli military. Among its upcoming events is a wellness retreat to Panama for lone soldier veterans who served in the Israeli military during its ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has killed more than 58,000 people — nearly half of them children — according to Gaza's health ministry. Other estimates put the death toll at 80,000 or higher. Nevut, which operates across 22 states, is one of at least 20 U.S.-based charities directly funding lone soldier programs. Since 2020, according to The Intercept's analysis of their tax forms, these organizations have spent over $26 million to recruit and support lone soldiers from initial drafting to reintegration. The groups provide subsidized apartments, therapy, wellness retreats, and equipment to Israeli military units. MOST READ ICE Lawyers Are Hidina Their Names in Immigration Court Debbie Na han Ell Four CUNY Professors Say They Were Fired for Supporting Palestine Sanya Mansoor The Military Occupied LA for 40 Days and All They Did Was Detain One Guy Nick Turse The Intercept reviewed five years of tax documents that show 2023 was the most lucrative year on record for lone soldier programs. After Israel began calling up hundreds of thousands of reservists in the wake of Hamas's October 7 attack, U.S. donors poured funding into the organizations. Each year from 2002 to 2020, between 3,000 anc L,000 lone soldiers served in the Israeli military, about a third of them from North America. Since October 7, 2023, it is estimatedthat 7,000 lone soldiers from the U.S. alone have either signed up or returned to Israel to serve. The programs have helped to prop up an Israeli military now facing its biggest recruitment crisis in decaces. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drags the assault on Gaza through its second year, civilians have protestec his government and soldiers have refused to show up for reserve duty. With an estimates 100,000 Israeli soldiers refusing service, volunteers from the U.S. and other countries provide reinforcements. Last year, the Israeli military estimated that at least 23,000 American citizens were currently serving, a combination of lone soldiers and Americans who immigrated to Israel with their families. On social media, Nevut and other organizations post pictures, videos, and testimonies from lone soldiers serving in Gaza.Earlier this month, Nevut promoted a videoadvertising a day at a shooting range as "a little dose of enjoyable fire." A man wearing military tactical gear says: "All the guys here serve in the IDF; a majority serve in the war in Gaza." Another Instagram video encourages lone soldier veterans to reach out if they're thinking of going back into combat. One Nevut post advises viewers on "What not to ask a lone soldier," including: "Did you kill anyone?" "How many people died over there?" and "Were you in Gaza or Lebanon?" "These can potentially feel like dismissive, political, or emotionally charged questions," the post warns. A screenshot from Nevut's Instagram. Screenshot: Nevut / Instagram While the United States' steady supply of weapons shipments to Israel has come under scrutiny from electec officials to the United Nations, thousands of U.S. civilians who travel to Israel to join the army have received markedly less attention. Back at home, American lone soldiers do sneaking tours to cleanse the reputation of the Israeli military. "I almost died for Palestinian children," said lone soldier Eli Wininger at an event in an Alabama church put on by the Massachusetts -based lone soldier organization Growing Wings. A Los Angeles native, Wininger has touched many sides of the lone soldier ecosystem: He was recruited after taking part in the youth scouts program Garin Tzabar, served with the Israeli military in Gaza,returned to the United States, and recently started a volunteer position as a youth leader with the U.S. nonprofit Friends of the IDF. Speaking at the Growing Wings event earlier this year, he said he was instructed "not to kill Palestinian children. There is not a single soldier in there that is doing that." According to the U.N., over 50,000 chilcrenhave been killed or injured in Gaza since October 7, 2023 — though this is likely an undercount. Wininger did not respond to The Intercept's request for comment. Related They Went to Get Flour With Their Mother in Gaza. "She Came Back in a White Shroud." In response to questions on lone soldiers and the army's affiliation with U.S. nonprofit groups, the IDF told The Intercept it had "no comment." Neither Nevut nor Growing Wings responded to The Intercept's requests for comment. Federal law prohibits recruiting for foreign armies within U.S. borders, but it allows donations and promotion of foreign volunteering. Where, if at all, efforts to help American teens join the Israeli military run afoul of U.S. policy on foreign fighting is hard to determine, experts say. "The State Department basically says on the website that we don't want Americans serving abroad," said David Malet, an associate professor of justice, law, and criminology at American University who researches foreign fighters. "But realistically, we know it's kind of hard to enforce that." A State Depaituient spokesperson said U.S. citizens serving in the Israeli military are not required to register their service with the U.S. government. Dual citizens must comply with the laws of both countries of which they are a citizen, including any mandatory military service. The department said U.S. citizens are encouraged to consult current travel advisories for Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. (It recommends that people reconsider their travel to Israel and the West Bank, and not travel to Gaza.) "Our embassies overseas maintain rough estimates of U.S. citizens in their countries for contingency planning purposes, but these estimates are imperfect, can vary, and are constantly changing, which is why we do not generally disclose them publicly," a State Department spokesperson said in a statement. "U.S. citizens are not required to register their travel to a foreign country with us, so we cannot track with certainty how many U.S. citizens are in any particular country." The State Department referred questions about legal implications of serving in a foreign military to the Department of Justice. DOJ referred questions to the Department of Defense, which referred questions to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. USCIS referred questions back to the State Department. Across the Jewish diaspora and in Israel, lone soldiers are receiving more recognition than ever. "I'm definitely aware of increased numbers of volunteers which are welcomed in Israel right now," Malet said. "You can see a lot more recognition and efforts to honor fallen lone soldiers than you would have seen before October 7." WE'RE INDEPENDENT OF CORPORATE INTERESTS - AND POWERED BY MEMBERS. JOIN US. BECOME A MEMBER The Pipeline Becca Strober was hailed as a hero when she returned to the U.S. while serving as a lone soldier in Israel. As she walked around her father's synagogue in Philadelphia in 2009, the congregants stood up to shake her hand and thank her. "I had just finished guarding a West Bank settlement," said Strober, now an anti -occupation activist. "Even then, I was like, this is such a weird experience." Strober was first introduced to the possibility of joining the Israeli military when she was 17, during a high school semester she spent in Israel. She said alumni of the semester in Israel program wearing miliary uniforms spoke to her group. "There were a lot of informal ways of talking about enlisting in the army," Strober told The Intercept. She later joined after participating in the Garin Tzabar program, which runs two majordrafting sessions each year. The program is funded by Tzofim, the biggest Zionist youth movement in Israel and the U.S. Also known as the Friends of Israel Scouts, the group has a U.S. nonprofit in New York. Tzofim "begins educating kids at five years old," said one former Zionist youth leader in Australia, who requested anonymity for fear of professional retaliation. He took part in groups affiliated with Tzofim as a teen. "There is a direct funnel from educating toddlers to, as soon as they turn 18 they're of military age and they're indoctrinated and groomed and brainwashed, and they're ready to fight the battle." Garin Tzabar continues to recruit lone soldiers from the U.S., who often end up serving in combat in Gaza and "protecting civilians" in the West Bank where Israeli settlers and forces have killed 1,000 Palestinians since October 7, 2023. Israeli soldiers talking to settlers in the West Bank in April 2025.Photo: Georgia Gee The recruitment pipeline includes many U.S. day schools from more conservative yeshivas to modern Jewish day schools that advertise how many alumni go on to serve in the Israeli military. The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, had51 alumni serving in the Israeli military as of 2023. Another school in New Jersey, the Rae Kushner Yeshiva, has congratulated an alum who became a social media manager in the IDF Spokesperson's Unit. "Her work was recognized as important for hasbara by the Israeli news," the school boasted on Facebook, using a term for Israeli public diplomacy, including wopagandatailored to international audiences. Another alum of the school served as a lone soldier in the army and was a friend of the son of Netanyahu, who commemorates him after he died while traveling in 2018. One charity reviewed by The Intercept, the Lone Soldier Founsation, specifically provides funds for the children of families that attend a synagogue in northern New Jersey who join the Israeli military. According to the group's most recent tax filing, it also supports the units in which the children of members of its congregation serve. In 2023, the group spent over $80,000 on providing "non -combat and equipment to IDF units in which eligible American citizens served." ❑® Read Our Comp=.ete Coverage Israel's War on Gaza North American lone soldiers are a "great example of the Zionist spirit or the Zionist dream," Strober told The Intercept. "It keeps American Jewish communities very, very close to the Israel question. It doesn't allow them to think critically because it's so close, because you know people who have been killed, or people who have served." The Charities Under heightened public scrutiny, U.S. nonprofits have distanced themselves from directly funding projects in the West Bank or other settlements, which are illegal under international law. But U.S.-based nonprofits granted $8.8 million to specific lone soldier programs in 2023 alone, The Intercept found. It's possible the real number is higher, as nonprofits only have to report foreign grants above a certain threshold. I "It doesn't allow American Jewish communities to think critically, because you know people who have been killed." The biggest known funder is Friends of the IDF, which has spent nearly $20 million on its lone soldier program since 2020, supporting more than 6.500 lone soldiers each year, according to cocuments filed with the Internal Revenue Service. In a statement, Friends of the IDF, an officia_ partner of the Israeli military, said it provides more than 7,000 lone soldiers "with practical, emotional and mental health support throughout their service to make sure they never feel alone." The group said about half of the soldiers it backs are from Israel but are considered lone soldiers because they don't have family support. On its Instagram page, the group says it is the "only U.S. non-profit working directly with IDF leadership to provide critical support for Israel soldiers' health, well-being & education." Other organizations help offset the costs of living for lone soldiers. Bayit Brigade, which operates in both the U.S. and Israel, helps lone soldiers find affordaple housing in Tel Aviv and raises emergency funds to help transport soldiers to their bases and provide supplies in the field. Bayit Brigade has posted viceos of volunteers providing resources to the Israeli military's Yahalom Unit, which conducts "tunnel warfare" and demolitions in Gaza, including destroying areas to allow the military to o berate. The organization's revenue jumped from approximately $160,000 in 2022 to $1.3 million in 2023, according to nonprofit documents. In a statement, the group told The Intercept that following October 7, it "temporarily expanded its community support efforts to address urgent needs on the ground," but have "no formal relationship with any government entity or with the IDF." The lines between support, education and recruitment of lone soldiers — including what a formal relationship entails are often blurred, said Strober, the former lone soldier. Garin Tzabar, for example, is operates in partby Israel's Ministry of Aliyah and Integration. Other efforts to finance lone soldiers, like Bayit Brigade, distance themselves from any sort of affiliation with the Israeli government. Other organizations also advertise their support for soldiers who fought in Gaza. Friends of Emek Lone Soldiers held concerts in the West Bank for women who served in Gaza. The we mite of the Michael Levin Lone Soldier Foundation includes testimonies of soldiers who received support while serving in Gaza. When she was part of the Israeli military, Strober still considered herself a believer in human rights, she told The Intercept. She was working for a human rights organization that supported Gazans' freedom of movement when, in 2014, Israel launched a series of attacks on Gaza that killed more than 2,000 Palestinians in uncer two months. "I didn't really know anything about Gaza," Strober said. "It was kind of the first time that I had any concept of who Palestinians were on the other side and how much control Israel had. Strober said she watched her friends get called up from the reserves and realized she didn't want to go serve in Gaza. "I just remember thinking, I'm not going to go zero in guns to kill Gazans when I'm talking to Gazans on the phone every day," she said. On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 4:22 PM Aram James <abj ld l @gmail.cor> wrote: As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel Tigraettighldi ciret Milar thkn dnuary. Photograph: IDF/GPO/Sipa/Rex/Shutterstock This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far -right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 2Oth-century history — and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree By Omer Bartov Tue 13 Aug 2024 00.00 EDT Share O n 19 June 2024, I was scheduled to give a lecture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Be'er Sheva, Israel. My lecture was part of an event about the worldwide campus protests against Israel, and I planned to address the war in Gaza and more broadly the question of whether the protests were sincere expressions of outrage or motivated by antisemitism, as some had claimed. But things did not work out as planned. When I arrived at the entrance to the lecture hall, I saw a group of students congregating. It soon transpired that they were not there to attend the event but to protest against it. The students had been summoned, it appeared, by a WhatsApp message that went out the day before, which flagged the lecture and called for action: "We will not allow it! How long will we commit treason against ourselves?!?!?!??!!" The message went on to allege that I had signed a petition that described Israel as a "regime of apartheid" (in fact, the petition referred to a regime of apartheid in the West Bank). I was also "accused" of having written an article for the New York Times, in November 2023, in which I stated that although the statements of Israeli leaders suggested genocidal intent, there was still time to stop Israel from perpetrating genocide. On this, I was guilty as charged. The organiser of the event, the distinguished geographer Oren Yiftachel, was similarly criticised. His offences included having served as the director of the "anti -Zionist" B'Tselem, a globally respected human rights NGO. As the panel participants and a handful of mostly elderly faculty members filed into the hall, security guards prevented the protesting students from entering. But they did not stop them from keeping the lecture hall door open, calling out slogans on a bullhorn and banging with all their might on the walls. After over an hour of disruption, we agreed that perhaps the best step forward would be to ask the student protesters to join us for a conversation, on the condition that they stop the disruption. A fair number of those activists eventually walked in and for the next two hours we sat down and talked. As it turned out, most of these young men and women had recently returned from reserve service, during which they had been deployed in the Gaza Strip. This was not a friendly or "positive" exchange of views, but it was revealing. These students were not necessarily representative of the student body in Israel as a whole. They were activists in extreme rightwing organisations. But in many ways, what they were saying reflected a much more widespread sentiment in the country. I had not been to Israel since June 2023, and during this recent visit I found a different country from the one I had known. Although I have worked abroad for many years, Israel is where I was born and raised. It is the place where my parents lived and are buried; it is where my son has established his own family and most of my oldest and best friends live. Knowing the country from the inside and having followed events even more closely than usual since 7 October, I was not entirely surprised by what I encountered on my return, but it was still profoundly disturbing. I n deliberating these issues, I cannot but draw on my personal and professional background. I served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for four years, a term that included the 1973 Yom Kippur War and postings in the West Bank, northern Sinai and Gaza, ending my service as an infantry company commander. During my time in Gaza, I saw first-hand the poverty and hopelessness of Palestinian refugees eking out a living in congested, decrepit neighbourhoods. Most vividly, I remember patrolling the shadeless, silent streets of the Egyptian town of `Arish — which was then occupied by Israel — pierced by the gazes of the fearful, resentful population observing us from their shuttered windows. For the first time, I understood what it meant to occupy another people. Military service is mandatory for Jewish Israelis when they turn 18 — though there are a few exceptions — but afterwards, you can still be called upon to serve again in the IDF, for training or operational duties, or in case of emergencies such as a war. When I was called up in 1976, I was an undergraduate studying at Tel Aviv University. During that first deployment as a reserve officer, I was severely wounded in a training accident, along with a score of my soldiers. The IDF covered up the circumstances of this event, which was caused by the negligence of the training base commander. I spent most of that first semester in the hospital of Be'er Sheva, but returned to my studies, graduating in 1979 with a speciality in history. These personal experiences made me all the more interested in a question that had long preoccupied me: what motivates soldiers to fight? In the decades after the second world war, many American sociologists argued that soldiers fight first and foremost for each other, rather than for some bigger ideological goal. But that didn't quite fit with what I'd experienced as a soldier: we believed that we were in it for a larger cause that surpassed our own group of buddies. By the time I had completed my undergraduate degree, I had also begun to ask whether, in the name of that cause, soldiers could be made to act in ways they would otherwise find reprehensible. Taking the extreme case, I wrote my Oxford PhD thesis, later published as a book, on the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and the crimes it perpetrated on the eastern front in the second world war. What I found ran counter to how Germans in the 198os understood their past. They preferred to think that the army had fought a "decent" war, even as the Gestapo and the SS perpetrated genocide "behind its back". It took Germans many more years to realise just how complicit their own fathers and grandfathers had been in the Holocaust and the mass murder of many other groups in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. When the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out in late 1987 I was teaching at Tel Aviv University. I was appalled by the instruction of Yitzhak Rabin, then minister of defence, to the IDF to "break the arms and legs" of Palestinian youths who were throwing rocks at heavily armed troops. I wrote a letter to him warning that, based on my research into the indoctrination of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, I feared that under his leadership the IDF was heading down a similarly slippery path. View i 'I was not entirely surprised by what I encountered, but it was still profoundly disturbing' . . . Omer Bartov. Photograph: David Degner/The Guardian As my research had shown, even before their conscription, young German men had internalised core elements of Nazi ideology, especially the view that the subhuman Slav masses, led by insidious Bolshevik Jews, were threatening Germany and the rest of the civilised world with destruction, and that therefore Germany had the right and duty to create for itself a "living space" in the east and to decimate or enslave that region's population. This worldview was then further inculcated into the troops, so that by the time they marched into the Soviet Union they perceived their enemies through that prism. The fierce resistance put up by the Red Army only confirmed the need to utterly destroy Soviet soldiers and civilians alike, and most especially the Jews, who were seen as the main instigators of Bolshevism. The more destruction they wrought, the more fearful German troops became of the revenge they could expect if their enemies prevailed. The result was the killing of up to 3o million Soviet soldiers and citizens. To my astonishment, a few days after writing to him, I received a one -line response from Rabin, chiding me for daring to compare the IDF to the German military. This gave me the opportunity to write him a more detailed letter, explaining my research and my anxiety about using the IDF as a tool of oppression against unarmed occupied civilians. Rabin responded again, with the same statement: "How dare you compare the IDF to the Wehrmacht." But in retrospect, I believe this exchange revealed something about his subsequent intellectual journey. For as we know from his later engagement in the Oslo peace process, however flawed, he did eventually recognise that in the long run Israel could not sustain the military, political and moral price of the occupation. Since 1989, I have been teaching in the United States. I have written profusely on war, genocide, nazism, antisemitism and the Holocaust, seeking to understand the links between the industrial killing of soldiers in the first world war and the extermination of civilian populations by Hitler's regime. Among other projects, I spent many years researching the transformation of my mother's home town — Buchach in Poland (now Ukraine) — from a community of inter -ethnic coexistence into one in which, under the Nazi occupation, the gentile population turned against their Jewish neighbours. While the Germans came to the town with the express goal of murdering its Jews, the speed and efficiency of the killing was greatly facilitated by local collaboration. These locals were motivated by pre-existing resentments and hatreds that can be traced back to the rise of ethnonationalism in the preceding decades, and the prevalent view that the Jews did not belong to the new nation states created after the first world war. In the months since 7 October, what I have learned over the course of my life and my career has become more painfully relevant than ever before. Like many others, I have found these last months emotionally and intellectually challenging. Like many others, members of my own and of my friends' families have also been directly affected by the violence. There is no dearth of grief wherever you turn. T he Hamas attack on 7 October came as a tremendous shock to Israeli society, one from which it has not begun to recover. It was the first time Israel has lost control of part of its territory for an extended period of time, with the IDF unable to prevent the massacre of more than 1,200 people — many killed in the cruellest ways imaginable — and the taking of well over 200 hostages, including scores of children. The sense of abandonment by the state and of ongoing insecurity — with tens of thousands of Israeli citizens still displaced from their homes along the Gaza Strip and by the Lebanese border — is profound. Today, across vast swaths of the Israeli public, including those who oppose the government, two sentiments reign supreme. The first is a combination of rage and fear, a desire to re- establish security at any cost and a complete distrust of political solutions, negotiations and reconciliation. The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that war was the extension of politics by other means, and warned that without a defined political objective it would lead to limitless destruction. The sentiment that now prevails in Israel similarly threatens to make war into its own end. In this view, politics is an obstacle to achieving goals rather than a means to limit destruction. This is a view that can only ultimately lead to self-annihilation. The second reigning sentiment — or rather lack of sentiment — is the flipside of the first. It is the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza. The majority, it seems, do not even want to know what is happening in Gaza, and this desire is reflected in TV coverage. Israeli television news these days usually begins with reports on the funerals of soldiers, invariably described as heroes, fallen in the fighting in Gaza, followed by estimates of how many Hamas fighters were "liquidated". References to Palestinian civilian deaths are rare and normally presented as part of enemy propaganda or as a cause for unwelcome international pressure. In the face of so much death, this deafening silence now seems like its own form of vengefulness. Of course, the Israeli public long ago became inured to the brutal occupation that has characterised the country for 57 out of the 76 years of its existence. But the scale of what is being perpetrated in Gaza right now by the IDF is as unprecedented as the complete indifference of most Israelis to what is being done in their name. In 1982, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against the massacre of the Palestinian population in the refugee camps Sabra and Shatilain western Beirut by Maronite Christian militias, facilitated by the IDF. Today, this kind of response is inconceivable. The way people's eyes glaze over whenever one mentions the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and the deaths of thousands of children and women and elderly people, is deeply unsettling. Meeting my friends in Israel this time, I frequently felt that they were afraid that I might disrupt their grief, and that living out of the country I could not grasp their pain, anxiety, bewilderment and helplessness. Any suggestion that living in the country had numbed them to the pain of others — the pain that, after all, was being inflicted in their name — only produced a wall of silence, a retreat into themselves, or a quick change of subject. The impression that I got was consistent: we have no room in our hearts, we have no room in our thoughts, we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza. We must focus on ourselves, on our trauma, fear and anger. In an interview conducted on 7 March 2024, the writer, farmer and scientist Zeev Smilansky expressed this very sentiment in a manner that I found shocking, precisely because it came from him. I have known Smilansky for more than half a century, and he is the son of the celebrated Israeli author S Yizhar, whose 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh was the very first text in Israeli literature to confront the injustice of the Nakba, the expulsion of 150,000 Palestinians from what became the state of Israel in 1948. Speaking about his own son, Offer, who lives in Brussels, Smilansky commented: Offer says that for him every child is a child, no matter whether he is in Gaza or here. I don't feel like him. Our children here are more important to me. There is a shocking humanitarian disaster there, I understand that, but my heart is blocked and filled with our children and our hostages ... There is no room in my heart for the children in Gaza, however shocking and terrifying it is and even though I know that war is not the solution. I listen to Maoz Inon, who lost both his parents [murdered by Hamas on 7 October] ... and who speaks so beautifully and persuasively about the need to look forward, that we need to bring hope and to want peace, because wars won't accomplish anything, and I agree with him. I agree with him, but I cannot find the strength in my heart, with all my leftist inclinations and love for humanity, I cannot ... It is not just From: Aram James To: Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman@assembly.ca.gov; Veenker, Vicki Cc: Jeff Rosen; Jay Bovarskv; Veenker Vicki; h.etzko@gmail.com; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Ra Javadev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneider, James; Binder, Andrew; Gardener, Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanda Conaway; volanda; Don Austin; jgreen@dailynewsgroup.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonga; roberta ahlquist; Baker, Rob; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlcuist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Freddie.Quintana@sen.ca.gov; Jeff Conrad; Burt, Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District9@sanjoseca.gov; District4@sanjoseca.gov; District5@sanjoseca.gov; District2@sanjoseca.gov; EPA Today; Gennadv Shevner; Council, City; ciy.council@menlopark.cov; Nash, Betsy; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero@cityofepa.org; Cribbs, Anne; <michael.gennaco@oirgroup.com>; Stump, Molly; board@pausd.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Rodriguez, Miguel; Cait James; Tim James; Zelkha, Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enbera, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Tanaka, Grec; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberley; Supervisor Susan Ellenberc; Greg Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauinq; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee; Mark Turner; City Attorney; CityCouncil; Michelle Bicelow; Sean Allen; Seher Awan; Pat M; Carla Torres; David Piper; sharon .aci kson; Marty Wasserman Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Sunday, July 20, 2025 4:53:15 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Toddlers Trained to Die For Israel as young as five years oldlun Toddlers Trained to die for Israel " There is a direct funnel from educating toddlers to, as soon as they turn 18 — they're of military age and they're indoctrinated and groomed and brainwashed, and they're ready to fight the battle." Tzofim "begins educating kids at five years old," said one former Zionist youth leader in Australia, who requested anonymity for fear of professional retaliation. He took part in groups affiliated with Tzofim as a teen. "There is a direct funnel from educating toddlers to, as soon as they turn 18 — they're of military age and they're indoctrinated and groomed and brainwashed, and they're ready to fight the battle." Tzofim "begins educating kids at five years old," said one former Zionist youth leader in Australia, who requested anonymity for fear of professional retaliation. He took part in groups affiliated with Tzofim as a teen. "There is a direct funnel from educating toddlers to, as soon as they turn 18 — they're of military age and they're indoctrinated and groomed and brainwashed, and they're ready to fight the battle." RESERVEDAMERICAN VOLUNTEERS FOR the Israeli army have partied with Ben Shapiro in Boca Raton, met with House Republicans Brian Mastand Mike Lawler in Washington, and :oinedNew York City Mayor Eric Adams at Gracie Mansion. On a Manhattan rooftop late last year, they sipped cocktails and reconnected with people they'd met before — supporting Israel in its campaign of bombing, displacement, and starvation in Gaza. These efforts were organized by Nevut, a New York -based charity supporting American "lone soldiers" who sign up for the Israeli military. Among its upcoming events is a wellness retreat to Panama for lone soldier veterans who served in the Israeli military during its ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has killed more than 58,000 people nearly half of them children according to Gaza's health ministry. Other estimates put the death toll at 80,000 or higher. Nevut, which operates across 22 states, is one of at least 20 U.S.-based charities directly funding lone soldier programs. Since 2020, according to The Intercept's analysis of their tax forms, these organizations have spent over $26 million to recruit and support lone soldiers from initial drafting to reintegration. The groups provide subsidized apartments, therapy, wellness retreats, and equipment to Israeli military units. MOST READ ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration Court DeaDie Nathan Four CUNY Professors Say They Were Fired for Supporting Palestine Sanya Mansoor The Military Occupied LA for 40 Days and All They Did Was Detain One Guy Nick Turse The Intercept reviewed five years of tax documents that show 2023 was the most lucrative year on record for lone soldier programs. After Israel began calling up hundreds of thousands of reservists in the wake of Hamas's October 7 attack, U.S. donors poured funding into the organizations. Each year from 2002 to 2020, between 3,000 and 4,000 lone soldiers served in the Israeli military, about a third of them from North America. Since October 7, 2023, it is estimatecthat 7,000 lone soldiers from the U.S. alone have either signed up or returned to Israel to serve. The programs have helped to prop up an Israeli military now facing its biggest recruitment crisis in c.ecades. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drags the assault on Gaza through its second year, civilians have protes -ed his government and soldiers have refused to show up for reserve duty. With an es:imated 100,000 Israeli soldiers refusing service, volunteers from the U.S. and other countries provide reinforcements. Last year, the Israeli military estimated that at least 23,000 American citizens were currently serving, a combination of lone soldiers and Americans who immigrated to Israel with their families. On social media, Nevut and other organizations post pictures, videos, and testimonies from lone soldiers serving in Gaza.Earlier this month, Nevut promoted a videoadvertising a day at a shooting range as "a little dose of enjoyable fire." A man wearing military tactical gear says: "All the guys here serve in the IDF; a majority serve in the war in Gaza." Another Instagram viceo encourages lone soldier veterans to reach out if they're thinking of going back into combat. One Nevut mai advises viewers on "What not to ask a lone soldier," including: "Did you kill anyone?" "How many people died over there?" and "Were you in Gaza or Lebanon?" "These can potentially feel like dismissive, political, or emotionally charged questions," the post warns. A screenshot from Nevut's Instagram. Screenshot: Nevut / Instagr n While the United States' steady supply of weapons shi Dments to Israel has come under scrutiny from electec officials to the Unitec. Nations, thousands of U.S. civilians who travel to Israel to join the army have received markedly less attention. Back at home, American lone soldiers do speaking tours to cleanse the reputation of the Israeli military. "I almost died for Palestinian children," said lone soldier Eli Wininger at an event in an Alabama church put on by the Massachusetts -based lone soldier organization Growing Wings. A Los Angeles native, Wininger has touched many sides of the lone soldier ecosystem: He was recruited after taking part in the youth scouts program Garin Tzabar, servec with the Israeli military in Gaza,returned to the United States, and recently started a volunteer position as a youth leader with the U.S. nonprofit Friends of the IDF. Speaking at the Growing Wings event earlier this year, he said he was instructed "not to kill Palestinian children. There is not a single soldier in there that is doing that." According to the U.N., over 50,000 childrenhave been killed or injured in Gaza since October 7, 2023 though this is likely an undercount. Wininger did not respond to The Intercept's request for comment. Relatec They Went to Get Flour With Their Mother in Gaza. "She Came Back in a White Shroud." In response to questions on lone soldiers and the army's affiliation with U.S. nonprofit groups, the IDF told The Intercept it had "no comment." Neither Nevut nor Growing Wings responded to The Intercept's requests for comment. Federal law prohibits recruiting for foreign armies within U.S. borders, but it allows donations and promotion of foreign volunteering. Where, if at all, efforts to help American teens join the Israeli military run afoul of U.S. policy on foreign fighting is hard to determine, experts say. "The State Department basically says on the website that we don't want Americans serving abroad," said David Malet, an associate professor of justice, law, and criminology at American University who researches foreign fighters. "But realistically, we know it's kind of hard to enforce that." A State Department spokesperson said U.S. citizens serving in the Israeli military are not required to register their service with the U.S. government. Dual citizens must comply with the laws of both countries of which they are a citizen, including any mandatory military service. The department said U.S. citizens are encouraged to consult current travel advisories for Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. (It recommends that people reconsider their travel to Israel and the West Bank, and not travel to Gaza.) "Our embassies overseas maintain rough estimates of U.S. citizens in their countries for contingency planning purposes, but these estimates are imperfect, can vary, and are constantly changing, which is why we do not generally disclose them publicly," a State Department spokesperson said in a statement. "U.S. citizens are not required to register their travel to a foreign country with us, so we cannot track with certainty how many U.S. citizens are in any particular country." The State Department referred questions about legal implications of serving in a foreign military to the Department of Justice. DOJ referred questions to the Department of Defense, which referred questions to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. USCIS referred questions back to the State Depaitiuent. Across the Jewish diaspora and in Israel, lone soldiers are receiving more recognition than ever. "I'm definitely aware of increased numbers of volunteers which are welcomed in Israel right now," Malet said. "You can see a lot more recognition and efforts to honor fallen lone soldiers than you would have seen before October 7." WE'RE INDEPENDENT OF CORPORATE INTERESTS - AND POWERED BY MEMBERS. JOIN US. BECOME A MEMBER The Pipeline Becca Strober was hailed as a hero when she returned to the U.S. while serving as a lone soldier in Israel. As she walked around her father's synagogue in Philadelphia in 2009, the congregants stood up to shake her hand and thank her. "I had just finished guarding a West Bank settlement," said Strober, now an anti -occupation activist. "Even then, I was like, this is such a weird experience." Strober was first introduced to the possibility of joining the Israeli military when she was 17, during a high school semes -er she spent in Israel. She said alumni of the semester in Israel program wearing miliary uniforms spoke to her group. "There were a lot of informal ways of talking about enlisting in the army," Strober told The Intercept. She later joined after participating in the Garin Tzabar program, which runs two majordrafting sessions each year. The program is funded by Tzofim, the biggest Zionist youth movement in Israel and the U.S. Also known as the Friends of Israel Scouts, the group has a U.S. nonprofit in New York. Tzofim "begins educating kids at five years old," said one former Zionist youth leader in Australia, who requested anonymity for fear of professional retaliation. He took part in groups affiliated with Tzofim as a teen. "There is a direct funnel from educating toddlers to, as soon as they turn 18 they're of military age and they're indoctrinated and groomed and brainwashed, and they're ready to fight the battle." Garin Tzabar continues to recruit lone soldiers from the U.S., who often end up serving in combat in Gaza and "protecting civilians" in the West Bank where Israeli settlers and forces have killed 1,000 Palestinians since October 7, 2023. Israeli soldiers talking to settlers in the West Bank in April 2025.Photo: Georgia Gee The recruitment pipeline includes many U.S. day schools from more conservative yeshivas to modern Jewish day schools that advertise how many alumni go on to serve in the Israeli military. The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, had51 alumni serving in the Israeli military as of 2023. Another school in New Jersey, the Rae Kushner Yeshiva, has congratulated an alum who became a social mecia manager in the IDF Spokesperson's Unit. "Her work was recognized as important for hasbara by the Israeli news," the school boasted on Facebook, using a term for Israeli public diplomacy, including nropagandatailored to international audiences. Another alum of the school served as a lone soldier in the army and was a friend of the son of Netanyahu, who commemorated him after he died while traveling in 2018. One charity reviewed by The Intercept, the Lone Soldier Founcation, specifically provides funds for the children of families that attend a synagogue in northern New Jersey who join the Israeli military. According to the group's most recent tax filing, it also supports the units in which the children of members of its congregation serve. In 2023, the group spent over $80,000 on providing "non -combat and equipment to IDF units in which eligible American citizens served." Read Our Comp-e_e Coverace Israel's War on Gaza North American lone soldiers are a "great example of the Zionist spirit or the Zionist dream," Strober told The Intercept. "It keeps American Jewish communities very, very close to the Israel question. It doesn't allow them to think critically because it's so close, because you know people who have been killed, or people who have served." The Charities Under heightened pualic scrutiny, U.S. nonprofits have distanced themselves from directly funding projects in the West Bank or other settlements, which are illegal under international law. But U.S.-based nonprofits granted $8.8 million to specific lone soldier programs in 2023 alone, The Intercept found. It's possible the real number is higher, as nonprofits only have to report foreign grants above a certain threshold. I "It doesn't allow American Jewish communities to think critically, because you know people who have been killed." The biggest known funder is Friends of the IDF, which has spent nearly $20 million on its lone soldier program since 2020, supporting more than 6.500 lone soldiers each year, according to documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service. In a statement, Friends of the IDF, an official 'partner of the Israeli military, said it provides more than 7,000 lone soldiers "with practical, emotional and mental health support throughout their service to make sure they never feel alone." The group said about half of the soldiers it backs are from Israel but are considered lone soldiers because they don't have family support. On its Instagram page, the group says it is the "only U.S. non-profit working directly with IDF leadership to provide critical support for Israel soldiers' health, well-being & education." Other organizations help offset the costs of living for lone soldiers. Bayit Brigade, which operates in both the U.S. and Israel, helps lone soldiers find affordable housing in Tel Aviv and raises emergency funcs to help transport soldiers to their bases and provide supplies in the field. Bayit Brigade has posted vireos of volunteers providing resources to the Israeli military's Yahalom Unit, which conducts "tunnel warfare" and demolitions in Gaza, including destroying areas to allow the military to operate. The organization's revenue jumped from approximately $160,000 in 2022 to $1.3 million in 2023, according to nonprofit cocuments. In a statement, the group told The Intercept that following October 7, it "temporarily expanded its community support efforts to address urgent needs on the ground," but have "no formal relationship with any government entity or with the IDF." The lines between support, education and recruitment of lone soldiers — including what a formal relationship entails — are often blurred, said Strober, the former lone soldier. Garin Tzabar, for example, is operated in partby Israel's Ministry of Aliyah and Integration. Other efforts to finance lone soldiers, like Bayit Brigade, distance themselves from any sort of affiliation with the Israeli government. Other organizations also advertise their support for soldiers who fought in Gaza. Friends of Emek Lone Soldiers helc concerts in the West Bank for women who served in Gaza. The we Dsite of the Michael Levin Lone Soldier Foundation includes testimonies of soldiers who received support while serving in Gaza. When she was part of the Israeli military, Strober still considered herself a believer in human rights, she told The Intercept. She was working for a human rights organization that supported Gazans' freedom of movement when, in 2014, Israel launched a series of attacks on Gaza that killed more than 2r000 Palestinians in under two months. "I didn't really know anything about Gaza," Strober said. "It was kind of the first time that I had any concept of who Palestinians were on the other side and how much control Israel had." Strober said she watched her friends get called up from the reserves and realized she didn't want to go serve in Gaza. "I just remember thinking, I'm not going to go zero in guns to kill Gazans when I'm talking to Gazans on the phone every day," she said. On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 4:22 PM Aram James <abj 2dl@gmail.com> wrote: As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel ThlfaxtiltighldersdrrttiuCliaitaxithimidnuary. Photograph: IDF/GPO/Sipa/Rex/Shutterstock This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far -right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 2Oth-century history — and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree By Omer Bartov Tue 13 Aug 2024 00.00 EDT Share O n 19 June 2024, I was scheduled to give a lecture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Be'er Sheva, Israel. My lecture was part of an event about the worldwide campus protests against Israel, and I planned to address the war in Gaza and more broadly the question of whether the protests were sincere expressions of outrage or motivated by antisemitism, as some had claimed. But things did not work out as planned. When I arrived at the entrance to the lecture hall, I saw a group of students congregating. It soon transpired that they were not there to attend the event but to protest against it. The students had been summoned, it appeared, by a WhatsApp message that went out the day before, which flagged the lecture and called for action: "We will not allow it! How long will we commit treason against ourselves?!?!?!??!!" The message went on to allege that I had signed a petition that described Israel as a "regime of apartheid" (in fact, the petition referred to a regime of apartheid in the West Bank). I was also "accused" of having written an article for the New York Times, in November 2023, in which I stated that although the statements of Israeli leaders suggested genocidal intent, there was still time to stop Israel from perpetrating genocide. On this, I was guilty as charged. The organiser of the event, the distinguished geographer Oren Yiftachel, was similarly criticised. His offences included having served as the director of the "anti -Zionist" B'Tselem, a globally respected human rights NGO. As the panel participants and a handful of mostly elderly faculty members filed into the hall, security guards prevented the protesting students from entering. But they did not stop them from keeping the lecture hall door open, calling out slogans on a bullhorn and banging with all their might on the walls. After over an hour of disruption, we agreed that perhaps the best step forward would be to ask the student protesters to join us for a conversation, on the condition that they stop the disruption. A fair number of those activists eventually walked in and for the next two hours we sat down and talked. As it turned out, most of these young men and women had recently returned from reserve service, during which they had been deployed in the Gaza Strip. This was not a friendly or "positive" exchange of views, but it was revealing. These students were not necessarily representative of the student body in Israel as a whole. They were activists in extreme rightwing organisations. But in many ways, what they were saying reflected a much more widespread sentiment in the country. I had not been to Israel since June 2023, and during this recent visit I found a different country from the one I had known. Although I have worked abroad for many years, Israel is where I was born and raised. It is the place where my parents lived and are buried; it is where my son has established his own family and most of my oldest and best friends live. Knowing the country from the inside and having followed events even more closely than usual since 7 October, I was not entirely surprised by what I encountered on my return, but it was still profoundly disturbing. I n deliberating these issues, I cannot but draw on my personal and professional background. I served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for four years, a term that included the 1973 Yom Kippur War and postings in the West Bank, northern Sinai and Gaza, ending my service as an infantry company commander. During my time in Gaza, I saw first-hand the poverty and hopelessness of Palestinian refugees eking out a living in congested, decrepit neighbourhoods. Most vividly, I remember patrolling the shadeless, silent streets of the Egyptian town of `Arish — which was then occupied by Israel — pierced by the gazes of the fearful, resentful population observing us from their shuttered windows. For the first time, I understood what it meant to occupy another people. Military service is mandatory for Jewish Israelis when they turn 18 — though there are a few exceptions — but afterwards, you can still be called upon to serve again in the IDF, for training or operational duties, or in case of emergencies such as a war. When I was called up in 1976, I was an undergraduate studying at Tel Aviv University. During that first deployment as a reserve officer, I was severely wounded in a training accident, along with a score of my soldiers. The IDF covered up the circumstances of this event, which was caused by the negligence of the training base commander. I spent most of that first semester in the hospital of Be'er Sheva, but returned to my studies, graduating in 1979 with a speciality in history. These personal experiences made me all the more interested in a question that had long preoccupied me: what motivates soldiers to fight? In the decades after the second world war, many American sociologists argued that soldiers fight first and foremost for each other, rather than for some bigger ideological goal. But that didn't quite fit with what I'd experienced as a soldier: we believed that we were in it for a larger cause that surpassed our own group of buddies. By the time I had completed my undergraduate degree, I had also begun to ask whether, in the name of that cause, soldiers could be made to act in ways they would otherwise find reprehensible. Taking the extreme case, I wrote my Oxford PhD thesis, later published as a book, on the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and the crimes it perpetrated on the eastern front in the second world war. What I found ran counter to how Germans in the 198os understood their past. They preferred to think that the army had fought a "decent" war, even as the Gestapo and the SS perpetrated genocide "behind its back". It took Germans many more years to realise just how complicit their own fathers and grandfathers had been in the Holocaust and the mass murder of many other groups in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. When the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out in late 1987 I was teaching at Tel Aviv University. I was appalled by the instruction of Yitzhak Rabin, then minister of defence, to the IDF to "break the arms and legs" of Palestinian youths who were throwing rocks at heavily armed troops. I wrote a letter to him warning that, based on my research into the indoctrination of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, I feared that under his leadership the IDF was heading down a similarly slippery path. _Bu View i 'I was not entirely surprised by what I encountered, but it was still profoundly disturbing' .. . Omer Bartov. Photograph: David Degner/The Guardian As my research had shown, even before their conscription, young German men had internalised core elements of Nazi ideology, especially the view that the subhuman Slav masses, led by insidious Bolshevik Jews, were threatening Germany and the rest of the civilised world with destruction, and that therefore Germany had the right and duty to create for itself a "living space" in the east and to decimate or enslave that region's population. This worldview was then further inculcated into the troops, so that by the time they marched into the Soviet Union they perceived their enemies through that prism. The fierce resistance put up by the Red Army only confirmed the need to utterly destroy Soviet soldiers and civilians alike, and most especially the Jews, who were seen as the main instigators of Bolshevism. The more destruction they wrought, the more fearful German troops became of the revenge they could expect if their enemies prevailed. The result was the killing of up to 30 million Soviet soldiers and citizens. To my astonishment, a few days after writing to him, I received a one -line response from Rabin, chiding me for daring to compare the IDF to the German military. This gave me the opportunity to write him a more detailed letter, explaining my research and my anxiety about using the IDF as a tool of oppression against unarmed occupied civilians. Rabin responded again, with the same statement: "How dare you compare the IDF to the Wehrmacht." But in retrospect, I believe this exchange revealed something about his subsequent intellectual journey. For as we know from his later engagement in the Oslo peace process, however flawed, he did eventually recognise that in the long run Israel could not sustain the military, political and moral price of the occupation. Since 1989, I have been teaching in the United States. I have written profusely on war, genocide, nazism, antisemitism and the Holocaust, seeking to understand the links between the industrial killing of soldiers in the first world war and the extermination of civilian populations by Hitler's regime. Among other projects, I spent many years researching the transformation of my mother's home town — Buchach in Poland (now Ukraine) — from a community of inter -ethnic coexistence into one in which, under the Nazi occupation, the gentile population turned against their Jewish neighbours. While the Germans came to the town with the express goal of murdering its Jews, the speed and efficiency of the killing was greatly facilitated by local collaboration. These locals were motivated by pre-existing resentments and hatreds that can be traced back to the rise of ethnonationalism in the preceding decades, and the prevalent view that the Jews did not belong to the new nation states created after the first world war. In the months since 7 October, what I have learned over the course of my life and my career has become more painfully relevant than ever before. Like many others, I have found these last months emotionally and intellectually challenging. Like many others, members of my own and of my friends' families have also been directly affected by the violence. There is no dearth of grief wherever you turn. T he Hamas attack on 7 October came as a tremendous shock to Israeli society, one from which it has not begun to recover. It was the first time Israel has lost control of part of its territory for an extended period of time, with the IDF unable to prevent the massacre of more than 1,200 people — many killed in the cruellest ways imaginable — and the taking of well over 200 hostages, including scores of children. The sense of abandonment by the state and of ongoing insecurity — with tens of thousands of Israeli citizens still displaced from their homes along the Gaza Strip and by the Lebanese border — is profound. Today, across vast swaths of the Israeli public, including those who oppose the government, two sentiments reign supreme. The first is a combination of rage and fear, a desire to re- establish security at any cost and a complete distrust of political solutions, negotiations and reconciliation. The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that war was the extension of politics by other means, and warned that without a defined political objective it would lead to limitless destruction. The sentiment that now prevails in Israel similarly threatens to make war into its own end. In this view, politics is an obstacle to achieving goals rather than a means to limit destruction. This is a view that can only ultimately lead to self-annihilation. The second reigning sentiment — or rather lack of sentiment — is the flipside of the first. It is the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza. The majority, it seems, do not even want to know what is happening in Gaza, and this desire is reflected in TV coverage. Israeli television news these days usually begins with reports on the funerals of soldiers, invariably described as heroes, fallen in the fighting in Gaza, followed by estimates of how many Hamas fighters were "liquidated". References to Palestinian civilian deaths are rare and normally presented as part of enemy propaganda or as a cause for unwelcome international pressure. In the face of so much death, this deafening silence now seems like its own form of vengefulness. Of course, the Israeli public long ago became inured to the brutal occupation that has characterised the country for 57 out of the 76 years of its existence. But the scale of what is being perpetrated in Gaza right now by the IDF is as unprecedented as the complete indifference of most Israelis to what is being done in their name. In 1982, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against the massacre of the Palestinian population in the refugee camps Sabra and Shatilain western Beirut by Maronite Christian militias, facilitated by the IDF. Today, this kind of response is inconceivable. The way people's eyes glaze over whenever one mentions the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and the deaths of thousands of children and women and elderly people, is deeply unsettling. Meeting my friends in Israel this time, I frequently felt that they were afraid that I might disrupt their grief, and that living out of the country I could not grasp their pain, anxiety, bewilderment and helplessness. Any suggestion that living in the country had numbed them to the pain of others — the pain that, after all, was being inflicted in their name — only produced a wall of silence, a retreat into themselves, or a quick change of subject. The impression that I got was consistent: we have no room in our hearts, we have no room in our thoughts, we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza. We must focus on ourselves, on our trauma, fear and anger. In an interview conducted on 7 March 2024, the writer, farmer and scientist Zeev Smilansky expressed this very sentiment in a manner that I found shocking, precisely because it came from him. I have known Smilansky for more than half a century, and he is the son of the celebrated Israeli author S Yizhar, whose 19L9 novella Khirbet Khizeh was the very first text in Israeli literature to confront the injustice of the Nakba, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from what became the state of Israel in 1948. Speaking about his own son, Offer, who lives in Brussels, Smilansky commented: Offer says that for him every child is a child, no matter whether he is in Gaza or here. I don't feel like him. Our children here are more important to me. There is a shocking humanitarian disaster there, I understand that, but my heart is blocked and filled with our children and our hostages ... There is no room in my heart for the children in Gaza, however shocking and terrifying it is and even though I know that war is not the solution. I listen to Maoz Inon, who lost both his parents [murdered by Hamas on 7 October] ... and who speaks so beautifully and persuasively about the need to look forward, that we need to bring hope and to want peace, because wars won't accomplish anything, and I agree with him. I agree with him, but I cannot find the strength in my heart, with all my leftist inclinations and love for humanity, I cannot ... It is not just Hamas, it's all Gazans who agree that it's OK to kill Jewish children, that this is a worthy cause ... With Germany there was reconciliation, but they apologised and paid reparations, and what [will happen] here? We too did terrible things, but nothing that comes close to what happened here on 7 October. It will be necessary to reconcile but we need some distance. This was a pervasive sentiment among many left -leaning, liberal friends and acquaintances I spoke with in Israel. It was, of course, quite different from what rightwing politicians and media figures have been saying since 7 October. Many of my friends recognise the injustice of the occupation, and, as Smilansky said, profess a "love for humanity". But at this moment, under these circumstances, this is not what they are focused on. Instead, they feel that in the struggle between justice and existence, existence must win out, and in the struggle between one just cause and another — that of the Israelis and that of the Palestinians — it is our own cause that must be triumphant, no matter the price. To those who doubt this stark choice, the Holocaust is presented as the alternative, however irrelevant it is to the current moment. This feeling did not appear suddenly on 7 October. Its roots are much deeper. O n 30 April 1956, Moshe Dayan, then IDF chief of staff, gave a short speech that would become one of the most famous in Israel's history. He was addressing mourners at the funeral of Ro'i Rothberg, a young security officer of the newly founded Nahal Oz kibbutz, which was established by the IDF in 1951 and became a civilian community two years later. The kibbutz was located just a few hundred metres from the border with the Gaza Strip, facing the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuja'iyya. Rothberg had been killed the day before, and his body was dragged across the border and mutilated, before being returned to Israeli hands with the help of the United Nations. Dayan's speech has become an iconic statement, used both by the political right and left to this day: Yesterday morning Ro'i was murdered. Dazzled by the calm of the morning, he did not see those waiting in ambush for him at the edge of the furrow. Let us not cast accusations at the murderers today. Why should we blame them for their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been dwelling in Gaza's refugee camps, as before their eyes we have transformed the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers had dwelled into our own property. We should not seek Roi's blood from the Arabs in Gaza but from ourselves. How have we shut our eyes and not faced up forthrightly to our fate, not faced up to our generation's mission in all its cruelty? Have we forgotten that this group of lads, who dwell in Nahal Oz, is carrying on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, on whose other side crowd hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands praying for our moment of weakness, so that they can tear us apart — have we forgotten that?... We are the generation of settlement; without a steel helmet and the muzzle of the cannon we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Our children will not have a life if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire and machine guns we will not be able to pave roads and dig water wells. Millions of Jews who were exterminated because they had no land are looking at us from the ashes of Israeli history and ordering us to settle and resurrect a land for our people. But beyond the border's furrow an ocean of hatred and an urge for vengeance rises, waiting for the moment that calm will blunt our readiness, for the day that we heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, who call upon us to put down our arms ... Let us not flinch from seeing the loathing that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who dwell around us and await the moment they can reach for our blood. Let us not avert our eyes lest our hands grow weak. This is the destiny of our generation. This is the choice of our lives — to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down. The following day, Dayan recorded his speech for Israeli radio. But something was missing. Gone was the reference to the refugees watching the Jews cultivate the lands from which they had been evicted, who should not be blamed for hating their dispossessors. Although he had uttered these lines at the funeral and written them subsequently, Dayan chose to omit them from the recorded version. He, too, had known this land before 1948. He recalled the Palestinian villages and towns that were destroyed to make room for Jewish settlers. He clearly understood the rage of the refugees across the fence. But he also firmly believed in both the right and the urgent need for Jewish settlement and statehood. In the struggle between addressing injustice and taking over the land, he chose his side, knowing that it doomed his people to forever rely on the gun. Dayan also knew well what the Israeli public could accept. It was because of his ambivalence about where guilt and responsibility for injustice and violence lay, and his deterministic, tragic view of history, that the two versions of his speech ended up appealing to vastly different political orientations. _Bu View i Moshe Dayan, then Israel's minister of defence, with Henry Kissinger, US national security advisor, in 1974. Photograph: PhotoQuest/Getty Images Decades later, after many more wars and rivers of blood, Dayan titled his last book Shall the Sword Devour Forever? Published in 1981, the book detailed his role in reaching a peace agreement with Egypt two years earlier. He had finally learned the truth of the second part of the biblical verse from which he took the book's title: "Knowest thou not that it will be bitterness in the latter end?" But in his 1956 speech, with his references to carrying the heavy gates of Gaza and the Palestinians waiting for a moment of weakness, Dayan was alluding to the biblical story of Samson. As his listeners would have recalled, Samson the Israelite, whose superhuman strength derived from his long hair, was in the habit of visiting prostitutes in Gaza. The Philistines, who viewed him as their mortal enemy, hoped to ambush him against the locked gates of the city. But Samson simply lifted the gates on his shoulders and walked free. It was only when his mistress Delilah tricked him and cut off his hair that the Philistines could capture and imprison him, rendering him all the more powerless by poking out his eyes (as the Gazans who mutilated Ro'i are alleged to have also done). But in a last feat of bravery, as he is mocked by his captors, Samson calls for God's help, seizes the pillars of the temple to which he had been led, and collapses it on the merry crowd surrounding him, calling out: "Let me die with the Philistines!" Those gates of Gaza are lodged deeply in the Zionist Israeli imagination, a symbol of the divide between us and the "barbarians". In the case of Ro'i, Dayan asserted, "the longing for peace blocked his ears, and he did not hear the voice of murder waiting in ambush. The gates of Gaza weighed too heavily on his shoulders and brought him down." On 8 October 2023, President Isaac Herzog addressed the Israeli public, citing the last line of Dayan's speech: "This is the destiny of our generation. This is the choice of our lives — to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down." The previous day, 67 years after Ro'i's death, Hamas militants had murdered 15 residents of the Nahal Oz kibbutz and taken eight hostages. Since Israel's retaliatory invasion of Gaza, the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuja'iyya facing the kibbutz, where 100,000 people had been living, has been emptied of its population and turned into one vast pile of rubble. O ne of the rare literary attempts to expose the grim logic of Israel's wars is Anadad Eldan's extraordinary 1971 poem Samson Tearing His Clothes, in which this ancient Hebrew hero crashes his way into and out of Gaza, leaving only desolation in his tracks. I first learned about this poem from Arie Dubnov's outstanding Hebrew - language essay, "The Gates of Gaza," published in January 2024. Samson the hero, the prophet, the subduer of the nation's eternal enemy, is transformed into its angel of death, a death which, as we recall, he ends up bringing also on himself in a grand suicidal action that has echoed through the generations to this very day. When I went to Gaza I met Samson coming out ripping his clothes on his scratched face rivers flowed and the houses bent to let him pass his pains uprooted trees and got caught up in the tangled roots. In the roots were strands of his hair. His head shone like a skull made of rock and his faltering steps tore up my tears Samson walked dragging a weary sun shattered windowpanes and chains in Gaza's sea were drowned. I heard how the earth groaned under his steps, how he slit her gut. Samson's shoes screeched when he walked. Born in Poland in 1924 as Avraham Bleiberg, Eldan came to Palestine as a child, fought in the 1948 war, and in 1960 moved to Kibbutz Be'eri, about 4km from the Gaza Strip. On 7 October 2023, the 99 -year -old Eldan and his wife survived the massacre of about a hundred inhabitants of the kibbutz, when the militants who walked into their home inexplicably spared them. After 7 October, in the wake of this obscure poet's miraculous survival, a different work of his was widely shared on Israeli media. For it seemed as if Eldan, a longtime chronicler of the sorrow and pain brought on by oppression and injustice, had predicted the catastrophe that befell his home. In 2016, he had published a collection of poems under the title Six the Hour of Dawn. That was the hour when the Hamas attack began. The book contains the harrowing poem On the Walls of Be'eri, mourning his daughter's death from illness (in Hebrew the name of the kibbutz also means "my well"). In the wake of 7 October, the poem eerily seems both to forecast destruction and to convey a certain view of Zionism, as originating in diasporic catastrophe and despair, bringing the nation to a cursed land where children are buried by their parents, yet holding out the hope for a new and hopeful dawn: On the walls of Be'eri I wrote her story from origins and depths frayed by the cold when they read what was happening in pain and her lights tumbled into the mist and darkness of night and a howl engendered prayer, for her children have fallen and a door is locked for the grace of heaven they breathe desolation and grief who will console inconsolable parents, for a curse is whispering let there be neither dew nor rain, you may weep if you can there is a time when darkness roars but there is dawn and radiance Like Dayan's eulogy for Ro'i, On the Walls of Be'eri means different things to different people. Should it be read as a lament for the destruction of a beautiful and innocent kibbutz in the desert, or is it a cry of pain over the endless bloody vendetta between the two peoples of this land? The poet has not told us his meaning, as is the way of poets. After all, he wrote this years ago in mourning for his beloved daughter. But given his many years of quiet, precise and searing work, it does not seem fanciful to believe that the poem was a call for reconciliation and coexistence, rather than for more cycles of bloodshed and revenge. A s it happens, I have a personal connection to the Be'eri kibbutz. It is where my daughter-in-law grew up, and my trip to Israel in June was primarily to visit the twins — my grandchildren — she had brought into the world in January 2024. The kibbutz, though, had been abandoned. My son, daughter-in-law and their children had moved into a nearby vacant apartment with a family of survivors — close relatives, whose father is still being held hostage — making for an unimaginable combination of new life and inconsolable sorrow in one home. As well as seeing family, I had also come to Israel to meet friends. I hoped to make sense of what had happened in the country since the war began. The aborted lecture in BGU was not on the top of my agenda. But once I arrived at the lecture hall on that mid -June day, I quickly understood that this explosive situation could also provide some clues to understanding the mentality of a younger generation of students and soldiers. After we sat down and began to talk, it became clear to me that the students wanted to be heard, and that no one, perhaps even their own professors and university administrators, was interested in listening. My presence, and their vague knowledge of my criticism of the war, triggered in them a need to explain to me, but perhaps also to themselves, what they had been engaged in as soldiers and as citizens. One young woman, recently returned from long military service in Gaza, leapt on the stage and spoke forcefully about the friends she had lost, the evil nature of Hamas, and the fact that she and her comrades were sacrificing themselves to ensure the country's future safety. Deeply distraught, she began crying halfway through her speech and stepped down. A young man, collected and articulate, rejected my suggestion that criticism of Israeli policies was not necessarily motivated by antisemitism. He then launched on a brief survey of the history of Zionism as a response to antisemitism and as a political path that no gentiles had a right to deny. While they were upset by my views and agitated by their own recent experiences in Gaza, the opinions expressed by the students were in no way exceptional. They reflected much greater swaths of public opinion in Israel. Knowing that I had previously warned of genocide, the students were especially keen to show me that they were humane, that they were not murderers. They had no doubt that the IDF was, in fact, the most moral army in the world. But they were also convinced that any damage done to the people and buildings in Gaza was totally justified, that it was all the fault of Hamas using them as human shields. They showed me photos on their phones to prove that they had behaved admirably toward children, denied that there was any hunger in Gaza, insisted that the systematic destruction of schools, universities, hospitals, public buildings, residences and infrastructure was necessary and justifiable. They viewed any criticism of Israeli policies by other countries and the United Nations as simply antisemitic. Unlike the majority of Israelis, these young people had seen the destruction of Gaza with their own eyes. It seemed to me that they had not only internalised a particular view that has become commonplace in Israel — namely, that the destruction of Gaza as such was a legitimate response to 7 October — but had also developed a way of thinking that I had observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview and self - perception of German army soldiers in the second world war. Having internalised certain views of the enemy — the Bolsheviks as Untermenschen; Hamas as human animals — and of the wider population as less than human and undeserving of rights, soldiers observing or perpetrating atrocities tend to ascribe them not to their own military, or to themselves, but to the enemy. Thousands of children were killed? It's the enemy's fault. Our own children were killed? That is certainly the enemy's fault. If Hamas carry out a massacre in a kibbutz, they are Nazis. If we drop 2,000 -pound bombs on refugee shelters and kill hundreds of civilians, it's Hamas's fault for hiding close to these shelters. After what they did to us, we have no choice but to root them out. After what we did to them, we can only imagine what they would do to us if we don't destroy them. We simply have no choice. In mid -July 1941, just weeks after Germany launched what Hitler had proclaimed to be a "war of annihilation" against the Soviet Union, a German noncommissioned officer wrote home from the eastern front: The German people owe a great debt to our Fuhrer, for had these beasts, who are our enemies here, come to Germany, such murders would have taken place that the world has never seen before ... What we have seen ... borders on the unbelievable ... And when one reads Der Stiirmer [a Nazi newspaper] and looks at the pictures, that is only a weak illustration of what we see here and the crimes committed here by the Jews. An army propaganda leaflet issued in June 1941 paints a similarly nightmarish picture of Red Army political officers, which many soldiers soon perceived as a reflection of reality: Anyone who has ever looked at the face of a Red commissar knows what the Bolsheviks are like. Here there is no need for theoretical expressions. We would insult the animals if we described these mostly Jewish men as beasts. They are the embodiment of the satanic and insane hatred against the whole of noble humanity ... [They] would have brought an end to all meaningful life, had this eruption not been dammed at the last moment. View i Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visits Rafah in the Gaza Strip on 18 July 2024. Photograph: Avi Ohayon/Israel Gpo/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock Two days after the Hamas attack, defence minister Yoav Gallant declared, "We are fighting human animals, and we must act accordingly," later adding that Israel would "break apart one neighbourhood after another in Gaza". Former prime minister Naftali Bennett confirmed: "We are fighting Nazis." Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu exhorted Israelis to "remember what Amalek has done to you", alluding to the biblical call to exterminate Amalek's "men and women, children and infants". In a radio interview, he said about Hamas: "I don't call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals." Deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi wrote on X that Israel's goal should be "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth". On Israeli TV he stated, "There are no uninvolved people ... we must go in there and kill, kill, kill. We must kill them before they kill us." Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich stressed in a speech, "The work must be completed ... Total destruction. 'Blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven."" Avi Dichter, agriculture minister and former head of the Shin Bet intelligence service, spoke about "rolling out the Gaza Nakba". One Israeli 95 -year - old military veteran, whose motivational speech to IDF troops preparing for the invasion of Gaza exhorted them to "wipe out their memory, their families, mothers and children", was given a certificate of honour by Israeli president Herzog for "providing a wonderful example to generations of soldiers". No wonder that there have been innumerable social media posts by IDF troops in Gaza calling to "kill the Arabs", "burn their mothers" and "flatten" Gaza. There has been no known disciplinary action by their commanders. This is the logic of endless violence, a logic that allows one to destroy entire populations and to feel totally justified in doing so. It is a logic of victimhood — we must kill them before they kill us, as they did before — and nothing empowers violence more than a righteous sense of victimhood. Look at what happened to us in 1918, German soldiers said in 1942, recalling the propagandistic "stab -in -the -back" myth, which attributed Germany's catastrophic defeat in the first world war to Jewish and communist treason. Look at what happened to us in the Holocaust, when we trusted that others would come to our rescue, IDF troops say in 2024, thereby giving themselves licence for indiscriminate destruction based on a false analogy between Hamas and the Nazis. The young men and women I spoke with that day were filled with rage, not so much against me — they calmed down a bit when I mentioned my own military service — but because, I think, they fell betrayed by everyone around them. Betrayed by the media, which they perceived as too critical, by senior commanders who they thought were too lenient toward Palestinians, by politicians who had failed to prevent the 7 October fiasco, by the IDF's inability to achieve "total victory", by intellectuals and leftists unfairly criticising them, by the US government for not delivering sufficient munitions fast enough, and by all those hypocritical European politicians and antisemitic students protesting against their actions in Gaza. They seemed fearful and insecure and confused, and some were likely also suffering from PTSD. I told them the story of how, in 1930, the German student union was democratically taken over by the Nazis. The students of that time felt betrayed by the loss of the first world war, the loss of opportunity because of the economic crisis, and the loss of land and prestige in the wake of the humiliating peace treaty of Versailles. They wanted to make Germany great again, and Hitler seemed able to fulfil that promise. Germany's internal enemies were put away, its economy flourished, other nations feared it again, and then it went to war, conquered Europe and murdered millions of people. Finally, the country was utterly destroyed. I wondered aloud whether perhaps the few German students who survived those 15 years regretted their decision in 1930 to support nazism. But I do not think the young men and women at BGU understood the implications of what I had told them. The students were frightening and frightened at the same time, and their fear made them all the more aggressive. This level of menace, as well as a degree of overlap in opinion, seemed to have generated fear and obsequiousness in their superiors, professors and administrators, who demonstrated great reluctance to discipline them in any way. At the same time, a host of media pundits and politicians have been cheering on these angels of destruction, calling them heroes just a moment before putting them in the ground and turning their backs on their grief-stricken families. The fallen soldiers died for a good cause, the families are told. But no one takes the time to articulate what that cause actually is beyond sheer survival through ever more violence. And so, I also felt sorry for these students, who were so unaware of how they had been manipulated. But I left that meeting filled with trepidation and foreboding. A s I headed back to the United States at the end of June, I contemplated my experiences over those two messy and troubling weeks. I was conscious of my deep connection to the country I had left. This is not just about my relationship with my Israeli family and friends, but also with the particular tenor of Israeli culture and society, which is characterised by its lack of distance or deference. This can be heartwarming and revealing; one can, almost instantaneously, find oneself in intense, even intimate conversations with others on the street, in a cafe, at a bar. Yet this same aspect of Israeli life can also be endlessly frustrating, since there is so little respect for social niceties. There is almost a cull of sincerity, an obligation to speak your mind, no matter who you're talking to or how much offence it may cause. This shared expectation creates both a sense of solidarity, and of lines that cannot be crossed. When you are with us, we are all family. If you turn against us or are on the other side of the national divide, you are shut out and can expect us to come after you. This may also have been the reason why this time, for the first time, I had been apprehensive about going to Israel, and why part of me was glad to leave. The country had changed in ways visible and subtle, ways that might have raised a barrier between me, as an observer from the outside, and those who have remained an organic part of it. But another part of my apprehension had to do with the fact that my view of what was happening in Gaza had shifted. On io November 2023, I wrote in the New York Times: "As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is now taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. [...] We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time." I no longer believe that. By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans — most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so- called safe zone — demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality — namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part", the Palestinian population in Gaza, "as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group's destruction". These were issues that I could only discuss with a very small handful of activists, scholars, experts in international law and, not surprisingly, Palestinian citizens of Israel. Beyond this limited circle, such statements on the illegality of Israeli actions in Gaza are anathema in Israel. Even the vast majority of protesters against the government, those calling for a ceasefire and the release of the hostages, will not countenance them. Since I returned from my visit, I have been trying to place my experiences there into a larger context. The reality on the ground is so devastating, and the future appears so bleak, that I have allowed myself to indulge in some counter -factual history and to entertain some hopeful speculations about a different future. I ask myself, what would have happened had the newly created state of Israel fulfilled its commitment to enact a constitution based on its Declaration of Independence? 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Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel ThisaatighldierstcirrttitaMilarftrithkodltinuary. Photograph: IDF/GPO/Sipa/Rex/Shutterstock This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far -right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of loth -century history — and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree By Omer Bartov Tue 13 Aug 2024 00.00 EDT Share O n 19 June 2024, I was scheduled to give a lecture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Be'er Sheva, Israel. My lecture was part of an event about the worldwide campus protests against Israel, and I planned to address the war in Gaza and more broadly the question of whether the protests were sincere expressions of outrage or motivated by antisemitism, as some had claimed. But things did not work out as planned. When I arrived at the entrance to the lecture hall, I saw a group of students congregating. It soon transpired that they were not there to attend the event but to protest against it. The students had been summoned, it appeared, by a WhatsApp message that went out the day before, which flagged the lecture and called for action: "We will not allow it! How long will we commit treason against ourselves?!?!?!??!!" The message went on to allege that I had signed a petition that described Israel as a "regime of apartheid" (in fact, the petition referred to a regime of apartheid in the West Bank). I was also "accused" of having written an article for the New York Times, in November 2023, in which I stated that although the statements of Israeli leaders suggested genocidal intent, there was still time to stop Israel from perpetrating genocide. On this, I was guilty as charged. The organiser of the event, the distinguished geographer Oren Yiftachel, was similarly criticised. His offences included having served as the director of the "anti -Zionist" B'Tselem, a globally respected human rights NGO. As the panel participants and a handful of mostly elderly faculty members filed into the hall, security guards prevented the protesting students from entering. But they did not stop them from keeping the lecture hall door open, calling out slogans on a bullhorn and banging with all their might on the walls. After over an hour of disruption, we agreed that perhaps the best step forward would be to ask the student protesters to join us for a conversation, on the condition that they stop the disruption. A fair number of those activists eventually walked in and for the next two hours we sat down and talked. As it turned out, most of these young men and women had recently returned from reserve service, during which they had been deployed in the Gaza Strip. This was not a friendly or "positive" exchange of views, but it was revealing. These students were not necessarily representative of the student body in Israel as a whole. They were activists in extreme rightwing organisations. But in many ways, what they were saying reflected a much more widespread sentiment in the country. I had not been to Israel since June 2023, and during this recent visit I found a different country from the one I had known. Although I have worked abroad for many years, Israel is where I was born and raised. It is the place where my parents lived and are buried; it is where my son has established his own family and most of my oldest and best friends live. Knowing the country from the inside and having followed events even more closely than usual since 7 October, I was not entirely surprised by what I encountered on my return, but it was still profoundly disturbing. I n deliberating these issues, I cannot but draw on my personal and professional background. I served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for four years, a term that included the 1973 Yom Kippur War and postings in the West Bank, northern Sinai and Gaza, ending my service as an infantry company commander. During my time in Gaza, I saw first-hand the poverty and hopelessness of Palestinian refugees eking out a living in congested, decrepit neighbourhoods. Most vividly, I remember patrolling the shadeless, silent streets of the Egyptian town of Arish — which was then occupied by Israel — pierced by the gazes of the fearful, resentful population observing us from their shuttered windows. For the first time, I understood what it meant to occupy another people. Military service is mandatory for Jewish Israelis when they turn 18 — though there are a few exceptions — but afterwards, you can still be called upon to serve again in the IDF, for training or operational duties, or in case of emergencies such as a war. When I was called up in 1976, I was an undergraduate studying at Tel Aviv University. During that first deployment as a reserve officer, I was severely wounded in a training accident, along with a score of my soldiers. The IDF covered up the circumstances of this event, which was caused by the negligence of the training base commander. I spent most of that first semester in the hospital of Be'er Sheva, but returned to my studies, graduating in 1979 with a speciality in history. These personal experiences made me all the more interested in a question that had long preoccupied me: what motivates soldiers to fight? In the decades after the second world war, many American sociologists argued that soldiers fight first and foremost for each other, rather than for some bigger ideological goal. But that didn't quite fit with what I'd experienced as a soldier: we believed that we were in it for a larger cause that surpassed our own group of buddies. By the time I had completed my undergraduate degree, I had also begun to ask whether, in the name of that cause, soldiers could be made to act in ways they would otherwise find reprehensible. Taking the extreme case, I wrote my Oxford PhD thesis, later published as a book, on the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and the crimes it perpetrated on the eastern front in the second world war. What I found ran counter to how Germans in the 198os understood their past. They preferred to think that the army had fought a "decent" war, even as the Gestapo and the SS perpetrated genocide "behind its back". It took Germans many more years to realise just how complicit their own fathers and grandfathers had been in the Holocaust and the mass murder of many other groups in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. When the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out in late 1987 I was teaching at Tel Aviv University. I was appalled by the instruction of Yitzhak Rabin, then minister of defence, to the IDF to "break the arms and legs" of Palestinian youths who were throwing rocks at heavily armed troops. I wrote a letter to him warning that, based on my research into the indoctrination of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, I feared that under his leadership the IDF was heading down a similarly slippery path. View i `I was not entirely surprised by what I encountered, but it was still profoundly disturbing' ... Omer Bartov. Photograph: David Degner/The Guardian As my research had shown, even before their conscription, young German men had internalised core elements of Nazi ideology, especially the view that the subhuman Slav masses, led by insidious Bolshevik Jews, were threatening Germany and the rest of the civilised world with destruction, and that therefore Germany had the right and duty to create for itself a "living space" in the east and to decimate or enslave that region's population. This worldview was then further inculcated into the troops, so that by the time they marched into the Soviet Union they perceived their enemies through that prism. The fierce resistance put up by the Red Army only confirmed the need to utterly destroy Soviet soldiers and civilians alike, and most especially the Jews, who were seen as the main instigators of Bolshevism. The more destruction they wrought, the more fearful German troops became of the revenge they could expect if their enemies prevailed. The result was the killing of up to 3o million Soviet soldiers and citizens. To my astonishment, a few days after writing to him, I received a one -line response from Rabin, chiding me for daring to compare the IDF to the German military. This gave me the opportunity to write him a more detailed letter, explaining my research and my anxiety about using the IDF as a tool of oppression against unarmed occupied civilians. Rabin responded again, with the same statement: "How dare you compare the IDF to the Wehrmacht." But in retrospect, I believe this exchange revealed something about his subsequent intellectual journey. For as we know from his later engagement in the Oslo peace process, however flawed, he did eventually recognise that in the long run Israel could not sustain the military, political and moral price of the occupation. Since 1989, I have been teaching in the United States. I have written profusely on war, genocide, nazism, antisemitism and the Holocaust, seeking to understand the links between the industrial killing of soldiers in the first world war and the extermination of civilian populations by Hitler's regime. Among other projects, I spent many years researching the transformation of my mother's home town — Buchach in Poland (now Ukraine) — from a community of inter -ethnic coexistence into one in which, under the Nazi occupation, the gentile population turned against their Jewish neighbours. While the Germans came to the town with the express goal of murdering its Jews, the speed and efficiency of the killing was greatly facilitated by local collaboration. These locals were motivated by pre-existing resentments and hatreds that can be traced back to the rise of ethnonationalism in the preceding decades, and the prevalent view that the Jews did not belong to the new nation states created after the first world war. In the months since 7 October, what I have learned over the course of my life and my career has become more painfully relevant than ever before. Like many others, I have found these last months emotionally and intellectually challenging. Like many others, members of my own and of my friends' families have also been directly affected by the violence. There is no dearth of grief wherever you turn. T he Hamas attack on 7 October came as a tremendous shock to Israeli society, one from which it has not begun to recover. It was the first time Israel has lost control of part of its territory for an extended period of time, with the IDF unable to prevent the massacre of more than 1,200 people — many killed in the cruellest ways imaginable — and the taking of well over 200 hostages, including scores of children. The sense of abandonment by the state and of ongoing insecurity — with tens of thousands of Israeli citizens still displaced from their homes along the Gaza Strip and by the Lebanese border — is profound. Today, across vast swaths of the Israeli public, including those who oppose the government, two sentiments reign supreme. The first is a combination of rage and fear, a desire to re- establish security at any cost and a complete distrust of political solutions, negotiations and reconciliation. The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that war was the extension of politics by other means, and warned that without a defined political objective it would lead to limitless destruction. The sentiment that now prevails in Israel similarly threatens to make war into its own end. In this view, politics is an obstacle to achieving goals rather than a means to limit destruction. This is a view that can only ultimately lead to self-annihilation. The second reigning sentiment — or rather lack of sentiment — is the flipside of the first. It is the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza. The majority, it seems, do not even want to know what is happening in Gaza, and this desire is reflected in TV coverage. Israeli television news these days usually begins with reports on the funerals of soldiers, invariably described as heroes, fallen in the fighting in Gaza, followed by estimates of how many Hamas fighters were "liquidated". References to Palestinian civilian deaths are rare and normally presented as part of enemy propaganda or as a cause for unwelcome international pressure. In the face of so much death, this deafening silence now seems like its own form of vengefulness. Of course, the Israeli public long ago became inured to the brutal occupation that has characterised the country for 57 out of the 76 years of its existence. But the scale of what is being perpetrated in Gaza right now by the IDF is as unprecedented as the complete indifference of most Israelis to what is being done in their name. In 1982, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against the massacre of the Palestinian population in the refugee camps Sabra and Shatilain western Beirut by Maronite Christian militias, facilitated by the IDF. Today, this kind of response is inconceivable. The way people's eyes glaze over whenever one mentions the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and the deaths of thousands of children and women and elderly people, is deeply unsettling. Meeting my friends in Israel this time, I frequently fell that they were afraid that I might disrupt their grief, and that living out of the country I could not grasp their pain, anxiety, bewilderment and helplessness. Any suggestion that living in the country had numbed them to the pain of others — the pain that, after all, was being inflicted in their name — only produced a wall of silence, a retreat into themselves, or a quick change of subject. The impression that I got was consistent: we have no room in our hearts, we have no room in our thoughts, we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza. We must focus on ourselves, on our trauma, fear and anger. In an interview conducted on 7 March 2024, the writer, farmer and scientist Zeev Smilansky expressed this very sentiment in a manner that I found shocking, precisely because it came from him. I have known Smilansky for more than half a century, and he is the son of the celebrated Israeli author S Yizhar, whose 19L9 novella Khirbet Khizeh was the very first text in Israeli literature to confront the injustice of the Nakba, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from what became the state of Israel in 1948. Speaking about his own son, Offer, who lives in Brussels, Smilansky commented: Offer says that for him every child is a child, no matter whether he is in Gaza or here. I don't feel like him. Our children here are more important to me. There is a shocking humanitarian disaster there, I understand that, but my heart is blocked and filled with our children and our hostages ... There is no room in my heart for the children in Gaza, however shocking and terrifying it is and even though I know that war is not the solution. I listen to Maoz Inon, who lost both his parents [murdered by Hamas on 7 October] ... and who speaks so beautifully and persuasively about the need to look forward, that we need to bring hope and to want peace, because wars won't accomplish anything, and I agree with him. I agree with him, but I cannot find the strength in my heart, with all my leftist inclinations and love for humanity, I cannot ... It is not just Hamas, it's all Gazans who agree that it's OK to kill Jewish children, that this is a worthy cause ... With Germany there was reconciliation, but they apologised and paid reparations, and what [will happen] here? We too did terrible things, but nothing that comes close to what happened here on 7 October. It will be necessary to reconcile but we need some distance. This was a pervasive sentiment among many left -leaning, liberal friends and acquaintances I spoke with in Israel. It was, of course, quite different from what rightwing politicians and media figures have been saying since 7 October. Many of my friends recognise the injustice of the occupation, and, as Smilansky said, profess a "love for humanity". But at this moment, under these circumstances, this is not what they are focused on. Instead, they feel that in the struggle between justice and existence, existence must win out, and in the struggle between one just cause and another — that of the Israelis and that of the Palestinians — it is our own cause that must be triumphant, no matter the price. To those who doubt this stark choice, the Holocaust is presented as the alternative, however irrelevant it is to the current moment. This feeling did not appear suddenly on 7 October. Its roots are much deeper. O n 3o April 1956, Moshe Dayan, then IDF chief of staff, gave a short speech that would become one of the most famous in Israel's history. He was addressing mourners at the funeral of Ro'i Rothberg, a young security officer of the newly founded Nahal Oz kibbutz, which was established by the IDF in 1951 and became a civilian community two years later. The kibbutz was located just a few hundred metres from the border with the Gaza Strip, facing the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuja'iyya. Rothberg had been killed the day before, and his body was dragged across the border and mutilated, before being returned to Israeli hands with the help of the United Nations. Dayan's speech has become an iconic statement, used both by the political right and left to this day: Yesterday morning Ro'i was murdered. Dazzled by the calm of the morning, he did not see those waiting in ambush for him at the edge of the furrow. Let us not cast accusations at the murderers today. Why should we blame them for their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been dwelling in Gaza's refugee camps, as before their eyes we have transformed the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers had dwelled into our own property. We should not seek Roi's blood from the Arabs in Gaza but from ourselves. How have we shut our eyes and not faced up forthrightly to our fate, not faced up to our generation's mission in all its cruelty? Have we forgotten that this group of lads, who dwell in Nahal Oz, is carrying on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, on whose other side crowd hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands praying for our moment of weakness, so that they can tear us apart — have we forgotten that?... We are the generation of settlement; without a steel helmet and the muzzle of the cannon we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Our children will not have a life if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire and machine guns we will not be able to pave roads and dig water wells. Millions of Jews who were exterminated because they had no land are looking at us from the ashes of Israeli history and ordering us to settle and resurrect a land for our people. But beyond the border's furrow an ocean of hatred and an urge for vengeance rises, waiting for the moment that calm will blunt our readiness, for the day that we heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, who call upon us to put down our arms ... Let us not flinch from seeing the loathing that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who dwell around us and await the moment they can reach for our blood. Let us not avert our eyes lest our hands grow weak. This is the destiny of our generation. This is the choice of our lives — to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down. The following day, Dayan recorded his speech for Israeli radio. But something was missing. Gone was the reference to the refugees watching the Jews cultivate the lands from which they had been evicted, who should not be blamed for hating their dispossessors. Although he had uttered these lines at the funeral and written them subsequently, Dayan chose to omit them from the recorded version. He, too, had known this land before 1948. He recalled the Palestinian villages and towns that were destroyed to make room for Jewish settlers. He clearly understood the rage of the refugees across the fence. But he also firmly believed in both the right and the urgent need for Jewish settlement and statehood. In the struggle between addressing injustice and taking over the land, he chose his side, knowing that it doomed his people to forever rely on the gun. Dayan also knew well what the Israeli public could accept. It was because of his ambivalence about where guilt and responsibility for injustice and violence lay, and his deterministic, tragic view of history, that the two versions of his speech ended up appealing to vastly different political orientations. View i Moshe Dayan, then Israel's minister of defence, with Henry Kissinger, US national security advisor, in 1974. Photograph: PhotoQuest/Getty Images Decades later, after many more wars and rivers of blood, Dayan titled his last book Shall the Sword Devour Forever? Published in 1981, the book detailed his role in reaching a peace agreement with Egypt two years earlier. He had finally learned the truth of the second part of the biblical verse from which he took the book's title: "Knowest thou not that it will be bitterness in the latter end?" But in his 1956 speech, with his references to carrying the heavy gates of Gaza and the Palestinians waiting for a moment of weakness, Dayan was alluding to the biblical story of Samson. As his listeners would have recalled, Samson the Israelite, whose superhuman strength derived from his long hair, was in the habit of visiting prostitutes in Gaza. The Philistines, who viewed him as their mortal enemy, hoped to ambush him against the locked gates of the city. But Samson simply lifted the gates on his shoulders and walked free. It was only when his mistress Delilah tricked him and cut off his hair that the Philistines could capture and imprison him, rendering him all the more powerless by poking out his eyes (as the Gazans who mutilated Ro'i are alleged to have also done). But in a last feat of bravery, as he is mocked by his captors, Samson calls for God's help, seizes the pillars of the temple to which he had been led, and collapses it on the merry crowd surrounding him, calling out: "Let me die with the Philistines!" Those gates of Gaza are lodged deeply in the Zionist Israeli imagination, a symbol of the divide between us and the "barbarians". In the case of Ro'i, Dayan asserted, "the longing for peace blocked his ears, and he did not hear the voice of murder waiting in ambush. The gates of Gaza weighed too heavily on his shoulders and brought him down." On 8 October 2023, President Isaac Herzog addressed the Israeli public, citing the last line of Dayan's speech: "This is the destiny of our generation. This is the choice of our lives — to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down." The previous day, 67 years after Ro'i's death, Hamas militants had murdered 15 residents of the Nahal Oz kibbutz and taken eight hostages. Since Israel's retaliatory invasion of Gaza, the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuja'iyya facing the kibbutz, where 1OO,000 people had been living, has been emptied of its population and turned into one vast pile of rubble. O ne of the rare literary attempts to expose the grim logic of Israel's wars is Anadad Eldan's extraordinary 1971 poem Samson Tearing His Clothes, in which this ancient Hebrew hero crashes his way into and out of Gaza, leaving only desolation in his tracks. I first learned about this poem from Arie Dubnov's outstanding Hebrew - language essay, "The Gates of Gaza," published in January 2024. Samson the hero, the prophet, the subduer of the nation's eternal enemy, is transformed into its angel of death, a death which, as we recall, he ends up bringing also on himself in a grand suicidal action that has echoed through the generations to this very day. When I went to Gaza I met Samson coming out ripping his clothes on his scratched face rivers flowed and the houses bent to let him pass his pains uprooted trees and got caught up in the tangled roots. In the roots were strands of his hair. His head shone like a skull made of rock and his faltering steps tore up my tears Samson walked dragging a weary sun shattered windowpanes and chains in Gaza's sea were drowned. I heard how the earth groaned under his steps, how he slit her gut. Samson's shoes screeched when he walked. Born in Poland in 1924 as Avraham Bleiberg, Eldan came to Palestine as a child, fought in the 1948 war, and in 196o moved to Kibbutz Be'eri, about 4km from the Gaza Strip. On 7 October 2023, the 99 -year -old Eldan and his wife survived the massacre of about a hundred inhabitants of the kibbutz, when the militants who walked into their home inexplicably spared them. After 7 October, in the wake of this obscure poet's miraculous survival, a different work of his was widely shared on Israeli media. For it seemed as if Eldan, a longtime chronicler of the sorrow and pain brought on by oppression and injustice, had predicted the catastrophe that befell his home. In 2016, he had published a collection of poems under the title Six the Hour of Dawn. That was the hour when the Hamas attack began. The book contains the harrowing poem On the Walls of Be'eri, mourning his daughter's death from illness (in Hebrew the name of the kibbutz also means "my well"). In the wake of 7 October, the poem eerily seems both to forecast destruction and to convey a certain view of Zionism, as originating in diasporic catastrophe and despair, bringing the nation to a cursed land where children are buried by their parents, yet holding out the hope for a new and hopeful dawn: On the walls of Be'eri I wrote her story from origins and depths frayed by the cold when they read what was happening in pain and her lights tumbled into the mist and darkness of night and a howl engendered prayer, for her children have fallen and a door is locked for the grace of heaven they breathe desolation and grief who will console inconsolable parents, for a curse is whispering let there be neither dew nor rain, you may weep if you can there is a time when darkness roars but there is dawn and radiance Like Dayan's eulogy for Ro'i, On the Walls of Be'eri means different things to different people. Should it be read as a lament for the destruction of a beautiful and innocent kibbutz in the desert, or is it a cry of pain over the endless bloody vendetta between the two peoples of this land? The poet has not told us his meaning, as is the way of poets. After all, he wrote this years ago in mourning for his beloved daughter. But given his many years of quiet, precise and searing work, it does not seem fanciful to believe that the poem was a call for reconciliation and coexistence, rather than for more cycles of bloodshed and revenge. A s it happens, I have a personal connection to the Be'eri kibbutz. It is where my daughter-in-law grew up, and my trip to Israel in June was primarily to visit the twins — my grandchildren — she had brought into the world in January 2024. The kibbutz, though, had been abandoned. My son, daughter-in-law and their children had moved into a nearby vacant apartment with a family of survivors — close relatives, whose father is still being held hostage — making for an unimaginable combination of new life and inconsolable sorrow in one home. As well as seeing family, I had also come to Israel to meet friends. I hoped to make sense of what had happened in the country since the war began. The aborted lecture in BGU was not on the top of my agenda. But once I arrived at the lecture hall on that mid -June day, I quickly understood that this explosive situation could also provide some clues to understanding the mentality of a younger generation of students and soldiers. After we sat down and began to talk, it became clear to me that the students wanted to be heard, and that no one, perhaps even their own professors and university administrators, was interested in listening. My presence, and their vague knowledge of my criticism of the war, triggered in them a need to explain to me, but perhaps also to themselves, what they had been engaged in as soldiers and as citizens. One young woman, recently returned from long military service in Gaza, leapt on the stage and spoke forcefully about the friends she had lost, the evil nature of Hamas, and the fact that she and her comrades were sacrificing themselves to ensure the country's future safety. Deeply distraught, she began crying halfway through her speech and stepped down. A young man, collected and articulate, rejected my suggestion that criticism of Israeli policies was not necessarily motivated by antisemitism. He then launched on a brief survey of the history of Zionism as a response to antisemitism and as a political path that no gentiles had a right to deny. While they were upset by my views and agitated by their own recent experiences in Gaza, the opinions expressed by the students were in no way exceptional. They reflected much greater swaths of public opinion in Israel. Knowing that I had previously warned of genocide, the students were especially keen to show me that they were humane, that they were not murderers. They had no doubt that the IDF was, in fact, the most moral army in the world. But they were also convinced that any damage done to the people and buildings in Gaza was totally justified, that it was all the fault of Hamas using them as human shields. They showed me photos on their phones to prove that they had behaved admirably toward children, denied that there was any hunger in Gaza, insisted that the systematic destruction of schools, universities, hospitals, public buildings, residences and infrastructure was necessary and justifiable. They viewed any criticism of Israeli policies by other countries and the United Nations as simply antisemitic. Unlike the majority of Israelis, these young people had seen the destruction of Gaza with their own eyes. It seemed to me that they had not only internalised a particular view that has become commonplace in Israel — namely, that the destruction of Gaza as such was a legitimate response to 7 October — but had also developed a way of thinking that I had observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview and self - perception of German army soldiers in the second world war. Having internalised certain views of the enemy — the Bolsheviks as Untermenschen; Hamas as human animals — and of the wider population as less than human and undeserving of rights, soldiers observing or perpetrating atrocities tend to ascribe them not to their own military, or to themselves, but to the enemy. Thousands of children were killed? It's the enemy's fault. Our own children were killed? That is certainly the enemy's fault. If Hamas carry out a massacre in a kibbutz, they are Nazis. If we drop 2,OOO-pound bombs on refugee shelters and kill hundreds of civilians, it's Hamas's fault for hiding close to these shelters. After what they did to us, we have no choice but to root them out. After what we did to them, we can only imagine what they would do to us if we don't destroy them. We simply have no choice. In mid -July 1941, just weeks after Germany launched what Hitler had proclaimed to be a "war of annihilation" against the Soviet Union, a German noncommissioned officer wrote home from the eastern front: The German people owe a great debt to our Fiihrer, for had these beasts, who are our enemies here, come to Germany, such murders would have taken place that the world has never seen before ... What we have seen ... borders on the unbelievable ... And when one reads Der Stiirmer [a Nazi newspaper] and looks at the pictures, that is only a weak illustration of what we see here and the crimes committed here by the Jews. An army propaganda leaflet issued in June 1941 paints a similarly nightmarish picture of Red Army political officers, which many soldiers soon perceived as a reflection of reality: Anyone who has ever looked at the face of a Red commissar knows what the Bolsheviks are like. Here there is no need for theoretical expressions. We would insult the animals if we described these mostly Jewish men as beasts. They are the embodiment of the satanic and insane hatred against the whole of noble humanity ... [They] would have brought an end to all meaningful life, had this eruption not been dammed at the last moment. View i Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visits Rafah in the Gaza Strip on 18 July 2024. Photograph: Avi Ohayon/Israel Gpo/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock Two days after the Hamas attack, defence minister Yoav Gallant declared, "We are fighting human animals, and we must act accordingly," later adding that Israel would "break apart one neighbourhood after another in Gaza". Former prime minister Naftali Bennett confirmed: "We are fighting Nazis." Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu exhorted Israelis to "remember what Amalek has done to you", alluding to the biblical call to exterminate Amalek's "men and women, children and infants". In a radio interview, he said about Hamas: "I don't call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals." Deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi wrote on X that Israel's goal should be "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth". On Israeli TV he stated, "There are no uninvolved people ... we must go in there and kill, kill, kill. We must kill them before they kill us." Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich stressed in a speech, "The work must be completed ... Total destruction. 'Blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven."" Avi Dichter, agriculture minister and former head of the Shin Bet intelligence service, spoke about "rolling out the Gaza Nakba". One Israeli 95 -year - old military veteran, whose motivational speech to IDF troops preparing for the invasion of Gaza exhorted them to "wipe out their memory, their families, mothers and children", was given a certificate of honour by Israeli president Herzog for "providing a wonderful example to generations of soldiers". No wonder that there have been innumerable social media posts by IDF troops in Gaza calling to "kill the Arabs", "burn their mothers" and "flatten" Gaza. There has been no known disciplinary action by their commanders. This is the logic of endless violence, a logic that allows one to destroy entire populations and to feel totally justified in doing so. It is a logic of victimhood — we must kill them before they kill us, as they did before — and nothing empowers violence more than a righteous sense of victimhood. Look at what happened to us in 1918, German soldiers said in 1942, recalling the propagandistic "stab -in -the -back" myth, which attributed Germany's catastrophic defeat in the first world war to Jewish and communist treason. Look at what happened to us in the Holocaust, when we trusted that others would come to our rescue, IDF troops say in 2024, thereby giving themselves licence for indiscriminate destruction based on a false analogy between Hamas and the Nazis. The young men and women I spoke with that day were filled with rage, not so much against me — they calmed down a bit when I mentioned my own military service — but because, I think, they felt betrayed by everyone around them. Betrayed by the media, which they perceived as too critical, by senior commanders who they thought were too lenient toward Palestinians, by politicians who had failed to prevent the 7 October fiasco, by the IDF's inability to achieve "total victory", by intellectuals and leftists unfairly criticising them, by the US government for not delivering sufficient munitions fast enough, and by all those hypocritical European politicians and antisemitic students protesting against their actions in Gaza. They seemed fearful and insecure and confused, and some were likely also suffering from PTSD. I told them the story of how, in 1930, the German student union was democratically taken over by the Nazis. The students of that time felt betrayed by the loss of the first world war, the loss of opportunity because of the economic crisis, and the loss of land and prestige in the wake of the humiliating peace treaty of Versailles. They wanted to make Germany great again, and Hitler seemed able to fulfil that promise. Germany's internal enemies were put away, its economy flourished, other nations feared it again, and then it went to war, conquered Europe and murdered millions of people. Finally, the country was utterly destroyed. I wondered aloud whether perhaps the few German students who survived those 15 years regretted their decision in 193o to support nazism. But I do not think the young men and women at BGU understood the implications of what I had told them. The students were frightening and frightened at the same time, and their fear made them all the more aggressive. This level of menace, as well as a degree of overlap in opinion, seemed to have generated fear and obsequiousness in their superiors, professors and administrators, who demonstrated great reluctance to discipline them in any way. At the same time, a host of media pundits and politicians have been cheering on these angels of destruction, calling them heroes just a moment before putting them in the ground and turning their backs on their grief-stricken families. The fallen soldiers died for a good cause, the families are told. But no one takes the time to articulate what that cause actually is beyond sheer survival through ever more violence. And so, I also fell sorry for these students, who were so unaware of how they had been manipulated. But I left that meeting filled with trepidation and foreboding. A s I headed back to the United States at the end of June, I contemplated my experiences over those two messy and troubling weeks. I was conscious of my deep connection to the country I had left. This is not just about my relationship with my Israeli family and friends, but also with the particular tenor of Israeli culture and society, which is characterised by its lack of distance or deference. This can be heartwarming and revealing; one can, almost instantaneously, find oneself in intense, even intimate conversations with others on the street, in a cafe, at a bar. Yet this same aspect of Israeli life can also be endlessly frustrating, since there is so little respect for social niceties. There is almost a cult of sincerity, an obligation to speak your mind, no matter who you're talking to or how much offence it may cause. This shared expectation creates both a sense of solidarity, and of lines that cannot be crossed. When you are with us, we are all family. If you turn against us or are on the other side of the national divide, you are shut out and can expect us to come after you. This may also have been the reason why this time, for the first time, I had been apprehensive about going to Israel, and why part of me was glad to leave. The country had changed in ways visible and subtle, ways that might have raised a barrier between me, as an observer from the outside, and those who have remained an organic part of it. But another part of my apprehension had to do with the fact that my view of what was happening in Gaza had shifted. On io November 2023, I wrote in the New York Times: "As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is now taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. [...] We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time." I no longer believe that. By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans — most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so- called safe zone — demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality — namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part", the Palestinian population in Gaza, "as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group's destruction". These were issues that I could only discuss with a very small handful of activists, scholars, experts in international law and, not surprisingly, Palestinian citizens of Israel. Beyond this limited circle, such statements on the illegality of Israeli actions in Gaza are anathema in Israel. Even the vast majority of protesters against the government, those calling for a ceasefire and the release of the hostages, will not countenance them. Since I returned from my visit, I have been trying to place my experiences there into a larger context. The reality on the ground is so devastating, and the future appears so bleak, that I have allowed myself to indulge in some counter -factual history and to entertain some hopeful speculations about a different future. I ask myself, what would have happened had the newly created state of Israel fulfilled its commitment to enact a constitution based on its Declaration of Independence? That same declaration which stated that Israel "will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations". El `Scars on every street': the refugee camp where generations of Palestinians have lost their futures Read more What effect would such a constitution have had on the nature of the state? How would it have tempered the transformation of Zionism from an ideology that sought to liberate the Jews from the degradation of exile and discrimination and to put them on equal standing with the other nations of the world, to a state ideology of ethnonationalism, oppression of others, expansionism and apartheid? During the few hopeful years of the Oslo peace process, people in Israel began speaking of making it into a "state of all its citizens", Jews and Palestinians alike. The assassination of prime minister Rabin in 1995 put an end to that dream. Will it ever be possible for Israel to discard the violent, exclusionary, militant and increasingly racist aspects of its vision as it is embraced there now by so many of its Jewish citizens? Will it ever be able to reimagine itself as its founders had so eloquently envisioned it — as a nation based on freedom, justice and peace? It is difficult to indulge in such fantasies at the moment. But perhaps precisely because of the nadir in which Israelis, and much more so Palestinians, now find themselves, and the trajectory of regional destruction their leaders have set them on, I pray that alternative voices will finally be raised. For, in the words of the poet Eldan, "there is a time when darkness roars but there is dawn and radiance". Follow the Long Read on X at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here. You've read 8 articles in the last year Article count on At this dangerous moment for dissent I hope you appreciated this article. Before you close this tab, I wanted to ask if you could support the Guardian at this crucial time for journalism in the US. 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All rights reserved. (dcr) On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 10:03 AM Martin Wasserman <deeDerlook@aol.com> wrote: Aram, If that's the definition of genocide, then Israel is clearly NOT committing genocide in Gaza. If Israel were trying to kill as many Gazans as possible, the death toll would be much, much higher than it is. They wouldn't allow any food or medicine in at all, and they wouldn't issue evacuation warnings before striking Hamas targets. The truth is, Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, but Hamas makes it very difficult by deliberately placing their command centers in civilian locations such as schools and hospitals. The only group that Israel wants to destroy is Hamas, which does have an explicit policy of genocide (by your definition) against Jews. Yes, the Gazans are suffering, but Hamas could end their suffering tomorrow if they wanted to. All they have to do is lay down their arms and release the hostages, and the war would be over immediately. But Hamas has no interest in ending the suffering of the Gazans. What they're actually calling for is an open-ended war of attrition against Israel, no matter what the cost to their own people. Martin Wasserman On Jul 18, 2025, at 8:26 PM, Aram James <a3jpol@gmail.com> wrote: Genocide defined: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. '°a campaign of genocide" On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 4:04 PM Martin Wasserman <dee 3erlook@aol.com> wrote: It appears that "genocide" can be defined in several different ways. Perhaps we should stop using that term altogether and stick to words that have clear and unambiguous meanings. On Jul 18, 2025, at 12:25 PM, Aram James <a pc 1 @gmail,com> wrote: I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But contrary to the cries of Israel's fiercest critics, the evidence did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide. By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August. At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a "huge price" for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas was operating, "into rubble," and he called on "the residents of Gaza" to "leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere." Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember "what Amalek did to you;" a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to "kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings" of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting "human animals" and, later, called for "total annihilation." Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on Xthat Israel's task must be "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth." Israel's actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one. This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Image People inspecting a huge pile of rubble. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend. *** The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." In determining what constitutes genocide, therefore, we must both establish intent and show that it is being carried out. In Israel's case, that intent has been publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. But intent can also be derived from a pattern of operations on the ground, and this pattern became clear by May 2024 — and has since become ever clearer — as the I.D.F. has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most genocide scholars are cautious about applying this term to contemporary events, precisely because of the tendency, since it was coined by the Jewish -Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, to attribute it to any case of massacre or inhumanity. Indeed, some argue that the categorization should be entirely discarded, because it often serves more to express outrage than to identify a particular crime. Yet as Mr. Lemkin recognized, and as the United Nations later agreed, it is crucial to be able to distinguish the attempt to destroy a particular group of people from other crimes under international law, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is because, while other crimes entail indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians as individuals, genocide denotes the killing of people as members of a group, geared at irreparably destroying the group itself so that it would never be able to reconstitute itself as a political, social or cultural entity. And, as the international community signaled by adopting the convention, it is incumbent upon all signatory states to prevent such an attempt, to do all they can to stop it while it is occurring and to subsequently punish those who were engaged in this crime of crimes — even if it occurred within the borders of a sovereign state. The designation has major political, legal and moral ramifications. Nations, politicians and military personnel suspected of, indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide are seen as beyond the pale of humanity and may compromise or lose their right to remain members of the international community. A finding by the International Court of Justice that a particular state is engaged in genocide, especially if enforced by the U.N. Security Council, can lead to severe sanctions. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox. Politicians or generals indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide or other breaches of international humanitarian law by the International Criminal Court can face arrest outside of their country. And a society that condones and is complicit in genocide, whatever the stand of its individual citizens may be, will carry this mark of Cain long after the fires of hatred and violence are put out. *** Israel has denied all allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The I.D.F. says it investigates reports of crimes, although it has rarely made its findings public, and when breaches of discipline or protocol are acknowledged, it has generally meted out light reprimands to its personnel. Israeli military and political leaders repeatedly describe the I.D.F. as acting lawfully, say they issue warnings to civilian populations to evacuate sites about to be attacked and blame Hamas for using civilians as human shields. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In fact, the systematic destruction in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure — government buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas, and parks — reflects a policy aimed at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely. According to a recent investigation by Haaretz, an estimated 174,000 buildings have been destroyed or damaged, accounting for up to 70 percent of all structures in the Strip. So far, more than 58,000 people have been killed, according to Gazan health authorities, including more than 17,000 children, who make up nearly a third of the total fatality count. More than 870 of those children were less than a year old. More than 2,000 families have been wiped out, the health authorities said. In addition, 5,600 families now count only one survivor. At least 10,000 people are believed to still be buried under the ruins of their homes. More than 138,000 have been wounded and maimed. Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world. An entire generation of children subjected to ongoing military attacks, loss of parents and long- term malnutrition will suffer severe physical and mental repercussions for the rest of their lives. Untold additional thousands of chronically ill persons have had little access to hospital care. The horror of what has been happening in Gaza is still described by most observers as war. But this is a misnomer. For the last year, the I.D.F. has not been fighting an organized military body. The version of Hamas that planned and carried out the attacks on Oct. 7 has been destroyed, though the weakened group continues to fight Israeli forces and retains control over the population in areas not held by the Israeli Army. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Today the I.D.F. is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and ethnic cleansing. That's how Mr. Netanyahu's own former chief of staff and minister of defense, the hard-liner Moshe Yaalon, in November described on Israel's Democrat TV and in subsequent articlesand interviews the attempt to clear northern Gaza of its population. Image A man in shadow sorts through the rubble of a home. ®L Credit...Mahmoud Issa/Reuters On Jan. 19, under pressure from Donald Trump, who was a day away from resuming the presidency, a cease- fire went into effect, facilitating the exchange of hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. But after Israel's breaking of the cease-fire on March 18, the I.D.F. has been executing a well -publicized plan to concentrate the entire Gazan population in a quarter of the territory in three zones: Gaza City, the central refugee camps and the Mawasi coastline in the Strip's southwestern edge. Using large numbers of bulldozers and huge aerial bombs supplied by the United States, the military appears to be trying to demolish every remaining structure and establish control over the other three- quarters of the territory. This is also being facilitated by a planthat provides — intermittently — limited aid supplies at a few distribution points guarded by the Israeli military, drawing people to the south. Many Gazans are killed in a desperate attempt to obtain food, and the starvation crisis deepens. On July 7, Defense Minister Israel Katz said the I.D.F. would build a "humanitarian city" over the ruins of Rafah to initially accommodate 600,000 Palestinians from the Mawasi area, who would be provisioned by international bodies and not allowed to leave. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT *** Some might describe this campaign as ethnic cleansing, not genocide. But there is a link between the crimes. When an ethnic group has nowhere to go and is constantly displaced from one so-called safe zone to another, relentlessly bombed and starved, ethnic cleansing can morph into genocide. This was the case in several well-known genocides of the loth century, such as that of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, now Namibia, that began in 1904; the Armenians in World War I; and, indeed, even in the Holocaust, which began with the German attempt to expel the Jews and ended up with their murder. To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust — and no institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating it — have issued warnings that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This silence has made a mockery of the slogan "Never again," transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one's own past victimhood. This is another of the many incalculable costs of the current catastrophe. As Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza and is exercising increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the moral and historical credit that the Jewish state has drawn on until now is running out. Israel, created in the wake of the Holocaust as the answer to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, has always insisted that any threat to its security must be seen as potentially leading to another Auschwitz. This provides Israel with license to portray those it perceives as its enemies as Nazis — a term usedrepeatedly by Israeli media figures to depict Hamas and, by extension, all Gazans, based on the popular assertion that none of them are "uninvolved," not even the infants, who would grow up to be militants. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT This is not a new phenomenon. As early as Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasir Arafat, then hunkered down in Beirut, to Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker. This time, the analogy is being used in connection with a policy aimed at uprooting and removing the entire population of Gaza. The daily scenes of horror in Gaza, from which the Israeli public is shielded by its own media's self - censorship, expose the lies of Israeli propaganda that this is a war of defense against a Nazi -like enemy. One shudders when Israeli spokespeople shamelessly utter the hollow slogan of the I.D.F. being the "most moral army in the world." Some European nations, such as France, Britain and Germany, as well as Canada, have feebly protested Israeli actions, especially since it breached the cease- fire in March. But they have neither suspended arms shipments nor taken many concrete and meaningful economic or political steps that might deter Mr. Netanyahu's government. For a while, the United States government seemed to have lost interest in Gaza, with President Trump initially announcing in February that the United States would take over Gaza, promising to turn it into "the Riviera of the Middle East," and then letting Israel get on with the Strip's destruction and turning his attention to Iran. At the moment, one can only hope that Mr. Trump will again pressure a reluctant Mr. Netanyahu to at least reach a new cease-fire and put an end to the relentless killing. *** How will Israel's future be affected by the inevitable demolition of its incontestable morality, derived from its birth in the ashes of the Holocaust? ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Israel's political leadership and its citizenry will have to decide. There seems to be little domestic pressure for the urgently needed change of paradigm: the recognition that there is no solution to this conflict other than an Israeli -Palestinian agreement to share the land under whatever parameters the two sides agree on, be it two states, one state or a confederation. Robust external pressure from the country's allies also appears unlikely. I am deeply worried that Israel will persist on its disastrous course, remaking itself, perhaps irreversibly, into a full-blown authoritarian apartheid state. Such states, as history has taught us, do not last. Another question arises: What consequences will Israel's moral reversal have for the culture of Holocaust commemoration, and the politics of memory, education and scholarship, when so many of its intellectual and administrative leaders have up to now refused to face up to their responsibility to denounce inhumanity and genocide wherever they occur? Those engaged in the worldwide culture of commemoration and remembrance built around the Holocaust will have to confront a moral reckoning. The wider community of genocide scholars — those engaged in the study of comparative genocide or of any one of the many other genocides that have marred human history — is now edging ever closer toward a consensus over describing events in Gaza as a genocide. In November, a little more than a year into the war, the Israeli genocide scholar Shmuel Lederman 'o] ined the growing chorus of opinion that Israel was engaged in genocidal actions. The Canadian international lawyer William Schabas came to the same conclusion last year and has recently described Israel's military campaign in Gaza as "absolutely" a genocide. Other genocide experts, such as Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the British specialist Martin Shaw (who has also said that the Hamas attack was genocidal), have reached the same conclusion, while the Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses of the City University of New York described these events in the Dutch publication NRC as a "mix of genocidal and military logic." In the same article, Ugur Umit Ungor, a professor at the Amsterdam -based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said there are probably scholars who still do not think it's genocide, but "I don't know them." ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most Holocaust scholars I know don't hold, or at least publicly express, this view. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Israeli Raz Segal, program director of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem historians Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman, the majority of academics engaged with the history of the Nazi genocide of the Jews have stayed remarkably silent, while some have openly denied Israel's crimes in Gaza, or accused their more critical colleagues of incendiary speech, wild exaggeration, well poisoning and antisemitism. In December the Holocaust scholar Norman J.W. Goda opined that "genocide charges like this have long been used as a fig leaf for broader challenges to Israel's legitimacy," expressing his worry that "they have cheapened the gravity of the word genocide itself." This "genocide libel," as Dr. Goda referred to it in an essay, "deploys a range of antisemitic tropes," including "the coupling of the genocide charge with the deliberate killing of children, images of whom are ubiquitous on NGO, social media, and other platforms that charge Israel with genocide." In other words, showing images of Palestinian children ripped apart by U.S.-made bombs launched by Israeli pilots is, in this view, an antisemitic act. Most recently, Dr. Goda and a respected historian of Europe, Jeffrey Herf, wrotein The Washington Post that "the genocide accusation hurled against Israel draws on deep wells of fear and hatred" found in "radical interpretations of both Christianity and Islam." It "has shifted opprobrium from Jews as a religious/ethnic group to the state of Israel, which it depicts as inherently evil." *** What are the ramifications of this rift between genocide scholars and Holocaust historians? This is not merely a squabble within academe. The memory culture created in recent decades around the Holocaust encompasses much more than the genocide of the Jews. It has come to play a crucial role in politics, education and identity. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Museums dedicated to the Holocaust have served as models for representations of other genocides around the world. Insistence that the lessons of the Holocaust demand the promotion of tolerance, diversity, antiracism and support for migrants and refugees, not to mention human rights and international humanitarian law, is rooted in an understanding of the universal implications of this crime in the heart of Western civilization at the peak of modernity. Discrediting genocide scholars who call out Israel's genocide in Gaza as antisemitic threatens to erode the foundation of genocide studies: the ongoing need to define, prevent, punish and reconstruct the history of genocide. Suggesting that this endeavor is motivated instead by malign interests and sentiments — that it is driven by the very hatred and prejudice that was at the root of the Holocaust — is not only morally scandalous, it provides an opening for a politics of denialism and impunity as well. By the same token, when those who have dedicated their careers to teaching and commemorating the Holocaust insist on ignoring or denying Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza, they threaten to undermine everything that Holocaust scholarship and commemoration have stood for in the past several decades. That is, the dignity of every human being, respect for the rule of law and the urgent need never to let inhumanity take over the hearts of people and steer the actions of nations in the name of security, national interest and sheer vengeance. Image eople at a beach and in the water as the sun sets. redit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times What I fear is that in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide, it will no longer be possible to continue teaching and researching the Holocaust in the same manner we did before. Because the Holocaust has been so relentlessly invoked by the state of Israel and its defenders as a cover-up for the crimes of the I.D.F., the study and remembrance -of the Holocaust could _ lose its claim to be concerned with universal justice and retreat into the same ethnic ghetto in which it began its life at the end of World War II — as a marginalized preoccupation by the remnants of a marginalized people, an ethnically specific event, before it succeeded, decades later, to find its rightful place as a lesson and a warning for humanity as a whole. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Just as worrisome is the prospect that the study of genocide as a whole will not survive the accusations of antisemitism, leaving us without the crucial community of scholars and international jurists to stand in the breach at a time when the rise of intolerance, racial hatred, populism and authoritarianism is threatening the values that were at the core of these scholarly, cultural and political endeavors of the loth century. Perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name. Israel will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity. That, despite all the horrific suffering we are currently watching, is a valuable thing, and may, in the long run, help Israel face the future in a healthier, more rational and less fearful and violent manner. This will do nothing to compensate for the staggering amount of death and suffering of Palestinians. But an Israel liberated from the overwhelming burden of the Holocaust may finally come to terms with the inescapable need for its seven million Jewish citizens to share the land with the seven million Palestinians living in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in peace, equality and dignity. That will be the only just reckoning. From: Aram James To: Martin Wasserman Cc: Jeff Rosen; Jay Bovarsky; Veenker Vicki; h.etzko@gmail.com; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Ra Javadev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneider, James; Binder, Andrew; Gardener, Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanda Conaway; volanda; Don Austin; jgreen@dailynewsgroup.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonga; roberta ahlquist; Baker, Rob; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlcuist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Freddie.Quintana@sen.ca.gov; Jeff Conrad; Burt, Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District9@sanjoseca.gov; District4©sanjoseca.gov; District5@sanjoseca.gov; District2@sanjoseca.gov; EPA Today; Gennady Shevner; Council, City; ciy.counciI@menlopark.cov; Nash, Betsy; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero@cityofepa.org; Cribbs, Anne; <michael.gennaco@oirgroup.com>; Stump, Molly; board@pausd.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Rodriguez, Miguel; Cait James; Tim James; Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman@assembly.ca.gov; Zelkha, Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enbera, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Tanaka. Greg; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberley; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq; Greg Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauinq; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee; Mark Turner; City Attorney; CityCouncil; Michelle Bigelow; Sean Allen; Seher Awan; Pat M; Carla Torres; David Piper Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Sunday, July 20, 2025 3:30:35 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Condemn Israel or be complicit in genocide': Colombia's Gustavo Petro By Al Mayadeen English Source: The Guardian 8 Jul 2025 13:47 2 Shares 4 Min Reat. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in a Guardian op-ed, accuses Netanyahu of genocide in Gaza and urges global action. Listen On Tuesday, The Guardian published an opinion piece by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in which he accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of orchestrating a "campaign of devastation" in Gaza and called on the international community to move beyond symbolic outrage toward concrete action in defense of international law. Petro has emerged as one of the most outspoken world leaders condemning "Israel's" war on Gaza, and his latest opinion piece adds to a growing series of forceful critiques directed at the ongoing Israeli genocide. Denouncing what he described as 600 days of systematic atrocities, Petro wrote that the world's inaction risks legitimizing a model of impunity where colonial violence, ethnic cleansing, and siege warfare are normalized against a captive population. "If we fail to act now," he wrote, "we not only betray the Palestinian people, we become complicit in the atrocities committed by Netanyahu's government." Moral break The president highlighted a landmark United Nations General Assembly resolution adopted in September 2024, which called for "Israel" to end its illegal occupation within 12 months. He noted that Colombia was among the 124 countries that voted in favor, thereby assuming binding obligations that include sanctions, legal action, and trade measures. "The clock is now ticking," he warned, reaffirming Colombia's commitment by recalling its concrete step: suspending coal exports to "Israel." Related News 650 days of genocide: 125,000 tons of bombs 2.4 min lives shattered 8 Starved by 'Israel': People of Gaza are dying while the world watches In his piece, Petro mentioned that he had declared earlier this year: "We cannot fuel the machinery that slaughters Palestinian children and then claim neutrality." This is not the first bold move by the Colombian president. In May, his government formally cut diplomatic ties with "Israel," citing what Petro explicitly described as a "genocide." His administration also appointed Colombia's first ambassador to Palestine, pledging medical treatment in Colombian hospitals for injured children from Gaza. The newly appointed ambassador, Jorge Ivan Ospina, later echoed Petro's position, warning of a "macabre intention to erase the identity of a people." In Tuesday's article, Petro praised similar actions taken by countries like Malaysia, which banned Israeli ships from its ports, and South Africa, which brought "Israel" before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on charges of genocide. It is worth noting that Colombia joined that case as an intervening party, further deepening its legal opposition to "Israel's" war. Read more: US defends Israeli use of starvation as weapon of war before ICJ Global reckoning Looking ahead, Petro mentioned that Colombia and South Africa, co-chairs of the Hague Group, will host an emergency summit regarding Gaza on July 15. The conference aims to develop a coordinated, multilateral strategy to isolate "Israel" diplomatically and economically while restoring credibility to the global legal order. With the UN's proposed international peace conference indefinitely postponed, Petro cast the July summit as a necessary corrective to global paralysis. The Colombian president framed the Gaza crisis not just as a moral catastrophe but as an existential test for international law and nations of the Global South. "We can either stand firm in defense of the legal principles that seek to prevent war and conflict," he wrote, "or watch helplessly as the international system collapses under the weight of unchecked power politics." He concluded his piece by stressing that the choice is between complicity in colonial violence and collective resistance against it. • On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 3:12 PM Martin Wasserman <ceeperlook@aol.com> wrote: Aram, Amnesty International is not a credible source on this issue. It appears that the once- respectable organization has been taken over by malevolent actors with a political axe to grind. Their anti -Israel bias is evident throughout the report. They accuse Israel of genocide but make no mention at all of Hamas' explicit genocidal policy against Jews. They accuse Israel of violating international law, but make no reference at all to the fact that Israel is facing a ruthless enemy that observes no international laws whatsoever. When they mention Hamas' transgressions at all, they do it in the mildest language possible, and then use the most damning possible language when describing Israel's actions. They take it as a given that Israel is an apartheid state, a blatantly false accusation that is very easily disproved. They take it as a given that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land, as if the territories of Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the ancient Jewish nation, don't belong to Jews at all, but are instead the property of a fictitious country called "Palestine" which has never actually existed in any historical period. In short, this entire report is a politically motivated "hatchet job" that deserves no credibility whatsoever. Martin Wasserman On Ju1 20, 2025, at 11:39 AM, Aram James <abjpdl@gmail.com> wrote: Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Amnesty International's research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today. The report, 'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman': Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity. "Amnesty International's report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them," said Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International. "Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. "States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel's atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end." Over the past two months the crisis has grown particularly acute in the North Gaza governorate, where a besieged population is facing starvation, displacement and annihilation amid relentless bombardment and suffocating restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. "Our research reveals that, for months, Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza. It continued to do so in defiance of countless warnings about the catastrophic humanitarian situation and of legally binding decisions from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering Israel to take immediate measures to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza," said Agnes Callamard. "Israel has repeatedly argued that its actions in Gaza are lawful and can be justified by its military goal to eradicate Hamas. But genocidal intent can co -exist alongside military goals and does not need to be Israel's sole intent." Amnesty International examined Israel's acts in Gaza closely and in their totality, taking into account their recurrence and simultaneous occurrence, and both their immediate impact and their cumulative and mutually reinforcing consequences. The organization considered the scale and severity of the casualties and destruction over time. It also analysed public statements by officials, finding that prohibited acts were often announced or called for in the first place by high-level officials in charge of the war efforts. "Taking into account the pre-existing context of dispossession, apartheid and unlawful military occupation in which these acts have been committed, we could fmd only one reasonable conclusion: Israel's intent is the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, whether in parallel with, or as a means to achieve, its military goal of destroying Hamas," said Agnes Callamard. "The atrocity crimes committed on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other armed groups against Israelis and victims of other nationalities, including deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking, can never justify Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza." International jurisprudence recognizes that the perpetrator does not need to succeed in their attempts to destroy the protected group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to have been committed. The commission of prohibited acts with the intent to destroy the group, as such, is sufficient. Amnesty International's report examines in detail Israel's violations in Gaza over nine months between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024. The organization interviewed 212 people, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, healthcare workers, conducted fieldwork and analysed an extensive range of visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery. It also analysed statements by senior Israeli government and military officials, and official Israeli bodies. On multiple occasions, the organization shared its findings with the Israeli authorities but had received no substantive response at the time of publication. Unprecedented scale and magnitude Israel's actions following Hamas's deadly attacks on 7 October 2023 have brought Gaza's population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over 97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families. It has caused unprecedented destruction, which experts say occurred at a level and speed not seen in any other conflict in the 21st century, levelling entire cities and destroying critical infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural and religious sites. It thereby rendered large swathes of Gaza uninhabitable. Mohammed, who fled with his family from Gaza City to Rafah in March 2024 and was displaced again in May 2024, described their struggle to survive in horrifying conditions: "Here in Deir al-Balah, it's like an apocalypse... You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat, and there is no clean water, no toilets, all while the bombing never stops. You feel like you are subhuman here." Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death. Israel also subjected hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza to incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment. Viewed in isolation, some of the acts investigated by Amnesty International constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law. But in looking at the broader picture of Israel's military campaign and the cumulative impact of its policies and acts, genocidal intent is the only reasonable conclusion. Intent to destroy To establish Israel's specific intent to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, Amnesty International analysed the overall pattern of Israel's conduct in Gaza, reviewed dehumanizing and genocidal statements by Israeli government and military officials, particularly those at the highest levels, and considered the context of Israel's system of apartheid, its inhumane blockade of Gaza and the unlawful 57 -year -old military occupation of the Palestinian territory. Before reaching its conclusion, Amnesty International examined Israel's claims that its military lawfully targeted Hamas and other armed groups throughout Gaza, and that the resulting unprecedented destruction and denial of aid were the outcome of unlawful conduct by Hamas and other armed groups, such as locating fighters among the civilian population or the diversion of aid. The organization concluded these claims are not credible. The presence of Hamas fighters near or within a densely populated area does not absolve Israel from its obligations to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. Its research found Israel repeatedly failed to do so, committing multiple crimes under international law for which there can be no justification based on Hamas's actions. Amnesty International also found no evidence that the diversion of aid could explain Israel's extreme and deliberate restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. In its analysis, the organization also considered alternative arguments such as ones that Israel was acting recklessly or that it simply wanted to destroy Hamas and did not care if it needed to destroy Palestinians in the process, demonstrating a callous disregard for their lives rather than genocidal intent. Our damning findings must serve as a wake- up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International However, regardless of whether Israel sees the destruction of Palestinians as instrumental to destroying Hamas or as an acceptable by-product of this goal, this view of Palestinians as disposable and not worthy of consideration is in itself evidence of genocidal intent. Many of the unlawful acts documented by Amnesty International were preceded by officials urging their implementation. The organization reviewed 102 statements that were issued by Israeli government and military officials and others between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2024 and dehumanized Palestinians, called for or justified genocidal acts or other crimes against them. Of these, Amnesty International identified 22 statements made by senior officials in charge of managing the offensive that appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts, providing direct evidence of genocidal intent. This language was frequently replicated, including by Israeli soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by audiovisual content verified by Amnesty International showing soldiers making calls to "erase" Gaza or to make it uninhabitable, and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities. Killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm Amnesty International documented the genocidal acts of killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza by reviewing the results of investigations it conducted into 15 air strikes between 7 October 2023 and 20 April 2024 that killed at least 334 civilians, including 141 children, and wounded hundreds of others. Amnesty International found no evidence that any of these strikes were directed at a military objective. In one illustrative case, on 20 April 2024, an Israeli air strike destroyed the Abdelal family house in the Al-Jneinah neighbourhood in eastern Rafah, killing three generations of Palestinians, including 16 children, while they were sleeping. While these represent just a fraction of Israel's aerial attacks, they are indicative of a broader pattern of repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects or deliberately indiscriminate attacks. The attacks were also conducted in ways designed to cause a very high number of fatalities and injuries among the civilian population. Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction The report documents how Israel deliberately inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza intended to lead, over time, to their destruction. These conditions were imposed through three simultaneous patterns that repeatedly compounded the effect of each other's devastating impacts: damage to and destruction of life - sustaining infrastructure and other objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population; the repeated use of sweeping, arbitrary and confusing mass "evacuation" orders to forcibly displace almost all of Gaza's population; and the denial and obstruction of the delivery of essential services, humanitarian assistance and other life-saving supplies into and within Gaza. After 7 October 2023, Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza cutting off electricity, water and fuel. In the nine months reviewed for this report, Israel maintained a suffocating, unlawful blockade, tightly controlled access to energy sources, failed to facilitate meaningful humanitarian access within Gaza, and obstructed the import and delivery of life- saving goods and humanitarian aid, particularly to areas north of Wadi Gaza. They thereby exacerbated an already existing humanitarian crisis. This, combined with the extensive damage to Gaza's homes, hospitals, water and sanitation facilities and agricultural land, and mass forced displacement, caused catastrophic levels of hunger and led to the spread of diseases at alarming rates. The impact was especially harsh on young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women, with anticipated long-term consequences for their health. The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International Time and again, Israel had the chance to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, yet for over a year it has repeatedly refused to take steps blatantly within its power to do so, such as opening sufficient access points to Gaza or lifting tight restrictions on what could enter the Strip or their obstruction of aid deliveries within Gaza while the situation has grown progressively worse. Through its repeated "evacuation" orders Israel displaced nearly 1.9 million Palestinians — 90% of Gaza's population — into ever -shrinking, unsafe pockets of land under inhumane conditions, some of them up to 10 times. These multiple waves of forced displacement left many jobless and deeply traumatized, especially since some 70% of Gaza's residents are refugees or descendants of refugees whose towns and villages were ethnically cleansed by Israel during the 1948 Nakba. Despite conditions quickly becoming unfit for human life, Israeli authorities refused to consider measures that would have protected displaced civilians and ensured their basic needs were met, showing that their actions were deliberate. They refused to allow those displaced to return to their homes in northern Gaza or relocate temporarily to other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory or Israel, continuing to deny many Palestinians their right to return under international law to areas they were displaced from in 1948. They did so knowing that there was nowhere safe for Palestinians in Gaza to flee to. Accountability for genocide "The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience," said Agnes Callamard. "Governments must stop pretending they are powerless to end this genocide, which was enabled by decades of impunity for Israel's violations of international law. States need to move beyond mere expressions of regret or dismay and take strong and sustained international action, however uncomfortable a finding of genocide may be for some of Israel's allies. "The International Criminal Court's (ICC) arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued last month offer real hope of long -overdue justice for victims. States must demonstrate their respect for the court's decision and for universal international law principles by arresting and handing over those wanted by the ICC. "We are calling on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to urgently consider adding genocide to the list of crimes it is investigating and for all states to use every legal avenue to bring perpetrators to justice. No one should be allowed to commit genocide and remain unpunished." Amnesty International is also calling for all civilian hostages to be released unconditionally and for Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups responsible for the crimes committed on 7 October to be held to account. The organization is also calling for the UN Security Council to impose targeted sanctions against Israeli and Hamas officials most implicated in crimes under international law. Background On 7 October 2023 Hamas and other armed groups indiscriminately fired rockets into southern Israel and carried out deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking there, killing 1,200 people, including over 800 civilians, and abducted 223 civilians and captured 27 soldiers. The crimes perpetrated by Hamas and other armed groups during this attack will be the focus of a forthcoming Amnesty International report. Since October 2023, Amnesty International has conducted in- depth investigations into the multiple violations and crimes under international law committed by Israeli forces, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects and deliberately indiscriminate attacks killing hundreds of civilians, as well as other unlawful attacks on and collective punishment of the civilian population. The organization has called on the Office of the ICC Prosecutor to expedite its investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine and is campaigning for an immediate ceasefire. For the Hebrew translation of this press release, click here. INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY MIDDLE EAST MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA NEWS PRESS RELEASE WAR CRIMES AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Related Content COUNTRY Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory NEWS New NATO defence commitments must not come at cost of human rights NEWS Gaza: Starvation or gunfire — this is not a humanitarian response NEWS DRC: Peace deal with Rwanda fails to address serious crimes committed in eastern DRC NEWS Gaza: Evidence points to Israel's continued use of starvation to inflict genocide against Palestinians Recently added Cambodia: Scamming crisis survivors must be protected amid police crackdown Ireland: Amnesty's head urges Irish government to Dress ahead with Occupied Territories Bill Angola: Authorities must respect and ensure the right to freedom of peaceful assembly Russia: Pro -Dosed amendments to counter - extremism laws escalate assault on cissent EU-Israel: Refusal to sus lend the EU-Israel Association Agreement is a `cruel and unlawful Defrayal' DONATE TO PROTECT HUMAN RIGHTS Women's Day protest in Mexico Together we can fight for human rights everywhere. Your donation can transform the lives of millions. ABOUT US Contact Us How We're Run Modern Slavery Act Statement Finances RESOURCES Media Centre Human Rights Education Human Rights Courses Annual report archive GET INVOLVED Join Take Action Volunteer LATEST News Campaigns Research WORK WITH US If you are talented and passionate about human rights then Amnesty International wants to hear from you. Privacy Policy Accessibility Cookie Statement Permissions Refunds of Donations © 2025 Amnesty International Facdbe r:'. FOLLOW US ON: rariiikT els`I Tii dIn On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 10:03 AM Martin Wasserman <deeperlook@aol.com> wrote: Aram, If that's the definition of genocide, then Israel is clearly NOT committing genocide in Gaza. If Israel were trying to kill as many Gazans as possible, the death toll would be much, much higher than it is. They wouldn't allow any food or medicine in at all, and they wouldn't issue evacuation warnings before striking Hamas targets. The truth is, Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, but Hamas makes it very difficult by deliberately placing their command centers in civilian locations such as schools and hospitals. The only group that Israel wants to destroy is Hamas, which does have an explicit policy of genocide (by your definition) against Jews. Yes, the Gazans are suffering, but Hamas could end their suffering tomorrow if they wanted to. All they have to do is lay down their arms and release the hostages, and the war would be over immediately. But Hamas has no interest in ending the suffering of the Gazans. What they're actually calling for is an open-ended war of attrition against Israel, no matter what the cost to their own people. Martin Wasserman On Jul 18, 2025, at 8:26 PM, Aram James <abjpol@gmail.com> wrote: Genocide defined: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. °°a campaign of genocide°" On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 4:04 PM Martin Wasserman <deeperlook@aol.com> wrote: It appears that "genocide" can be defined in several different ways. Perhaps we should stop using that term altogether and stick to words that have clear and unambiguous meanings. On Jul 18, 2025, at 12:25 PM, Aram James <aaj1d1@gmail.com> wrote: I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But contrary to the cries of Israel's fiercest critics, the evidence did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide. By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August. At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a "huge price" for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas was operating, "into rubble," and he called on "the residents of Gaza" to "leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere." Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember "what Amalek did to you," a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to "kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings" of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting "human animals" and, later, called for "total annihilation." Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on Xthat Israel's task must be "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth." Israel's actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one. This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Image People inspecting a huge pile of rubble. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend. *** The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." In determining what constitutes genocide, therefore, we must both establish intent and show that it is being carried out. In Israel's case, that intent has been publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. But intent can also be derived from a pattern of operations on the ground, and this pattern became clear by May 2024 — and has since become ever clearer — as the I.D.F. has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most genocide scholars are cautious about applying this term to contemporary events, precisely because of the tendency, since it was coined by the Jewish -Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, to attribute it to any case of massacre or inhumanity. Indeed, some argue that the categorization should be entirely discarded, because it often serves more to express outrage than to identify a particular crime. Yet as Mr. Lemkin recognized, and as the United Nations later agreed, it is crucial to be able to distinguish the attempt to destroy a particular group of people from other crimes under international law, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is because, while other crimes entail indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians as individuals, genocide denotes the killing of people as members of a group, geared at irreparably destroying the group itself so that it would never be able to reconstitute itself as a political, social or cultural entity. And, as the international community signaled by adopting the convention, it is incumbent upon all signatory states to prevent such an attempt, to do all they can to stop it while it is occurring and to subsequently punish those who were engaged in this crime of crimes — even if it occurred within the borders of a sovereign state. The designation has major political, legal and moral ramifications. Nations, politicians and military personnel suspected of, indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide are seen as beyond the pale of humanity and may compromise or lose their right to remain members of the international community. A finding by the International Court of Justice that a particular state is engaged in genocide, especially if enforced by the U.N. Security Council, can lead to severe sanctions. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox. Politicians or generals indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide or other breaches of international humanitarian law by the International Criminal Court can face arrest outside of their country. And a society that condones and is complicit in genocide, whatever the stand of its individual citizens may be, will carry this mark of Cain long after the fires of hatred and violence are put out. *** From: Martin Wasserman To: Aram James Cc: Jeff Rosen; Jav Bovarskv; Veenker, Vicki; h.etzko(algmail.com; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Rai Javacev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneicer, James; Bincer, Andrew; Gardener, Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanda Conaway; yolanda; Don Austin; jgreerKadailynewsgroup.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonaa; roberta ahlguist; Baker, Rob; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlcuist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Freddie.Quintana(alsen.ca.gov; Jeff Conrad; Burt, Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District9@sanjoseca.gov; District4@sanjoseca.gov; District5@sanjoseca.gov; District2@sanjoseca.gov; EPA Today; Gennadv Shevner; Council, City; citv.council@menlopark.00v; Nash, Betsy; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero@cityofepa.orq; Cribbs, Anne; <michael.gennaco@oirgroup.com>; Stump, Molly; board@pausd.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Rodriquez, Miguel; Cait James; Tim James; Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman@assembly.ca.gov; Zelkha, Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enbera, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Tanaka. Greg; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberley; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq; Greg Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauinq; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee; Mark Turner; City Attorney; CityCouncil; Michelle Bigelow; Sean Allen; Seher Awan; Pat M; Carla Torres; David Piper Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Sunday, July 20, 2025 3:13:06 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Aram, Amnesty International is not a credible source on this issue. It appears that the once - respectable organization has been taken over by malevolent actors with a political axe to grind. Their anti -Israel bias is evident throughout the report. They accuse Israel of genocide but make no mention at all of Hamas' explicit genocidal policy against Jews. They accuse Israel of violating international law, but make no reference at all to the fact that Israel is facing a ruthless enemy that observes no international laws whatsoever. When they mention Hamas' transgressions at all, they do it in the mildest language possible, and then use the most damning possible language when describing Israel's actions. They take it as a given that Israel is an apartheid state, a blatantly false accusation that is very easily disproved. They take it as a given that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land, as if the territories of Judea and Samaria, the heartland of the ancient Jewish nation, don't belong to Jews at all, but are instead the property of a fictitious country called "Palestine" which has never actually existed in any historical period. In short, this entire report is a politically motivated "hatchet job" that deserves no credibility whatsoever. Martin Wasserman On Ju1 20, 2025, at 11:39 AM, Aram James <abjpdl@gmail.com> wrote: Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Amnesty International's research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today. The report, 'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman': Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gazal,documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity. "Amnesty International's report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them," said Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International. "Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. "States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel's atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end." Over the past two months the crisis has grown particularly acute in the North Gaza governorate, where a besieged population is facing starvation, displacement and annihilation amid relentless bombardment and suffocating restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. "Our research reveals that, for months, Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza. It continued to do so in defiance of countless warnings about the catastrophic humanitarian situation and of legally binding decisions from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering Israel to take immediate measures to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza," said Agnes Callamard. "Israel has repeatedly argued that its actions in Gaza are lawful and can be justified by its military goal to eradicate Hamas. But genocidal intent can co -exist alongside military goals and does not need to be Israel's sole intent." Amnesty International examined Israel's acts in Gaza closely and in their totality, taking into account their recurrence and simultaneous occurrence, and both their immediate impact and their cumulative and mutually reinforcing consequences. The organization considered the scale and severity of the casualties and destruction over time. It also analysed public statements by officials, finding that prohibited acts were often announced or called for in the first place by high-level officials in charge of the war efforts. "Taking into account the pre-existing context of dispossession, apartheid and unlawful military occupation in which these acts have been committed, we could find only one reasonable conclusion: Israel's intent is the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, whether in parallel with, or as a means to achieve, its military goal of destroying Hamas," said Agnes Callamard. "The atrocity crimes committed on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other armed groups against Israelis and victims of other nationalities, including deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking, can never justify Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza." International jurisprudence recognizes that the perpetrator does not need to succeed in their attempts to destroy the protected group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to have been committed. The commission of prohibited acts with the intent to destroy the group, as such, is sufficient. Amnesty International's report examines in detail Israel's violations in Gaza over nine months between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024. The organization interviewed 212 people, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, healthcare workers, conducted fieldwork and analysed an extensive range of visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery. It also analysed statements by senior Israeli government and military officials, and official Israeli bodies. On multiple occasions, the organization shared its findings with the Israeli authorities but had received no substantive response at the time of publication. Unprecedented scale and magnitude Israel's actions following Hamas's deadly attacks on 7 October 2023 have brought Gaza's population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over 97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families. It has caused unprecedented destruction, which experts say occurred at a level and speed not seen in any other conflict in the 21st century, levelling entire cities and destroying critical infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural and religious sites. It thereby rendered large swathes of Gaza uninhabitable. Mohammed, who fled with his family from Gaza City to Rafah in March 2024 and was displaced again in May 2024, described their struggle to survive in horrifying conditions: "Here in Deir al-Balah, it's like an apocalypse... You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat, and there is no clean water, no toilets, all while the bombing never stops. You feel like you are subhuman here." Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death. Israel also subjected hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza to incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment. Viewed in isolation, some of the acts investigated by Amnesty International constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law. But in looking at the broader picture of Israel's military campaign and the cumulative impact of its policies and acts, genocidal intent is the only reasonable conclusion. Intent to destroy To establish Israel's specific intent to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, Amnesty International analysed the overall pattern of Israel's conduct in Gaza, reviewed dehumanizing and genocidal statements by Israeli government and military officials, particularly those at the highest levels, and considered the context of Israel's system of apartheid, its inhumane blockade of Gaza and the unlawful 57 -year -old military occupation of the Palestinian territory. Before reaching its conclusion, Amnesty International examined Israel's claims that its military lawfully targeted Hamas and other armed groups throughout Gaza, and that the resulting unprecedented destruction and denial of aid were the outcome of unlawful conduct by Hamas and other armed groups, such as locating fighters among the civilian population or the diversion of aid. The organization concluded these claims are not credible. The presence of Hamas fighters near or within a densely populated area does not absolve Israel from its obligations to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. Its research found Israel repeatedly failed to do so, committing multiple crimes under international law for which there can be no justification based on Hamas's actions. Amnesty International also found no evidence that the diversion of aid could explain Israel's extreme and deliberate restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. In its analysis, the organization also considered alternative arguments such as ones that Israel was acting recklessly or that it simply wanted to destroy Hamas and did not care if it needed to destroy Palestinians in the process, demonstrating a callous disregard for their lives rather than genocidal intent. Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International However, regardless of whether Israel sees the destruction of Palestinians as instrumental to destroying Hamas or as an acceptable by-product of this goal, this view of Palestinians as disposable and not worthy of consideration is in itself evidence of genocidal intent. Many of the unlawful acts documented by Amnesty International were preceded by officials urging their implementation. The organization reviewed 102 statements that were issued by Israeli government and military officials and others between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2024 and dehumanized Palestinians, called for or justified genocidal acts or other crimes against them. Of these, Amnesty International identified 22 statements made by senior officials in charge of managing the offensive that appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts, providing direct evidence of genocidal intent. This language was frequently replicated, including by Israeli soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by audiovisual content verified by Amnesty International showing soldiers making calls to "erase" Gaza or to make it uninhabitable, and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities. Killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm Amnesty International documented the genocidal acts of killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza by reviewing the results of investigations it conducted into 15 air strikes between 7 October 2023 and 20 April 2024 that killed at least 334 civilians, including 141 children, and wounded hundreds of others. Amnesty International found no evidence that any of these strikes were directed at a military objective. In one illustrative case, on 20 April 2024, an Israeli air strike destroyed the Abdelal family house in the Al-Jneinah neighbourhood in eastern Rafah, killing three generations of Palestinians, including 16 children, while they were sleeping. While these represent just a fraction of Israel's aerial attacks, they are indicative of a broader pattern of repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects or deliberately indiscriminate attacks. The attacks were also conducted in ways designed to cause a very high number of fatalities and injuries among the civilian population. Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction The report documents how Israel deliberately inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza intended to lead, over time, to their destruction. These conditions were imposed through three simultaneous patterns that repeatedly compounded the effect of each other's devastating impacts: damage to and destruction of life - sustaining infrastructure and other objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population; the repeated use of sweeping, arbitrary and confusing mass "evacuation" orders to forcibly displace almost all of Gaza's population; and the denial and obstruction of the delivery of essential services, humanitarian assistance and other life-saving supplies into and within Gaza. After 7 October 2023, Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza cutting off electricity, water and fuel. In the nine months reviewed for this report, Israel maintained a suffocating, unlawful blockade, tightly controlled access to energy sources, failed to facilitate meaningful humanitarian access within Gaza, and obstructed the import and delivery of life- saving goods and humanitarian aid, particularly to areas north of Wadi Gaza. They thereby exacerbated an already existing humanitarian crisis. This, combined with the extensive damage to Gaza's homes, hospitals, water and sanitation facilities and agricultural land, and mass forced displacement, caused catastrophic levels of hunger and led to the spread of diseases at alarming rates. The impact was especially harsh on young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women, with anticipated long-term consequences for their health. The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International Time and again, Israel had the chance to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, yet for over a year it has repeatedly refused to take steps blatantly within its power to do so, such as opening sufficient access points to Gaza or lifting tight restrictions on what could enter the Strip or their obstruction of aid deliveries within Gaza while the situation has grown progressively worse. Through its repeated "evacuation" orders Israel displaced nearly 1.9 million Palestinians — 90% of Gaza's population — into ever -shrinking, unsafe pockets of land under inhumane conditions, some of them up to 10 times. These multiple waves of forced displacement left many jobless and deeply traumatized, especially since some 70% of Gaza's residents are refugees or descendants of refugees whose towns and villages were ethnically cleansed by Israel during the 1948 Nakba. Despite conditions quickly becoming unfit for human life, Israeli authorities refused to consider measures that would have protected displaced civilians and ensured their basic needs were met, showing that their actions were deliberate. They refused to allow those displaced to return to their homes in northern Gaza or relocate temporarily to other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory or Israel, continuing to deny many Palestinians their right to return under international law to areas they were displaced from in 1948. They did so knowing that there was nowhere safe for Palestinians in Gaza to flee to. Accountability for genocide "The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience," said Agnes Callamard. "Governments must stop pretending they are powerless to end this genocide, which was enabled by decades of impunity for Israel's violations of international law. States need to move beyond mere expressions of regret or dismay and take strong and sustained international action, however uncomfortable a finding of genocide may be for some of Israel's allies. "The International Criminal Court's (ICC) arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued last month offer real hope of long -overdue justice for victims. States must demonstrate their respect for the court's decision and for universal international law principles by arresting and handing over those wanted by the ICC. "We are calling on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to urgently consider adding genocide to the list of crimes it is investigating and for all states to use every legal avenue to bring perpetrators to justice. No one should be allowed to commit genocide and remain unpunished." Amnesty International is also calling for all civilian hostages to be released unconditionally and for Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups responsible for the crimes committed on 7 October to be held to account. The organization is also calling for the UN Security Council to impose targeted sanctions against Israeli and Hamas officials most implicated in crimes under international law. Background On 7 October 2023 Hamas and other armed groups indiscriminately fired rockets into southern Israel and carried out deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking there, killing 1,200 people, including over 800 civilians, and abducted 223 civilians and captured 27 soldiers. The crimes perpetrated by Hamas and other armed groups during this attack will be the focus of a forthcoming Amnesty International report. Since October 2023, Amnesty International has conducted in- depth investigations into the multiple violations and crimes under international law committed by Israeli forces, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects and deliberately indiscriminate attacks killing hundreds of civilians, as well as other unlawful attacks on and collective punishment of the civilian population. The organization has called on the Office of the ICC Prosecutor to expedite its investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine and is campaigning for an immediate ceasefire. For the Hebrew translation of this press release, click here. INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY MIDDLE EAST MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA NEWS PRESS RELEASE WAR CRIMES AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Related Content COUNTRY Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory NEWS New NATO defence commitments must not come at cost of human rights NEWS Gaza: Starvation or gunfire — this is not a humanitarian response NEWS DRC: Peace deal with Rwanda fails to address serious crimes committed in eastern DRC NEWS Gaza: Evidence points to Israel's continued use of starvation to inflict genocide against Palestinians Recently added Cambodia: Scamming crisis survivors must be protected amid -police crackdown Irelanc: Amnesty's heat. urges Irish government to press ahead with Occupied Territories Bill Angola: Authorities must res Dect anc ensure the right to freecom of -peaceful assem ply Russia: Proposed amendments to counter - extremism laws escalate assault on dissent EU-Israel: Refusal to sus Send the EU-Israel Association Agreement is a `cruel and unlawful 3etrayal' DONATE TO PROTECT HUMAN RIGHTS Women's Day protest in Mexico Together we can fight for human rights everywhere. Your donation can transform the lives of millions. ABOUT US Contact Us How We're Run Modern Slavery Act Statement Finances RESOURCES Media Centre Human Rights Education Human Rights Courses Annual report archive GET INVOLVED Join Take Action Volunteer LATEST News Campaigns Research WORK WITH US If you are talented and passionate about human rights then Amnesty International wants to hear from you. Privacy Policy Accessibility Cookie Statement Permissions Refunds of Donations © 2025 Amnesty International 0FO x iT8k FOLLOW US ON: On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 10:03 AM Martin Wasserman <deenerlook@aol.com> wrote: Aram, If that's the definition of genocide, then Israel is clearly NOT committing genocide in Gaza. If Israel were trying to kill as many Gazans as possible, the death toll would be much, much higher than it is. They wouldn't allow any food or medicine in at all, and they wouldn't issue evacuation warnings before striking Hamas targets. The truth is, Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, but Hamas makes it very difficult by deliberately placing their command centers in civilian locations such as schools and hospitals. The only group that Israel wants to destroy is Hamas, which does have an explicit policy of genocide (by your definition) against Jews. Yes, the Gazans are suffering, but Hamas could end their suffering tomorrow if they wanted to. All they have to do is lay down their arms and release the hostages, and the war would be over immediately. But Hamas has no interest in ending the suffering of the Gazans. What they're actually calling for is an open- ended war of attrition against Israel, no matter what the cost to their own people. Martin Wasserman On Jul 18, 2025, at 8:26 PM, Aram James <ab'--d_@gmail.com> wrote: Genocide defined: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. "a campaign of genocide" On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 4:04 PM Martin Wasserman <ceeperlook@aol.com> wrote: It appears that "genocide" can be defined in several different ways. Perhaps we should stop using that term altogether and stick to words that have clear and unambiguous meanings. On Jul 18, 2025, at 12:25 PM, Aram James <abjpol@gmail.com> wrote: I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But contrary to the cries of Israel's fiercest critics, the evidence did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide. By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August. At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a "huge price" for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas was operating, "into rubble," and he ac lled on "the residents of Gaza" to "leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere." Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember "what Amalek did to you: a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to "kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings" of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting "human animals" and, later, called for "total annihilation." Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on Xthat Israel's task must be "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth." Israel's actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one. This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Image eople inspecting a huge pile of rubble. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend. *** The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." In determining what constitutes genocide, therefore, we must both establish intent and show that it is being carried out. In Israel's case, that intent has been publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. But intent can also be derived from a pattern of operations on the ground, and this pattern became clear by May 2024 — and has since become ever clearer — as the I.D.F. has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip. ADVERTISEMENT SIUF' ADVERTISEMENT Most genocide scholars are cautious about applying this term to contemporary events, precisely because of the tendency, since it was coined by the Jewish -Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, to attribute it to any case of massacre or inhumanity. Indeed, some argue that the categorization should be entirely discarded, because it often serves more to express outrage than to identify a particular crime. Yet as Mr. Lemkin recognized, and as the United Nations later agreed, it is crucial to be able to distinguish the attempt to destroy a particular group of people from other crimes under international law, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is because, while other crimes entail indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians as individuals, genocide denotes the killing of people as members of a group, geared at irreparably destroying the group itself so that it would never be able to reconstitute itself as a political, social or cultural entity. And, as the international community signaled by adopting the convention, it is incumbent upon all signatory states to prevent such an attempt, to do all they can to stop it while it is occurring and to subsequently punish those who were engaged in this crime of crimes — even if it occurred within the borders of a sovereign state. The designation has major political, legal and moral ramifications. Nations, politicians and military personnel suspected of, indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide are seen as beyond the pale of humanity and may compromise or lose their right to remain members of the international community. A finding by the International Court of Justice that a particular state is engaged in genocide, especially if enforced by the U.N. Security Council, can lead to severe sanctions. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox. Politicians or generals indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide or other breaches of international humanitarian law by the International Criminal Court can face arrest outside of their country. And a society that condones and is complicit in genocide, whatever the stand of its individual citizens may be, will carry this mark of Cain long after the fires of hatred and violence are put out. *** Israel has denied all allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The I.D.F. says it investigates reports of crimes, although it has rarely made its findings public, and when breaches of discipline or protocol are acknowledged, it has generally meted out light reprimands to its personnel. Israeli military and political leaders repeatedly describe the I.D.F. as acting lawfully, say they issue warnings to civilian populations to evacuate sites about to be attacked and blame Hamas for using civilians as human shields. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In fact, the systematic destruction in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure — government buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas, and parks — reflects a policy aimed at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely. According to a recent investigation by Haaretz, an estimated 174,000 buildings have been destroyed or damaged, accounting for up to 7o percent of all structures in the Strip. So far, more than 58,000 people have been killed, according to Gazan health authorities, including more than 17,000 children, who make up nearly a third of the total fatality count. More than 870 of those children were less than a year old. More than 2,000 families have been wiped out, the health authorities said. In addition, 5,600 families now count only one survivor. At least io,000 people are believed to still be buried under the ruins of their homes. More than 138,000 have been wounded and maimed. Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world. An entire generation of children subjected to ongoing military attacks, loss of parents and long-term malnutrition will suffer severe physical and mental repercussions for the rest of their lives. Untold additional thousands of chronically ill persons have had little access to hospital care. The horror of what has been happening in Gaza is still described by most observers as war. But this is a misnomer. For the last year, the I.D.F. has not been fighting an organized military body. The version of Hamas that planned and carried out the attacks on Oct. 7 has been destroyed, though the weakened group continues to fight Israeli forces and retains control over the population in areas not held by the Israeli Army. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Today the I.D.F. is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and ethnic cleansing. That's how Mr. Netanyahu's own former chief of staff and minister of defense, the hard-liner Moshe Yaalon, in November described on Israel's Democrat TV and in subsequent articlesand interviews the attempt to clear northern Gaza of its population. Image A man in shadow sorts through the rubble of a home. Credit...Mahmoud Issa/Reuters On Jan. 19, under pressure from Donald Trump, who was a day away from resuming the presidency, a cease- fire went into effect, facilitating the exchange of hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. But after Israel's breaking of the cease-fire on March i8, the I.D.F. has been executing a well -publicized plan to concentrate the entire Gazan population in a quarter of the territory in three zones: Gaza City, the central refugee camps and the Mawasi coastline in the Strip's southwestern edge. Using large numbers of bulldozers and huge aerial bombs supplied by the United States, the military appears to be trying to demolish every remaining structure and establish control over the other three- quarters of the territory. This is also being facilitated by a planthat provides — intermittently — limited aid supplies at a few distribution points guarded by the Israeli military, drawing people to the south. Many Gazans are killed in a desperate attempt to obtain food, and the starvation crisis deepens. On July 7, Defense Minister Israel Katz said the I.D.F. would build a "humanitarian city" over the ruins of Rafah to initially accommodate 600,000 Palestinians from the Mawasi area, who would be provisioned by international bodies and not allowed to leave. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT *** Some might describe this campaign as ethnic cleansing, not genocide. But there is a link between the crimes. When an ethnic group has nowhere to go and is constantly displaced from one so-called safe zone to another, relentlessly bombed and starved, ethnic cleansing can morph into genocide. This was the case in several well-known genocides of the loth century, such as that of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, now Namibia, that began in 1904; the Armenians in World War I; and, indeed, even in the Holocaust, which began with the German attempt to expel the Jews and ended up with their murder. To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust — and no institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating it — have issued warnings that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This silence has made a mockery of the slogan "Never again," transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one's own past victimhood. This is another of the many incalculable costs of the current catastrophe. As Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza and is exercising increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the moral and historical credit that the Jewish state has drawn on until now is running out. Israel, created in the wake of the Holocaust as the answer to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, has always insisted that any threat to its security must be seen as potentially leading to another Auschwitz. This provides Israel with license to portray those it perceives as its enemies as Nazis — a term usedrepeatedly by Israeli media figures to depict Hamas and, by extension, all Gazans, based on the popular assertion that none of them are "uninvolved," not even the infants, who would grow up to be militants. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT This is not a new phenomenon. As early as Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasir Arafat, then hunkered down in Beirut, to Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker. This time, the analogy is being used in connection with a policy aimed at uprooting and removing the entire population of Gaza. The daily scenes of horror in Gaza, from which the Israeli public is shielded by its own media's self - censorship, expose the lies of Israeli propaganda that this is a war of defense against a Nazi -like enemy. One shudders when Israeli spokespeople shamelessly utter the hollow slogan of the I.D.F. being the "most moral army in the world." Some European nations, such as France, Britain and Germany, as well as Canada, have feebly protested Israeli actions, especially since it breached the cease- fire in March. But they have neither suspended arms shipments nor taken many concrete and meaningful economic or political steps that might deter Mr. Netanyahu's government. For a while, the United States government seemed to have lost interest in Gaza, with President Trump initially announcing in February that the United States would take over Gaza, promising to turn it into "the Riviera of the Middle East," and then letting Israel get on with the Strip's destruction and turning his attention to Iran. At the moment, one can only hope that Mr. Trump will again pressure a reluctant Mr. Netanyahu to at least reach a new cease-fire and put an end to the relentless killing. *** How will Israel's future be affected by the inevitable demolition of its incontestable morality, derived from its birth in the ashes of the Holocaust? ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Israel's political leadership and its citizenry will have to decide. There seems to be little domestic pressure for the urgently needed change of paradigm: the recognition that there is no solution to this conflict other than an Israeli -Palestinian agreement to share the land under whatever parameters the two sides agree on, be it two states, one state or a confederation. Robust external pressure from the country's allies also appears unlikely. I am deeply worried that Israel will persist on its disastrous course, remaking itself, perhaps irreversibly, into a full-blown authoritarian apartheid state. Such states, as history has taught us, do not last. Another question arises: What consequences will Israel's moral reversal have for the culture of Holocaust commemoration, and the politics of memory, education and scholarship, when so many of its intellectual and administrative leaders have up to now refused to face up to their responsibility to denounce inhumanity and genocide wherever they occur? Those engaged in the worldwide culture of commemoration and remembrance built around the Holocaust will have to confront a moral reckoning. The wider community of genocide scholars — those engaged in the study of comparative genocide or of any one of the many other genocides that have marred human history — is now edging ever closer toward a consensus over describing events in Gaza as a genocide. In November, a little more than a year into the war, the Israeli genocide scholar Shmuel Lederman joined the growing chorus of opinion that Israel was engaged in genocidal actions. The Canadian international lawyer William Schabas came to the same conclusion last year and has recently described Israel's military campaign in Gaza as "absolutely" a genocide. Other genocide experts, such as Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the British specialist Martin Shaw (who has also said that the Hamas attack was genocidal), have reached the same conclusion, while the Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses of the City University of New York described these events in the Dutch publication NRC as a "mix of genocidal and military logic." In the same article, Ugur Umit Ungor, a professor at the Amsterdam -based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said there are probably scholars who still do not think it's genocide, but "I don't know them." ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most Holocaust scholars I know don't hold, or at least publicly express, this view. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Israeli Raz Segal, program director of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem historians Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman, the majority of academics engaged with the history of the Nazi genocide of the Jews have stayed remarkably silent, while some have openly denied Israel's crimes in Gaza, or accused their more critical colleagues of incendiary speech, wild exaggeration, well poisoning and antisemitism. In December the Holocaust scholar Norman J.W. Goda opined that "genocide charges like this have long been used as a fig leaf for broader challenges to Israel's legitimacy," expressing his worry that "they have cheapened the gravity of the word genocide itself." This "genocide libel," as Dr. Goda referred to it in an essay, "deploys a range of antisemitic tropes," including "the coupling of the genocide charge with the deliberate killing of children, images of whom are ubiquitous on NGO, social media, and other platforms that charge Israel with genocide." In other words, showing images of Palestinian children ripped apart by U.S.-made bombs launched by Israeli pilots is, in this view, an antisemitic act. Most recently, Dr. Goda and a respected historian of Europe, Jeffrey Herf, wrotein The Washington Post that "the genocide accusation hurled against Israel draws on deep wells of fear and hatred" found in "radical interpretations of both Christianity and Islam." It "has shifted opprobrium from Jews as a religious/ethnic group to the state of Israel, which it depicts as inherently evil." *** What are the ramifications of this rift between genocide scholars and Holocaust historians? This is not merely a squabble within academe. The memory culture created in recent decades around the Holocaust encompasses much more than the genocide of the Jews. It has come to play a crucial role in politics, education and identity. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Museums dedicated to the Holocaust have served as models for representations of other genocides around the world. Insistence that the lessons of the Holocaust demand the promotion of tolerance, diversity, antiracism and support for migrants and refugees, not to mention human rights and international humanitarian law, is rooted in an understanding of the universal implications of this crime in the heart of Western civilization at the peak of modernity. Discrediting genocide scholars who call out Israel's genocide in Gaza as antisemitic threatens to erode the foundation of genocide studies: the ongoing need to define, prevent, punish and reconstruct the history of genocide. Suggesting that this endeavor is motivated instead by malign interests and sentiments — that it is driven by the very hatred and prejudice that was at the root of the Holocaust — is not only morally scandalous, it provides an opening for a politics of denialism and impunity as well. By the same token, when those who have dedicated their careers to teaching and commemorating the Holocaust insist on ignoring or denying Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza, they threaten to undermine everything that Holocaust scholarship and commemoration have stood for in the past several decades. That is, the dignity of every human being, respect for the rule of law and the urgent need never to let inhumanity take over the hearts of people and steer the actions of nations in the name of security, national interest and sheer vengeance. Image People at a beach and in the water as the sun sets. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times What I fear is that in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide, it will no longer be possible to continue teaching and researching the Holocaust in the same manner we did before. Because the Holocaust has been so relentlessly invoked by the state of Israel and its defenders as a cover-up for the crimes of the I.D.F., the study and remembrance of the Holocaust could lose its claim to be concerned with universal justice and retreat into the same ethnic ghetto in which it began its life at the end of World War II — as a marginalized preoccupation by the remnants of a marginalized people, an ethnically specific event, before it succeeded, decades later, to find its rightful place as a lesson and a warning for humanity as a whole. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Just as worrisome is the prospect that the study of genocide as a whole will not survive the accusations of antisemitism, leaving us without the crucial community of scholars and international jurists to stand in the breach at a time when the rise of intolerance, racial hatred, populism and authoritarianism is threatening the values that were at the core of these scholarly, cultural and political endeavors of the loth century. Perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name. Israel will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity. That, despite all the horrific suffering we are currently watching, is a valuable thing, and may, in the long run, help Israel face the future in a healthier, more rational and less fearful and violent manner. This will do nothing to compensate for the staggering amount of death and suffering of Palestinians. But an Israel liberated from the overwhelming burden of the Holocaust may finally come to terms with the inescapable need for its seven million Jewish citizens to share the land with the seven million Palestinians living in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in peace, equality and dignity. That will be the only just reckoning. From: Aram James To: Martin Wasserman Cc: Jeff Rosen; Jay Bovarskv; Veenker, Vicki; h.etzko@gmail.com; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Rai Javadev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneider, James; Bincer, Andrew; Gardener, Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanda Conaway; yolanda; Don Austin; jgreen@dailynewsgrouo.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonaa; roberta ahlguist; Baker, Rob; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlcuist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Freddie.Quintana@sen.ca.gov; Jeff Conrad; Burt Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District9@sanjoseca.gov; District4@sanjoseca.gov; District5@sanjoseca.gov; District2@sanjoseca.gov; EPA Today; Gennacv Shevner; Council, City; citv.council@menlopark.gov; Nash, Betsy; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero@cityofepa.orc; Cribbs, Anne; <michael.gennaco@oirgroup.com>; Stump, Molly; board@pausd.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Rodriquez, Miguel; Cait James; Tim James; Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman@assembly.ca.gov; Zelkha, Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enbera, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Tanaka. Greg; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberley; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq; Greg Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauinq; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee; Mark Turner; City Attorney; CityCouncil; Michelle Bigelow; Sean Allen; Seher Awan; Pat M; Carla Torres; David Piper Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Sunday, July 20, 2025 11:39:58 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Amnesty International's research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today. The report, 'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman': Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza. documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity. "Amnesty International's report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them," said Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International. "Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. "States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel's atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end." Over the past two months the crisis has grown particularly acute in the North Gaza governorate, where a besieged population is facing starvation, displacement and annihilation amid relentless bombardment and suffocating restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. "Our research reveals that, for months, Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza. It continued to do so in defiance of countless warnings about the catastrophic humanitarian situation and of legally binding decisions from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering Israel to take immediate measures to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza," said Agnes Callamard. "Israel has repeatedly argued that its actions in Gaza are lawful and can be justified by its military goal to eradicate Hamas. But genocidal intent can co -exist alongside military goals and does not need to be Israel's sole intent." Amnesty International examined Israel's acts in Gaza closely and in their totality, taking into account their recurrence and simultaneous occurrence, and both their immediate impact and their cumulative and mutually reinforcing consequences. The organization considered the scale and severity of the casualties and destruction over time. It also analysed public statements by officials, finding that prohibited acts were often announced or called for in the first place by high-level officials in charge of the war efforts. "Taking into account the pre-existing context of dispossession, apartheid and unlawful military occupation in which these acts have been committed, we could find only one reasonable conclusion: Israel's intent is the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, whether in parallel with, or as a means to achieve, its military goal of destroying Hamas," said Agnes Callamard. "The atrocity crimes committed on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other armed groups against Israelis and victims of other nationalities, including deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking, can never justify Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza." International jurisprudence recognizes that the perpetrator does not need to succeed in their attempts to destroy the protected group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to have been committed. The commission of prohibited acts with the intent to destroy the group, as such, is sufficient. Amnesty International's report examines in detail Israel's violations in Gaza over nine months between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024. The organization interviewed 212 people, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, healthcare workers, conducted fieldwork and analysed an extensive range of visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery. It also analysed statements by senior Israeli government and military officials, and official Israeli bodies. On multiple occasions, the organization shared its findings with the Israeli authorities but had received no substantive response at the time of publication. Unprecedented scale and magnitude Israel's actions following Hamas's deadly attacks on 7 October 2023 have brought Gaza's population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over 97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families. It has caused unprecedented destruction, which experts say occurred at a level and speed not seen in any other conflict in the 21st century, levelling entire cities and destroying critical infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural and religious sites. It thereby rendered large swathes of Gaza uninhabitable. Mohammed, who fled with his family from Gaza City to Rafah in March 2024 and was displaced again in May 2024, described their struggle to survive in horrifying conditions: "Here in Deir al-Balah, it's like an apocalypse... You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat, and there is no clean water, no toilets, all while the bombing never stops. You feel like you are subhuman here." Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death. Israel also subjected hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza to incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment. Viewed in isolation, some of the acts investigated by Amnesty International constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law. But in looking at the broader picture of Israel's military campaign and the cumulative impact of its policies and acts, genocidal intent is the only reasonable conclusion. Intent to destroy To establish Israel's specific intent to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, Amnesty International analysed the overall pattern of Israel's conduct in Gaza, reviewed dehumanizing and genocidal statements by Israeli government and military officials, particularly those at the highest levels, and considered the context of Israel's system of apartheid, its inhumane blockade of Gaza and the unlawful 57 -year -old military occupation of the Palestinian territory. Before reaching its conclusion, Amnesty International examined Israel's claims that its military lawfully targeted Hamas and other armed groups throughout Gaza, and that the resulting unprecedented destruction and denial of aid were the outcome of unlawful conduct by Hamas and other armed groups, such as locating fighters among the civilian population or the diversion of aid. The organization concluded these claims are not credible. The presence of Hamas fighters near or within a densely populated area does not absolve Israel from its obligations to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. Its research found Israel repeatedly failed to do so, committing multiple crimes under international law for which there can be no justification based on Hamas's actions. Amnesty International also found no evidence that the diversion of aid could explain Israel's extreme and deliberate restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid. In its analysis, the organization also considered alternative arguments such as ones that Israel was acting recklessly or that it simply wanted to destroy Hamas and did not care if it needed to destroy Palestinians in the process, demonstrating a callous disregard for their lives rather than genocidal intent. Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International However, regardless of whether Israel sees the destruction of Palestinians as instrumental to destroying Hamas or as an acceptable by-product of this goal, this view of Palestinians as disposable and not worthy of consideration is in itself evidence of genocidal intent. Many of the unlawful acts documented by Amnesty International were preceded by officials urging their implementation. The organization reviewed 102 statements that were issued by Israeli government and military officials and others between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2024 and dehumanized Palestinians, called for or justified genocidal acts or other crimes against them. Of these, Amnesty International identified 22 statements made by senior officials in charge of managing the offensive that appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts, providing direct evidence of genocidal intent. This language was frequently replicated, including by Israeli soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by audiovisual content verified by Amnesty International showing soldiers making calls to "erase" Gaza or to make it uninhabitable, and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities. Killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm Amnesty International documented the genocidal acts of killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza by reviewing the results of investigations it conducted into 15 air strikes between 7 October 2023 and 20 April 2024 that killed at least 334 civilians, including 141 children, and wounded hundreds of others. Amnesty International found no evidence that any of these strikes were directed at a military objective. In one illustrative case, on 20 April 2024, an Israeli air strike destroyed the Abdelal family house in the Al-Jneinah neighbourhood in eastern Rafah, killing three generations of Palestinians, including 16 children, while they were sleeping. While these represent just a fraction of Israel's aerial attacks, they are indicative of a broader pattern of repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects or deliberately indiscriminate attacks. The attacks were also conducted in ways designed to cause a very high number of fatalities and injuries among the civilian population. Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction The report documents how Israel deliberately inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza intended to lead, over time, to their destruction. These conditions were imposed through three simultaneous patterns that repeatedly compounded the effect of each other's devastating impacts: damage to and destruction of life - sustaining infrastructure and other objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population; the repeated use of sweeping, arbitrary and confusing mass "evacuation" orders to forcibly displace almost all of Gaza's population; and the denial and obstruction of the delivery of essential services, humanitarian assistance and other life-saving supplies into and within Gaza. After 7 October 2023, Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza cutting off electricity, water and fuel. In the nine months reviewed for this report, Israel maintained a suffocating, unlawful blockade, tightly controlled access to energy sources, failed to facilitate meaningful humanitarian access within Gaza, and obstructed the import and delivery of life- saving goods and humanitarian aid, particularly to areas north of Wadi Gaza. They thereby exacerbated an already existing humanitarian crisis. This, combined with the extensive damage to Gaza's homes, hospitals, water and sanitation facilities and agricultural land, and mass forced displacement, caused catastrophic levels of hunger and led to the spread of diseases at alarming rates. The impact was especially harsh on young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women, with anticipated long-term consequences for their health. The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International Time and again, Israel had the chance to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, yet for over a year it has repeatedly refused to take steps blatantly within its power to do so, such as opening sufficient access points to Gaza or lifting tight restrictions on what could enter the Strip or their obstruction of aid deliveries within Gaza while the situation has grown progressively worse. Through its repeated "evacuation" orders Israel displaced nearly 1.9 million Palestinians — 90% of Gaza's population — into ever -shrinking, unsafe pockets of land under inhumane conditions, some of them up to 10 times. These multiple waves of forced displacement left many jobless and deeply traumatized, especially since some 70% of Gaza's residents are refugees or descendants of refugees whose towns and villages were ethnically cleansed by Israel during the 1948 Nakba. Despite conditions quickly becoming unfit for human life, Israeli authorities refused to consider measures that would have protected displaced civilians and ensured their basic needs were met, showing that their actions were deliberate. They refused to allow those displaced to return to their homes in northern Gaza or relocate temporarily to other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory or Israel, continuing to deny many Palestinians their right to return under international law to areas they were displaced from in 1948. They did so knowing that there was nowhere safe for Palestinians in Gaza to flee to. Accountability for genocide "The international community's seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience," said Agnes Callamard. "Governments must stop pretending they are powerless to end this genocide, which was enabled by decades of impunity for Israel's violations of international law. States need to move beyond mere expressions of regret or dismay and take strong and sustained international action, however uncomfortable a finding of genocide may be for some of Israel's allies. "The International Criminal Court's (ICC) arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued last month offer real hope of long -overdue justice for victims. States must demonstrate their respect for the court's decision and for universal international law principles by arresting and handing over those wanted by the ICC. "We are calling on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to urgently consider adding genocide to the list of crimes it is investigating and for all states to use every legal avenue to bring perpetrators to justice. No one should be allowed to commit genocide and remain unpunished." Amnesty International is also calling for all civilian hostages to be released unconditionally and for Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups responsible for the crimes committed on 7 October to be held to account. The organization is also calling for the UN Security Council to impose targeted sanctions against Israeli and Hamas officials most implicated in crimes under international law. Background On 7 October 2023 Hamas and other armed groups indiscriminately fired rockets into southern Israel and carried out deliberate mass killings and hostage -taking there, killing 1,200 people, including over 800 civilians, and abducted 223 civilians and captured 27 soldiers. The crimes perpetrated by Hamas and other armed groups during this attack will be the focus of a forthcoming Amnesty International report. Since October 2023, Amnesty International has conducted in- depth investigations into the multiple violations and crimes under international law committed by Israeli forces, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects and deliberately indiscriminate attacks killing hundreds of civilians, as well as other unlawful attacks on and collective punishment of the civilian population. The organization has called on the Office of the ICC Prosecutor to expedite its investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine and is campaigning for an immediate ceasefire. For the Hebrew translation of this press release, click here. INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY MIDDLE EAST MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA NEWS PRESS RELEASE WAR CRIMES AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY Related Content COUNTRY Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory NEWS New NATO defence commitments must not come at cost of human rights NEWS Gaza: Starvation or gunfire — this is not a humanitarian response NEWS DRC: Peace deal with Rwanda fails to address serious crimes committed in eastern DRC NEWS Gaza: Evidence points to Israel's continued use of starvation to inflict genocide against Palestinians Recently added Cambodia: Scamming crisis survivors must be protected amid police crackdown Ireland: Amnesty's head urges Irish government to press ahead with Occupied Territories Bill Angola: Authorities must res Peet and ensure the right to freedom of peaceful assembly Russia: Pro posed amendments to counter - extremism laws escalate assault on dissent EU-Israel: Refusal to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement is a `cruel and unlawful betrayal' DONATE TO PROTECT HUMAN RIGHTS Women's Day protest in Mexico Together we can fight for human rights everywhere. Your donation can transform the lives of millions. ABOUT US Contact Us How We're Run Modern Slavery Act Statement Finances RESOURCES Media Centre Human Rights Education Human Rights Courses Annual report archive GET INVOLVED Join Take Action Volunteer LATEST News Campaigns Research WORK WITH US If you are talented and passionate about human rights then Amnesty International wants to hear from you. Privacy Policy Accessibility Cookie Statement Permissions Refunds of Donations © 2025 Amnesty International FOLLOW US ON: Facdbe tr rarlikTalueVistialitikEdIn On Sun, Ju1 20, 2025 at 10:03 AM Martin Wasserman <c.eei,erlook@aol.com> wrote: Aram, If that's the definition of genocide, then Israel is clearly NOT committing genocide in Gaza. If Israel were trying to kill as many Gazans as possible, the death toll would be much, much higher than it is. They wouldn't allow any food or medicine in at all, and they wouldn't issue evacuation warnings before striking Hamas targets. The truth is, Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, but Hamas makes it very difficult by deliberately placing their command centers in civilian locations such as schools and hospitals. The only group that Israel wants to destroy is Hamas, which does have an explicit policy of genocide (by your definition) against Jews. Yes, the Gazans are suffering, but Hamas could end their suffering tomorrow if they wanted to. All they have to do is lay down their arms and release the hostages, and the war would be over immediately. But Hamas has no interest in ending the suffering of the Gazans. What they're actually calling for is an open-ended war of attrition against Israel, no matter what the cost to their own people. Martin Wasserman On Jul 18, 2025, at 8:26 PM, Aram James <abj Ddl @gmail.com> wrote: Genocide defined: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. "a campaign of genocide" On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 4:04 PM Martin Wasserman <deeierlook@aol.com> wrote: It appears that "genocide" can be defined in several different ways. Perhaps we should stop using that term altogether and stick to words that have clear and unambiguous meanings. On Jul 18, 2025, at 12:25 PM, Aram James <abjpol@gmail.com> wrote: I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But contrary to the cries of Israel's fiercest critics, the evidence did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide. By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August. At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a "huge price" for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas was operating, "into rubble," and he ac lled on "the residents of Gaza" to "leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere." Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember "what Amalek did to you," a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to "kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings" of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting "human animals" and, later, called for "total annihilation." Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on Xthat Israel's task must be "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth." Israel's actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one. This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Image People inspecting a huge pile of rubble. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend. *** The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." In determining what constitutes genocide, therefore, we must both establish intent and show that it is being carried out. In Israel's case, that intent has been publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. But intent can also be derived from a pattern of operations on the ground, and this pattern became clear by May 2024 — and has since become ever clearer — as the I.D.F. has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most genocide scholars are cautious about applying this term to contemporary events, precisely because of the tendency, since it was coined by the Jewish -Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, to attribute it to any case of massacre or inhumanity. Indeed, some argue that the categorization should be entirely discarded, because it often serves more to express outrage than to identify a particular crime. Yet as Mr. Lemkin recognized, and as the United Nations later agreed, it is crucial to be able to distinguish the attempt to destroy a particular group of people from other crimes under international law, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is because, while other crimes entail indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians as individuals, genocide denotes the killing of people as members of a group, geared at irreparably destroying the group itself so that it would never be able to reconstitute itself as a political, social or cultural entity. And, as the international community signaled by adopting the convention, it is incumbent upon all signatory states to prevent such an attempt, to do all they can to stop it while it is occurring and to subsequently punish those who were engaged in this crime of crimes — even if it occurred within the borders of a sovereign state. The designation has major political, legal and moral ramifications. Nations, politicians and military personnel suspected of, indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide are seen as beyond the pale of humanity and may compromise or lose their right to remain members of the international community. A finding by the International Court of Justice that a particular state is engaged in genocide, especially if enforced by the U.N. Security Council, can lead to severe sanctions. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox. Politicians or generals indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide or other breaches of international humanitarian law by the International Criminal Court can face arrest outside of their country. And a society that condones and is complicit in genocide, whatever the stand of its individual citizens may be, will carry this mark of Cain long after the fires of hatred and violence are put out. *** Israel has denied all allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The I.D.F. says it investigates reports of crimes, although it has rarely made its findings public, and when breaches of discipline or protocol are acknowledged, it has generally meted out light reprimands to its personnel. Israeli military and political leaders repeatedly describe the I.D.F. as acting lawfully, say they issue warnings to civilian populations to evacuate sites about to be attacked and blame Hamas for using civilians as human shields. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In fact, the systematic destruction in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure — government buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas, and parks — reflects a policy aimed at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely. According to a recent investigation by Haaretz, an estimated 174,000 buildings have been destroyed or damaged, accounting for up to 70 percent of all structures in the Strip. So far, more than 58,000 people have been killed, according to Gazan health authorities, including more than 17,000 children, who make up nearly a third of the total fatality count. More than 870 of those children were less than a year old. More than 2,000 families have been wiped out, the health authorities said. In addition, 5,600 families now count only one survivor. At least 10,000 people are believed to still be buried under the ruins of their homes. More than 138,000 have been wounded and maimed. Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world. An entire generation of children subjected to ongoing military attacks, loss of parents and long- term malnutrition will suffer severe physical and mental repercussions for the rest of their lives. Untold additional thousands of chronically ill persons have had little access to hospital care. The horror of what has been happening in Gaza is still described by most observers as war. But this is a misnomer. For the last year, the I.D.F. has not been fighting an organized military body. The version of Hamas that planned and carried out the attacks on Oct. 7 has been destroyed, though the weakened group continues to fight Israeli forces and retains control over the population in areas not held by the Israeli Army. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Today the I.D.F. is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and ethnic cleansing. That's how Mr. Netanyahu's own former chief of staff and minister of defense, the hard-liner Moshe Yaalon, in November described on Israel's Democrat TV and in subsequent articlesand interviews the attempt to clear northern Gaza of its population. Image Credit...Mahmoud Issa/Reuters On Jan. 19, under pressure from Donald Trump, who was a day away from resuming the presidency, a cease- A man in shadow sorts through the rubble of a home. fire went into effect, facilitating the exchange of hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. But after Israel's breaking of the cease-fire on March 18, the I.D.F. has been executing a well -publicized plan to concentrate the entire Gazan population in a quarter of the territory in three zones: Gaza City, the central refugee camps and the Mawasi coastline in the Strip's southwestern edge. Using large numbers of bulldozers and huge aerial bombs supplied by the United States, the military appears to be trying to demolish every remaining structure and establish control over the other three- quarters of the territory. This is also being facilitated by a nthat provides — intermittently — limited aid supplies at a few distribution points guarded by the Israeli military, drawing people to the south. Many Gazans are killed in a desperate attempt to obtain food, and the starvation crisis deepens. On July 7, Defense Minister Israel Katz said the I.D.F. would build a "humanitarian city" over the ruins of Rafah to initially accommodate 6o0,000 Palestinians from the Mawasi area, who would be provisioned by international bodies and not allowed to leave. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT *** Some might describe this campaign as ethnic cleansing, not genocide. But there is a link between the crimes. When an ethnic group has nowhere to go and is constantly displaced from one so-called safe zone to another, relentlessly bombed and starved, ethnic cleansing can morph into genocide. This was the case in several well-known genocides of the loth century, such as that of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, now Namibia, that began in 1904; the Armenians in World War I; and, indeed, even in the Holocaust, which began with the German attempt to expel the Jews and ended up with their murder. To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust — and no institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating it — have issued warnings that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This silence has made a mockery of the slogan "Never again," transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one's own past victimhood. This is another of the many incalculable costs of the current catastrophe. As Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza and is exercising increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the moral and historical credit that the Jewish state has drawn on until now is running out. Israel, created in the wake of the Holocaust as the answer to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, has always insisted that any threat to its security must be seen as potentially leading to another Auschwitz. This provides Israel with license to portray those it perceives as its enemies as Nazis — a term usedrepeatedly by Israeli media figures to depict Hamas and, by extension, all Gazans, based on the popular assertion that none of them are "uninvolved," not even the infants, who would grow up to be militants. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT This is not a new phenomenon. As early as Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasir Arafat, then hunkered down in Beirut, to Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker. This time, the analogy is being used in connection with a policy aimed at uprooting and removing the entire population of Gaza. The daily scenes of horror in Gaza, from which the Israeli public is shielded by its own media's self - censorship, expose the lies of Israeli propaganda that this is a war of defense against a Nazi -like enemy. One shudders when Israeli spokespeople shamelessly utter the hollow slogan of the I.D.F. being the "most moral army in the world." Some European nations, such as France, Britain and Germany, as well as Canada, have feebly protested Israeli actions, especially since it breached the cease- fire in March. But they have neither suspended arms shipments nor taken many concrete and meaningful economic or political steps that might deter Mr. Netanyahu's government. For a while, the United States government seemed to have lost interest in Gaza, with President Trump initially announcing in February that the United States would take over Gaza, promising to turn it into "the Riviera of the Middle East," and then letting Israel get on with the Strip's destruction and turning his attention to Iran. At the moment, one can only hope that Mr. Trump will again pressure a reluctant Mr. Netanyahu to at least reach a new cease-fire and put an end to the relentless killing. *** How will Israel's future be affected by the inevitable demolition of its incontestable morality, derived from its birth in the ashes of the Holocaust? ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Israel's political leadership and its citizenry will have to decide. There seems to be little domestic pressure for the urgently needed change of paradigm: the recognition that there is no solution to this conflict other than an Israeli -Palestinian agreement to share the land under whatever parameters the two sides agree on, be it two states, one state or a confederation. Robust external pressure from the country's allies also appears unlikely. I am deeply worried that Israel will persist on its disastrous course, remaking itself, perhaps irreversibly, into a full-blown authoritarian apartheid state. Such states, as history has taught us, do not last. Another question arises: What consequences will Israel's moral reversal have for the culture of Holocaust commemoration, and the politics of memory, education and scholarship, when so many of its intellectual and administrative leaders have up to now refused to face up to their responsibility to denounce inhumanity and genocide wherever they occur? Those engaged in the worldwide culture of commemoration and remembrance built around the Holocaust will have to confront a moral reckoning. The wider community of genocide scholars — those engaged in the study of comparative genocide or of any one of the many other genocides that have marred human history — is now edging ever closer toward a consensus over describing events in Gaza as a genocide. In November, a little more than a year into the war, the Israeli genocide scholar Shmuel Lederman 'off ined the growing chorus of opinion that Israel was engaged in genocidal actions. The Canadian international lawyer William Schabas came to the same conclusion last year and has recently described Israel's military campaign in Gaza as "absolutely" a genocide. Other genocide experts, such as Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the British specialist Martin Shaw (who has also said that the Hamas attack was genocidal), have reached the same conclusion, while the Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses of the City University of New York described these events in the Dutch publication NRC as a "mix of genocidal and military logic." In the same article, Ugur Umit Ungor, a professor at the Amsterdam -based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said there are probably scholars who still do not think it's genocide, but "I don't know them." ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most Holocaust scholars I know don't hold, or at least publicly express, this view. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Israeli Raz Segal, program director of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem historians Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman, the majority of academics engaged with the history of the Nazi genocide of the Jews have stayed remarkably silent, while some have openly denied Israel's crimes in Gaza, or accused their more critical colleagues of incendiary speech, wild exaggeration, well poisoning and antisemitism. In December the Holocaust scholar Norman J.W. Goda opined that "genocide charges like this have long been used as a fig leaf for broader challenges to Israel's legitimacy," expressing his worry that "they have cheapened the gravity of the word genocide itself." This "genocide libel," as Dr. Goda referred to it in an essay, "deploys a range of antisemitic tropes," including "the coupling of the genocide charge with the deliberate killing of children, images of whom are ubiquitous on NGO, social media, and other platforms that charge Israel with genocide." In other words, showing images of Palestinian children ripped apart by U.S.-made bombs launched by Israeli pilots is, in this view, an antisemitic act. Most recently, Dr. Goda and a respected historian of Europe, Jeffrey Herf, wrotein The Washington Post that "the genocide accusation hurled against Israel draws on deep wells of fear and hatred" found in "radical interpretations of both Christianity and Islam." It "has shifted opprobrium from Jews as a religious/ethnic group to the state of Israel, which it depicts as inherently evil." *** What are the ramifications of this rift between genocide scholars and Holocaust historians? This is not merely a squabble within academe. The memory culture created in recent decades around the Holocaust encompasses much more than the genocide of the Jews. It has come to play a crucial role in politics, education and identity. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Museums dedicated to the Holocaust have served as models for representations of other genocides around the world. Insistence that the lessons of the Holocaust demand the promotion of tolerance, diversity, antiracism and support for migrants and refugees, not to mention human rights and international humanitarian law, is rooted in an understanding of the universal implications of this crime in the heart of Western civilization at the peak of modernity. Discrediting genocide scholars who call out Israel's genocide in Gaza as antisemitic threatens to erode the foundation of genocide studies: the ongoing need to define, prevent, punish and reconstruct the history of genocide. Suggesting that this endeavor is motivated instead by malign interests and sentiments — that it is driven by the very hatred and prejudice that was at the root of the Holocaust — is not only morally scandalous, it provides an opening for a politics of denialism and impunity as well. By the same token, when those who have dedicated their careers to teaching and commemorating the Holocaust insist on ignoring or denying Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza, they threaten to undermine everything that Holocaust scholarship and commemoration have stood for in the past several decades. That is, the dignity of every human being, respect for the rule of law and the urgent need never to let inhumanity take over the hearts of people and steer the actions of nations in the name of security, national interest and sheer vengeance. Image People at a beach and in the water as the sun sets. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times What I fear is that in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide, it will no longer be possible to continue teaching and researching the Holocaust in the same manner we did before. Because the Holocaust has been so relentlessly invoked by the state of Israel and its defenders as a cover-up for the crimes of the I.D.F., the -study -and remembrance of the Holocaust -could lose its claim to be concerned with universal justice and retreat into the same ethnic ghetto in which it began its life at the end of World War II — as a marginalized preoccupation by the remnants of a marginalized people, an ethnically specific event, before it succeeded, decades later, to find its rightful place as a lesson and a warning for humanity as a whole. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Just as worrisome is the prospect that the study of genocide as a whole will not survive the accusations of antisemitism, leaving us without the crucial community of scholars and international jurists to stand in the breach at a time when the rise of intolerance, racial hatred, populism and authoritarianism is threatening the values that were at the core of these scholarly, cultural and political endeavors of the loth century. Perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name. Israel will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity. That, despite all the horrific suffering we are currently watching, is a valuable thing, and may, in the long run, help Israel face the future in a healthier, more rational and less fearful and violent manner. This will do nothing to compensate for the staggering amount of death and suffering of Palestinians. But an Israel liberated from the overwhelming burden of the Holocaust may finally come to terms with the inescapable need for its seven million Jewish citizens to share the land with the seven million Palestinians living in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in peace, equality and dignity. That will be the only just reckoning. From: Aram James To: Vicki Veenker Cc: Jessica Speiser. Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 2E; Lauina, Ec; Reckdahl, Keith; Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman@assembly.ca.cov; Julie Lythcott-Haims; Lu, George; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq; Zelkha. Mila; planning.commission@citvofoaloalto.0rq; ParkRec Commission; Gennady Sheyner; Dave Price; Emily Mibach; Jay Boyarsky; Jeff Rosen; Baker Rob; Roberta Ahlcuist; board@vallevwater.orq; board@pausc.orq; BoardOperations; boarcfeedback@smcgov.orq; fames pitkin; Binder. Andrew; Sean Allen; Carla Torres; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; city.council@menlopark.gov; CiyCouncil; Mark Turner; Michelle Bigelow; GRP-City Council; Council, City; ecitor@almanacnews.com; Diana Diamond; EPA Today; Damon Silver; Don Austin; Yolanda Conaway; Steve Wacstaffe; Jeff Conrad; Human Relations Commission; Bill Newell; Raymond Goins; Figueroa, Eric; h.etzko@gmail.com; Doug Minkler; Rowena Chiu; Lotus Fong; Linda Jolley; Friends of Cubberley; Palo Alto Free Press; Holman, Karen (external); Tom DuBois; Greg Tanaka; Bracen Cartwright; Templeton, Cari; Cribbs, Anne; Anna Griffin; Angel, David; David Piper; Gerry Gras Subject: Re: Watch "Gabor Mate, Chris Hedges & Aaron Mate on "Palestine: The Moral Issue of Our Time"" on YouTube Date: Sunday, July 20, 2025 10:22:28 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Subject: Presentation and Recommended Reading List July 20, 2025 Hi Vicki, I believe you will find value in the presentation by these two incredibly knowledgeable and honorable individuals. I apologize for not having provided you with my recommended reading list regarding the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Given recent events, I plan to share my reading list with you when the council reconvenes in August. Best regards, Aram On Sat, Jul 19, 2025, at 10:29 PM, Aram James <abjpdl@gmail.com> wrote: htt Ds://youtu.be/fn149IWc IcY?si=W 8bBD4vdXNQ3 QB1B From: Martin Wasserman To: Aram James Cc: Jeff Rosen; Jav Bovarskv; Veenker, Vicki; h.etzko(algmail.com; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Rai Javacev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneicer, James; Bincer, Andrew; Gardener, Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanda Conaway; yolanda; Don Austin; jgreerKadailynewsgroup.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonaa; roberta ahlguist; Baker, Rob; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlcuist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Freddie.Quintana(alsen.ca.gov; Jeff Conrad; Burt, Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District9@sanjoseca.gov; District4@sanjoseca.gov; District5@sanjoseca.gov; District2@sanjoseca.gov; EPA Today; Gennadv Shevner; Council, City; citv.council@menlopark.00v; Nash, Betsy; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero@cityofepa.orq; Cribbs, Anne; <michael.gennaco@oirgroup.com>; Stump, Molly; board@pausd.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Rodriquez, Miguel; Cait James; Tim James; Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman@assembly.ca.gov; Zelkha, Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enbera, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Tanaka. Greg; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberley; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq; Greg Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauinq; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee; Mark Turner; City Attorney; CityCouncil; Michelle Bigelow; Sean Allen; Seher Awan; Pat M; Carla Torres; David Piper Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Sunday, July 20, 2025 10:07:18 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Aram, If that's the definition of genocide, then Israel is clearly NOT committing genocide in Gaza. If Israel were trying to kill as many Gazans as possible, the death toll would be much, much higher than it is. They wouldn't allow any food or medicine in at all, and they wouldn't issue evacuation warnings before striking Hamas targets. The truth is, Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, but Hamas makes it very difficult by deliberately placing their command centers in civilian locations such as schools and hospitals. The only group that Israel wants to destroy is Hamas, which does have an explicit policy of genocide (by your definition) against Jews. Yes, the Gazans are suffering, but Hamas could end their suffering tomorrow if they wanted to. All they have to do is lay down their arms and release the hostages, and the war would be over immediately. But Hamas has no interest in ending the suffering of the Gazans. What they're actually calling for is an open-ended war of attrition against Israel, no matter what the cost to their own people. Martin Wasserman On Jul 18, 2025, at 8:26 PM, Aram James <abjpdl@gmail.com> wrote: Genocide defined: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. "a campaign of genocide" On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 4:04 PM Martin Wasserman <deeNrlook@aol.com> wrote: It appears that "genocide" can be defined in several different ways. Perhaps we should stop using that term altogether and stick to words that have clear and unambiguous meanings. On Jul 18, 2025, at 12:25 PM, Aram James <abj 3d1@gmail.com> wrote: I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But contrary to the cries of Israel's fiercest critics, the evidence did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide. By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August. At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a "huge price" for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas was operating, "into rubble," and he called on "the residents of Gaza" to "leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere." Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember "what Amalek did to you," a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to "kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings" of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting "human animals" and, later, called for "total annihilation." Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on Xthat Israel's task must be "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth." Israel's actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one. This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Image People inspecting a huge pile of rubble. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend. *** The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." In determining what constitutes genocide, therefore, we must both establish intent and show that it is being carried out. In Israel's case, that intent has been publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. But intent can also be derived from a pattern of operations on the ground, and this pattern became clear by May 2024 — and has since become ever clearer — as the I.D.F. has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most genocide scholars are cautious about applying this term to contemporary events, precisely because of the tendency, since it was coined by the Jewish -Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, to attribute it to any case of massacre or inhumanity. Indeed, some argue that the categorization should be entirely discarded, because it often serves more to express outrage than to identify a particular crime. Yet as Mr. Lemkin recognized, and as the United Nations later agreed, it is crucial to be able to distinguish the attempt to destroy a particular group of people from other crimes under international law, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is because, while other crimes entail indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians as individuals, genocide denotes the killing of people as members of a group, geared at irreparably destroying the group itself so that it would never be able to reconstitute itself as a political, social or cultural entity. And, as the international community signaled by adopting the convention, it is incumbent upon all signatory states to prevent such an attempt, to do all they can to stop it while it is occurring and to subsequently punish those who were engaged in this crime of crimes — even if it occurred within the borders of a sovereign state. The designation has major political, legal and moral ramifications. Nations, politicians and military personnel suspected of, indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide are seen as beyond the pale of humanity and may compromise or lose their right to remain members of the international community. A finding by the International Court of Justice that a particular state is engaged in genocide, especially if enforced by the U.N. Security Council, can lead to severe sanctions. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox. Politicians or generals indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide or other breaches of international humanitarian law by the International Criminal Court can face arrest outside of their country. And a society that condones and is complicit in genocide, whatever the stand of its individual citizens may be, will carry this mark of Cain long after the fires of hatred and violence are put out. *** Israel has denied all allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The I.D.F. says it investigates reports of crimes, although it has rarely made its findings public, and when breaches of discipline or protocol are acknowledged, it has generally meted out light reprimands to its personnel. Israeli military and political leaders repeatedly describe the I.D.F. as acting lawfully, say they issue warnings to civilian populations to evacuate sites about to be attacked and blame Hamas for using civilians as human shields. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In fact, the systematic destruction in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure — government buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas, and parks — reflects a policy aimed at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely. According to a recent investigation by Haaretz, an estimated 174,000 buildings have been destroyed or damaged, accounting for up to 70 percent of all structures in the Strip. So far, more than 58,000 people have been killed, according to Gazan health authorities, including more than 17,000 children, who make up nearly a third of the total fatality count. More than 870 of those children were less than a year old. More than 2,000 families have been wiped out, the health authorities said. In addition, 5,600 families now count only one survivor. At least 10,000 people are believed to still be buried under the ruins of their homes. More than 138,000 have been wounded and maimed. Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world. An entire generation of children subjected to ongoing military attacks, loss of parents and long-term malnutrition will suffer severe physical and mental repercussions for the rest of their lives. Untold additional thousands of chronically ill persons have had little access to hospital care. The horror of what has been happening in Gaza is still described by most observers as war. But this is a misnomer. For the last year, the I.D.F. has not been fighting an organized military body. The version of Hamas that planned and carried out the attacks on Oct. 7 has been destroyed, though the weakened group continues to fight Israeli forces and retains control over the population in areas not held by the Israeli Army. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Today the I.D.F. is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and ethnic cleansing. That's how Mr. Netanyahu's own former chief of staff and minister of defense, the hard-liner Moshe Yaalon, in November described on Israel's Democrat TV and in subsequent articlesand interviews the attempt to clear northern Gaza of its population. Image A man in shadow sorts through the rubble of a home. Credit...Mahmoud Issa/Reuters On Jan. 19, under pressure from Donald Trump, who was a day away from resuming the presidency, a cease- fire went into effect, facilitating the exchange of hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. But after Israel's breaking of the cease-fire on March 18, the I.D.F. has been executing a well -publicized plan to concentrate the entire Gazan population in a quarter of the territory in three zones: Gaza City, the central refugee camps and the Mawasi coastline in the Strip's southwestern edge. Using large numbers of bulldozers and huge aerial bombs supplied by the United States, the military appears to be trying to demolish every remaining structure and establish control over the other three- quarters of the territory. This is also being facilitated by a planthat provides — intermittently — limited aid supplies at a few distribution points guarded by the Israeli military, drawing people to the south. Many Gazans are killed in a desperate attempt to obtain food, and the starvation crisis deepens. On July 7, Defense Minister Israel Katz said the I.D.F. would build a "humanitarian city" over the ruins of Rafah to initially accommodate 600,000 Palestinians from the Mawasi area, who would be provisioned by international bodies and not allowed to leave. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT *** Some might describe this campaign as ethnic cleansing, not genocide. But there is a link between the crimes. When an ethnic group has nowhere to go and is constantly displaced from one so-called safe zone to another, relentlessly bombed and starved, ethnic cleansing can morph into genocide. This was the case in several well-known genocides of the loth century, such as that of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, now Namibia, that began in 1904; the Armenians in World War I; and, indeed, even in the Holocaust, which began with the German attempt to expel the Jews and ended up with their murder. To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust — and no institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating it — have issued warnings that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This silence has made a mockery of the slogan "Never again," transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one's own past victimhood. This is another of the many incalculable costs of the current catastrophe. As Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza and is exercising increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the moral and historical credit that the Jewish state has drawn on until now is running out. Israel, created in the wake of the Holocaust as the answer to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, has always insisted that any threat to its security must be seen as potentially leading to another Auschwitz. This provides Israel with license to portray those it perceives as its enemies as Nazis — a term usedrepeatedly by Israeli media figures to depict Hamas and, by extension, all Gazans, based on the popular assertion that none of them are "uninvolved," not even the infants, who would grow up to be militants. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT This is not a new phenomenon. As early as Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasir Arafat, then hunkered down in Beirut, to Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker. This time, the analogy is being used in connection with a policy aimed at uprooting and removing the entire population of Gaza. The daily scenes of horror in Gaza, from which the Israeli public is shielded by its own media's self - censorship, expose the lies of Israeli propaganda that this is a war of defense against a Nazi -like enemy. One shudders when Israeli spokespeople shamelessly utter the hollow slogan of the I.D.F. being the "most moral army in the world." Some European nations, such as France, Britain and Germany, as well as Canada, have feebly protested Israeli actions, especially since it breached the cease- fire in March. But they have neither suspended arms shipments nor taken many concrete and meaningful economic or political steps that might deter Mr. Netanyahu's government. For a while, the United States government seemed to have lost interest in Gaza, with President Trump initially announcing in February that the United States would take over Gaza, promising to turn it into "the Riviera of the Middle East," and then letting Israel get on with the Strip's destruction and turning his attention to Iran. At the moment, one can only hope that Mr. Trump will again pressure a reluctant Mr. Netanyahu to at least reach a new cease-fire and put an end to the relentless killing. *** How will Israel's future be affected by the inevitable demolition of its incontestable morality, derived from its birth in the ashes of the Holocaust? ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Israel's political leadership and its citizenry will have to decide. There seems to be little domestic pressure for the urgently needed change of paradigm: the recognition that there is no solution to this conflict other than an Israeli -Palestinian agreement to share the land under whatever parameters the two sides agree on, be it two states, one state or a confederation. Robust external pressure from the country's allies also appears unlikely. I am deeply worried that Israel will persist on its disastrous course, remaking itself, perhaps irreversibly, into a full-blown authoritarian apartheid state. Such states, as history has taught us, do not last. Another question arises: What consequences will Israel's moral reversal have for the culture of Holocaust commemoration, and the politics of memory, education and scholarship, when so many of its intellectual and administrative leaders have up to now refused to face up to their responsibility to denounce inhumanity and genocide wherever they occur? Those engaged in the worldwide culture of commemoration and remembrance built around the Holocaust will have to confront a moral reckoning. The wider community of genocide scholars — those engaged in the study of comparative genocide or of any one of the many other genocides that have marred human history — is now edging ever closer toward a consensus over describing events in Gaza as a genocide. In November, a little more than a year into the war, the Israeli genocide scholar Shmuel Lederman joined the growing chorus of opinion that Israel was engaged in genocidal actions. The Canadian international lawyer William Schabas came to the same conclusion last year and has recently described Israel's military campaign in Gaza as "absolutely" a genocide. Other genocide experts, such as Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the British specialist Martin Shaw (who has also said that the Hamas attack was genocidal), have reached the same conclusion, while the Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses of the City University of New York described these events in the Dutch publication NRC as a "mix of genocidal and military logic." In the same article, Ugur emit Unger, a professor at the Amsterdam -based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said there are probably scholars who still do not think it's genocide, but "I don't know them." ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most Holocaust scholars I know don't hold, or at least publicly express, this view. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Israeli Raz Segal, program director of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem historians Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman, the majority of academics engaged with the history of the Nazi genocide of the Jews have stayed remarkably silent, while some have openly denied Israel's crimes in Gaza, or accused their more critical colleagues of incendiary speech, wild exaggeration, well poisoning and antisemitism. In December the Holocaust scholar Norman J.W. Goda opined that "genocide charges like this have long been used as a fig leaf for broader challenges to Israel's legitimacy," expressing his worry that "they have cheapened the gravity of the word genocide itself." This "genocide libel," as Dr. Goda referred to it in an essay, "deploys a range of antisemitic tropes," including "the coupling of the genocide charge with the deliberate killing of children, images of whom are ubiquitous on NGO, social media, and other platforms that charge Israel with genocide." In other words, showing images of Palestinian children ripped apart by U.S.-made bombs launched by Israeli pilots is, in this view, an antisemitic act. Most recently, Dr. Goda and a respected historian of Europe, Jeffrey Herf, wrotein The Washington Post that "the genocide accusation hurled against Israel draws on deep wells of fear and hatred" found in "radical interpretations of both Christianity and Islam." It "has shifted opprobrium from Jews as a religious/ethnic group to the state of Israel, which it depicts as inherently evil." *** What are the ramifications of this rift between genocide scholars and Holocaust historians? This is not merely a squabble within academe. The memory culture created in recent decades around the Holocaust encompasses much more than the genocide of the Jews. It has come to play a crucial role in politics, education and identity. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Museums dedicated to the Holocaust have served as models for representations of other genocides around the world. Insistence that the lessons of the Holocaust demand the promotion of tolerance, diversity, antiracism and support for migrants and refugees, not to mention human rights and international humanitarian law, is rooted in an understanding of the universal implications of this crime in the heart of Western civilization at the peak of modernity. Discrediting genocide scholars who call out Israel's genocide in Gaza as antisemitic threatens to erode the foundation of genocide studies: the ongoing need to define, prevent, punish and reconstruct the history of genocide. Suggesting that this endeavor is motivated instead by malign interests and sentiments — that it is driven by the very hatred and prejudice that was at the root of the Holocaust — is not only morally scandalous, it provides an opening for a politics of denialism and impunity as well. By the same token, when those who have dedicated their careers to teaching and commemorating the Holocaust insist on ignoring or denying Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza, they threaten to undermine everything that Holocaust scholarship and commemoration have stood for in the past several decades. That is, the dignity of every human being, respect for the rule of law and the urgent need never to let inhumanity take over the hearts of people and steer the actions of nations in the name of security, national interest and sheer vengeance. Ima • e eople at a beach and in the water as the sun sets. redit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times What I fear is that in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide, it will no longer be possible to continue teaching and researching the Holocaust in the same manner we did before. Because the Holocaust has been so relentlessly invoked by the state of Israel and its defenders as a cover-up for the crimes of the I.D.F., the study -and remembrance of the Holocaust could lose its claim to be concerned with universal justice and retreat into the same ethnic ghetto in which it began its life at the end of World War II — as a marginalized preoccupation by the remnants of a marginalized people, an ethnically specific event, before it succeeded, decades later, to find its rightful place as a lesson and a warning for humanity as a whole. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Just as worrisome is the prospect that the study of genocide as a whole will not survive the accusations of antisemitism, leaving us without the crucial community of scholars and international jurists to stand in the breach at a time when the rise of intolerance, racial hatred, populism and authoritarianism is threatening the values that were at the core of these scholarly, cultural and political endeavors of the loth century. Perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name. Israel will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity. That, despite all the horrific suffering we are currently watching, is a valuable thing, and may, in the long run, help Israel face the future in a healthier, more rational and less fearful and violent manner. This will do nothing to compensate for the staggering amount of death and suffering of Palestinians. But an Israel liberated from the overwhelming burden of the Holocaust may finally come to terms with the inescapable need for its seven million Jewish citizens to share the land with the seven million Palestinians living in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in peace, equality and dignity. That will be the only just reckoning. From: Aram James To: Vicki Veenker; Raymond Goins; Gerry Gras; Gennady Sheyner; Human Relations Commission; EPA Today; Carla Torres; GRP-City Council; Liz Kniss; Gardener, Liz; Linda Jolley; h.etzko@gmail.com; Holman. Karen (externall; Tom DuBois; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Jasso, Tamara; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Diana Diamond; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District3@sanjoseca.gov; District9@sanjoseca.cov; District2@sanjoseca.gov; District4@sanjoseca.gov; districtl bos.sccgov.orq; Friends of Cubberley; Raj Jayadev; rabrica@cityofepa.orq; cromero@cityofepa.orq; Salem Ajluni; Gennadv Shevner; DuJuan Green; dennis burns; Dennis Upton Cc: Reckdahl, Keith; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Ed Lauinq; Lauinq, Ec.; editor@almanacnews.com; Supervisor Susan Ellenberg; Supervisor Otto Lee; Dave Price; J Boyarsky; board@valleywater.orq; BoardOperations; boardfeedback@smcgov.orq; board@pausd.orq; Mark Turner; CityCouncil; Michelle Bigelow; Damon Silver; Rodriquez, Miguel; Foley, Michael; Bryan Gobin; Burt Patrick; Patricia.Guerrero@jud.ca.gov; frances.Rothschild@jud.ca.gov; Sheree Roth; Emily Mibach; Lori Meyers; Figueroa, Eric; Henry Riggs; Zelkha, Mila; Doug Minkler; Dana St. George; gerald.engler@doi.ca.uov; Don Austin; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Lotus Fong.; Yolanda Conaway; Braden Cartwright; Bill Newell Subject: Watch "Gabor Mate, Chris Hedges & Aaron Mate on "Palestine: The Moral Issue of Our Time"" on YouTube Date: Saturday, July 19, 2025 10:30:07 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. https•//youtu. De/fn149IWc IcY? si=W 8bBD4vdXNQ3 QB 1B From: Larry Y To: Counci . City Subject: Alma is becoming a dumping ground Date: Saturday, July 19, 2025 5:17:11 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. This message needs your attention • This is a personal email address. • This is their first email to your company. Mark Safe Report Powered by Mimecast Recently there's been an accumulation of abandoned sofas, mattresses and other junk along Alma from the 1500 to the 4100 block. Below are a few pictures. I made a couple requests on Palo Alto 311 to clean them up but they're not keeping up. A couple of "No Dumping" signs have appeared but people are ignoring them. I think once someone sees one they're inspired to also dump. What can be done to stop this cycle? Thanks. _= Larry Yang, 2888 Ramona St. • • •am - r • To a . it • • s. 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I:M !• S -!a•a1 i•.5 J,.. ti • r i1 .4.'; • 1.11 '' v.t .. yi , Y, �•y)) Mar • iv: i.slivilf . • • • • • • • • pa • . % - sy, • - • • • I di • 4116 se • ass 4 • 40 • I NIsiga • • I. Tiara • t. • • 1 di o ld 11 4 • • • ire II • • 4 • • • JP • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Yea' 41 St 'P ak • • • .4 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • . 11 • 100D. •,42 Pr I From: mingxia zhanq To: Council, City Subject: oppose #3,#4 tennis courts convert to 8 pickleball courts in Mitchell Park Date: Saturday, July 19, 2025 4:52:33 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. On Tuesday night, June 24, only the president of the Palo Alto Pickleball Club (PAPC) and one other member gave a presentation at the Parks & Recreation Commission meeting. I spoke with them afterward. 1. Membership Claims and Overcrowding They stated that PAPC has 1,500 members, with 900 allegedly being Palo Alto residents. They emphasized how crowded the courts are -60 people playing while more than 100 are waiting. According to them, every court has about 8 people waiting to play. They also pointed out that the Palo Alto Tennis Club only has 125 members, yet tennis uses 240 times more court space than pickleball. They claimed this was unfair. I told them that the Palo Alto Pickleball Club should really be called the Bay Area Pickleball Club, because their members come from all over the Bay Area. I don't believe their claim that 900 members are Palo Alto residents and only 600 are from out of town. In 2022, in order to get more courts, the PAPC club aske no residents delay to register and residents register to try to make the resident member to reach half to show at the metting. now, more players from other cities come to Mitchell Park than local residents. Many Palo Alto members have even reduced their play time or quit due to overcrowding. 2. Proposal to Convert Tennis Courts They repeated how overcrowded the courts are and said that PAPC has over $10,000 available. They offered to pay the full cost to convert tennis courts #3 and #4 into 8 pickleball courts. However, Mitchell Park already has 15 permanent pickleball courts. If courts #3 and #4 are converted, it's likely they will continue pushing to convert courts #1 and #2 as well. That would bring the total number of courts to at least 30, effectively doubling the current number. This will attract even more players from other cities, making Mitchell Park even more crowded. Many Palo Alto players have already voiced concerns that expansion won't solve the overcrowding. Instead, PAPC and others should advocate for more courts in neighboring cities so players can play closer to where they live —helping to reduce the burden on Mitchell Park. 3. Lack of Courts in Nearby Cities Here's a comparison of permanent public pickleball courts in surrounding cities: Palo Alto: 15 (with a request to add 8 more) Mountain View: 2 sunnyvale 0 Los Altos: 0 Santa Clara: 0 East Palo Alto: 0 Menlo Park: 4 Sunnyvale: 0 This imbalance is clear. Mitchell Park should not be the default location for the entire Bay Area. 4. Turning Mitchell Park into a Regional Center The PAPC representatives said they want to make Mitchell Park the most popular pickleball destination in the Bay Area, which would bring more people —and business —to Palo Alto. But Mitchell Park is a community park, not a commercial hub. It exists to serve local residents, not to become a regional attraction. If they truly want to promote business, they should request new courts in downtown Palo Alto or Mountain View —not in a neighborhood park. 5. Noise, Parking and Traffic Concerns They claimed that parking and traffic issues are caused not by PAPC, but by the Magic Bridge Playground and soccer games. They also said they plan to negotiate with nearby businesses to expand parking at Mitchell Park. I responded that the Magic Bridge Playground was built for local families, but they argued that families from all over the Bay Area come there too. I pointed out that a Magic Bridge was also built in Mountain View. Instead of relying on Palo Alto, why haven't these seven nearby cities —combined —built more courts? Palo Alto already contributes 15 courts, while others have done little or nothing. 6. Personal Exchange They asked me if I was the person who posted on Nextdoor opposing the expansion. I said yes. They asked where I lived, and when I told them, they said, "You can walk to Mitchell Park —why do you complain about traffic and parking?" They argued they were helping the community and that if I opposed the expansion, I was "punishing" it. From: mingxia zhanq To: Council, City Subject: Fw: oppose to concert #3,#4 tennis courts to pickleball courts in Mitchell park Date: Saturday, July 19, 2025 4:43:03 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. This message needs your attention • This is a personal email address. Mark Safe Report Powered by Mimecast oppose convert #3,#4 tennis courts to pickleball courts in Mitchell Park I recently spoke with a friend who is a current member of the Palo Alto Pickleball Club (PAPC). He advised me not to oppose the proposed expansion of pickleball courts at Mitchell Park. According to him, tennis courts #3 and #4 see little use, and PAPC plans to convert those into dedicated pickleball courts. He also mentioned a longer -term goal of potentially converting courts #1 and #2 — all of which are located next to the library. He argued that while only a small number of tennis players currently use these courts, there are more than 100 pickleball players regularly waiting to play. In his view, this imbalance is unfair to the pickleball community. PAPC ultimately envisions taking over all the tennis courts at Mitchell Park and expanding the parking lot to transform the area into the premier pickleball center in the Bay Area. I asked him one question: if surrounding cities aren't building enough courts — Mountain View has only two, Menlo Park has four, and cities like Los Altos, Santa Clara, Campbell, Sunnyvale, and East Palo Alto have none — why should Palo Alto bear the burden? Mitchell Park already has 15 courts. If the expansion proceeds as planned, that number could grow to 30. That means 120 players could be on the courts at once — with more than 240 others still waiting to play. As a result, players from all over the region are flocking to Mitchell Park, displacing local residents, contributing to increased traffic, parking congestion, and noise in the area. He admitted that PAPC has tried to secure court space in other towns, but the opposition there has been strong. To work around this, PAPC often forms or partners with "local" clubs — such as the Mountain View Pickleball Club — to advocate for new facilities. So far, none of those efforts have succeeded. He said that in each case, once a park is proposed for pickleball expansion, local residents show up in force to oppose it at public meetings. When one proposal fails, they try a different park, only to face the same community resistance. He has attended several of those meetings himself and said it's been extremely difficult to gain approval. He concluded by saying that expanding at Mitchell Park remains the easiest path forward for PAPC — largely because, so far, there hasn't been significant local opposition voiced at public meetings regarding noise, traffic, or parking concerns. This situation is becoming increasingly ridiculous. One Palo Alto resident once asked a visiting player, "There are shared courts in your own town —why do you always come all the way to Palo Alto to play?" The player responded, "Because the people here are nice." Think about that. It's not that there are no courts elsewhere —it's that Palo Alto is easy to access, has better facilities, and has a welcoming community. But instead of building that same environment in their own cities, these players choose to crowd a park funded by Palo Alto taxpayers —and then ask us to expand even more, even at the cost of shrinking playgrounds or adding parking lots. Being "nice" doesn't mean being taken advantage of. It's time to push back and call for regional responsibility, not just local sacrifice. From: Aram James To: Binder, Andrew Cc: Reifschneider James; ames Ditkin; Perron, Zachary; Wagner, April; Gardener, Liz; Dave Price; Gennady Sheyner; Council, City Subject: Request to reschedule meeting Date: Saturday, July 19, 2025 4:13:13 PM Attachments: Untitled-design-10-1200x630.Dnq CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. FYI: Re request to Morgan Hill Mayor Mark Turner Subject: Addressing Ongoing Concerns Regarding Mayor Turner Dear Mayor, I appreciate the opportunity to address the conclusions drawn from the independent investigation regarding the allegations made by Mayor Pro Tem Yvonne Martinez Beltran. While the investigation found no credible evidence of physical assault or retaliation, it is essential to clarify the definition of battery under California law, which states that battery is the willful and unlawful use of force or violence upon the person of another. Even minor physical contact can qualify as battery if it is unwanted and done without consent. The investigation's report acknowledges that you did touch Martinez Beltran during the February 7 meeting. Importantly, prior to this contact, you stated to her, "you need to get in line." This comment, coupled with the physical touch, raises significant concerns about the context in which the contact occurred. Although the report concluded that the contact could not be proven to be aggressive or motivated by her gender or race, it is crucial to recognize that any unwanted physical contact — regardless of intent— still falls under the definition of battery. Key points from California law include: 1. Willful and Unlawful:The contact must be intentional and not accidental. Even if the touching was not intended to harm, it can still be considered unlawful if it was unwanted. 2. Force or Violence: Battery does not require significant harm; even a slight touch that is deemed offensive can be classified as battery. 3. On the Person of Another:The contact must occur directly on the victim's body or something intimately connected to them. 4. Unwanted: The contact must be unwelcome. If Martinez Beltran did not consent to the touch, it could be viewed as battery, irrespective of the intent behind it. For further reference, you can review the California Penal Code sections related to battery: - [California Penal Code Section 240 - Assault] (reaps://Wegiri o.iegisiaLffie.ca.gov/ acesicoues_displaySection? IawCode=PEN&sectionNum=240) - [California Penal Code Section 242 - Battery] (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection? IawCode=PEN&sectionNum=24?) - [California Penal Code Section 422 - Criminal Threats] (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection? IawCode=PEN&sectionNum=422) Additionally, California workplace violence laws and standards emphasize the importance of maintaining a safe environment for all employees, which includes prohibiting acts that can lead to physical harm or intimidation. The standards require employers, including public officials, to take reasonable steps to prevent and address workplace violence. Any behavior that creates a hostile work environment, including threats or unwelcome physical contact, is in violation of these standards. More information on workplace violence prevention can be found through the California Department of Industrial Relations: [Cal/OSHA Workplace Violence Prevention] (https://www.dir.ca.gov/dosh/Training/WorkplaceViolence.html). Furthermore, the investigation failed to include all potential witnesses, which is a critical oversight. Yvonne listed additional witnesses who were actually present at the scene of the incident and could provide relevant testimony. Some of these individuals are those to whom Yvonne may have reported the incident shortly after it occurred. When Yvonne reported to the NAACP, her statement was consistent with the information provided in this letter. This lack of thoroughness further undermines the credibility of the investigation's findings. Moreover, the initial meeting about the incident occurred in June during a closed session. A second meeting, this time public, has been scheduled in July, a time period when the council policy states that there are to be no meetings. This decision is disingenuous and appears to lack transparency. The city council had previously set the meeting dates, which were made public to city employees and leaders, and the public understood that this period was associated with closed session meetings. By holding a public meeting during this time, you have created confusion and potentially undermined respect for the council's established schedule and the community's involvement. Furthermore, your remark to Yvonne suggests a belief that people of color should conform to a hierarchy that you impose, which is unacceptable. Regardless of your intent, it is important to recognize that no one has the right to confront or physically touch another person without their consent. The act of touching Council Member Beltran, especially in the context presented, constitutes a violation of city policies and raises serious legal and ethical concerns. If this incident had involved city employees rather than elected officials, I believe the response would have been markedly different. Additionally, the NAACP has reached out to you previously on various issues, but your lack of response indicates a troubling disregard for our community's concerns and values. This pattern reflects a broader issue of supremacy, wherein our voices seem to matter less to you in your role as a public official. I understand that it may be uncomfortable for you to confront these issues, but it is essential for the health of our community. Your actions appear to align with patterns that are consistent with white supremacy, particularly as your circle seems to be composed primarily of individuals who share your background. In light of these concerns, I believe it is necessary for the community to come together and make it clear that we will not tolerate bigotry or any form of intimidation or violence —especially against women of color. You may hold the title of Mayor, but it is crucial to remember that you serve the community, and we will not accept any actions that threaten our dignity or safety. While I am not a judge, I am unafraid to speak out against injustice. Your actions suggest a fear of those who do not look like you, and it is time to address this fear constructively. Thank you for considering this perspective. Sincerely, Sean Allen President San Jose/Silicon Valley NAACP References: Forwarded message From: Sean Allen <sallen6444@yahoo.com> Date: Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 12:59 PM Subject: Fwd: Request to reschedule meeting To: <stevenson.:e3@gmail.com>, <c.avid. per@wvm.edu>, <chenc erson@nextdoor.org>, <Nicci90059@yahoo.com>, <jeffreycormier@sbcglobal.net>, <mbraxton2021 @gmail.com>, <ggi112517@yahoo.com>, <pedroavila 11 @gmail .com>, <dr.michaelcybarra@gmail.com>, <warmali@yahoo.com>, <pastor@.universityamez.com>, <michael.pati@gmail.com>, <theresac.iolapati@gmail.com>, <Laranck@yahoo.com>, Yusra Hussain <yusrahussainmd@gmail.com>, Lasha Heard <heardlasha22@gmail.com>, Candice Brooks <brookscandice114@gmail.com>, Aram James <abjpol@gmail.com>, James A. Staten <jamesastaten@gmail.com>, Ruth Silver Taube <ruthsilvertauDe16@gmail.com>, Seher Awan <firelranc..or@gmail.com>, Nicole Chiu-Wang <ncole@dreamcatchersyouth.org>, Pat Marshall <D.marsha1181@ymail.com>, Rose Lynn <roselynn95035@yahoo.com>, Sharon Jackson <mamad2ndchance@gmail.com>, Sean Allen <sallen6444@yahoo.com>, Lejoi Reese <lejoir@gmail.com> Sent from my iPhone Begin forwarded message: From: Sean Allen <sallen6444@yahoo.com> Date: July 18, 2025 at 12:48:59 PM PDT To: Mark Turner <mark.turner@morganhill.ca.gov>, Brandon Pho <3randon@sanjosespotlight.com>, Jeff Rosen <jrosen@cao.sccgov.org>, Dan Okonkwo <dokonkwo@dao.sccgov.org>, Daniel Chung <flivver76@gmail.com>, Sylvia Arenas <sylvia.arenas@Dos.sccgov.org>, Rebeca Armendariz <rbeca@wpusa.org>, Reymundo Armendariz <reymundo.armendariz@gmail.com>, Shane.Palsgrove@morganhill.ca.gov, miriam.vega@morganhill.ca.gov, yvonne.martinezbeltran@morganhill.ca.gov, soraida.iwanaga@morganhill.ca.gov, marilyn.librers@morganhill.ca.gov, Raul Colunga <colunga.raul@att.net>, roseamador@aol.com, Victor Vasquez <vduarte@somosmayfair.org>, Victor Sin <vctor@asianlawalliance.org>, Raj Jayadev <raj@siliconvalleydeaug.org>, Jose Valle <jvalle1800@gmail.com>, Darcie Green<carcie@lainascontracancer.org>, Kyra Kazantzis <Kyrak@svcn.org>, Richard Konda <rkonca@asianlawalliance.org>, walter wilson <walterlwilson@hotmail.com> Cc: Carla Torres <xicanamagic@hotmail.com>, CityCouncil <CityCounci_@morganhill.ca.gov>, Pat Marshall <p.marsha1181@ymail.com>, Sharon Jackson <mamad2ndchance@gmail.com>, Seher Awan <firearanc.dr@gmail.com>, Candice Brooks <brookscandice114@gmail.com>, "James A. Staten" <jamesastaten@gmail.com>, Aram James <aajpol@gmail.com>, Ruth Silver Taube <ru:isilvertaube16@gmail.com>, Robert Handa <robert.handa@nacuni.com>, Robert Salonga <rsalonga@bayareanewsgroup.com>, LaMonica Peters <lamonica.peters@fox.com>, Tamara Mino <tmino@televisaunivision.corn>, Jack Molmud <JMolmud@kron4.com> Subject: Request to reschedule meeting Subject: Addressing Ongoing Concerns Regarding Mayor Turner Dear Mayor, I appreciate the opportunity to address the conclusions drawn from the independent investigation regarding the allegations made by Mayor Pro Tem Yvonne Martinez Beltran. While the investigation found no credible evidence of physical assault or retaliation, it is essential to clarify the definition of battery under California law, which states that battery is the willful and unlawful use of force or violence upon the person of another. Even minor physical contact can qualify as battery if it is unwanted and done without consent. The investigation's report acknowledges that you did touch Martinez Beltran during the February 7 meeting. Importantly, prior to this contact, you stated to her, "you need to get in line." This comment, coupled with the physical touch, raises significant concerns about the context in which the contact occurred. Although the report concluded that the contact could not be proven to be aggressive or motivated by her gender or race, it is crucial to recognize that any unwanted physical contact —regardless of intent— still falls under the definition of battery. Key points from California law include: 1. Willful and Unlawful:The contact must be intentional and not accidental. Even if the touching was not intended to hann, it can still be considered unlawful if it was unwanted. 2. Force or Violence: Battery does not require significant harm; even a slight touch that is deemed offensive can be classified as battery. 3. On the Person of Another:The contact must occur directly on the victim's body or something intimately connected to them. 4. Unwanted: The contact must be unwelcome. If Martinez Beltran did not consent to the touch, it could be viewed as battery, irrespective of the intent behind it. For further reference, you can review the California Penal Code sections related to battery: - [California Penal Code Section 240 - Assault] (htt Ds://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes cis ) lay Section? lawCode=PEN&sectionNum=240) - [California Penal Code Section 242 - Battery] (httts://leginfo.legislature . ca. gov/faces/codes_cis3laySection? lawCoce=PEN&sectionNum=242) - [California Penal Code Section 422 - Criminal Threats] (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_cis )laySection? lawCoce=PEN&sectionNum=422) Additionally, California workplace violence laws and standards emphasize the importance of maintaining a safe environment for all employees, which includes prohibiting acts that can lead to physical harm or intimidation. The standards require employers, including public officials, to take reasonable steps to prevent and address workplace violence. Any behavior that creates a hostile work environment, including threats or unwelcome physical contact, is in violation of these standards. More information on workplace violence prevention can be found through the California Depatinnent of Industrial Relations: [Cal/OSHA Workplace Violence Prevention] (https://www.dir.ca.gov/dosh/Training/WorkplaceViolence.html). Furthermore, the investigation failed to include all potential witnesses, which is a critical oversight. Yvonne listed additional witnesses who were actually present at the scene of the incident and could provide relevant testimony. Some of these individuals are those to whom Yvonne may have reported the incident shortly after it occurred. When Yvonne reported to the NAACP, her statement was consistent with the information provided in this letter. This lack of thoroughness further undermines the credibility of the investigation's findings. Moreover, the initial meeting about the incident occurred in June during a closed session. A second meeting, this time public, has been scheduled in July, a time period when the council policy states that there are to be no meetings. This decision is disingenuous and appears to lack transparency. The city council had previously set the meeting dates, which were made public to city employees and leaders, and the public understood that this period was associated with closed session meetings. By holding a public meeting during this time, you have created confusion and potentially undermined respect for the council's established schedule and the community's involvement. Furthermore, your remark to Yvonne suggests a belief that people of color should conform to a hierarchy that you impose, which is unacceptable. Regardless of your intent, it is important to recognize that no one has the right to confront or physically touch another person without their consent. The act of touching Council Member Beltran, especially in the context presented, constitutes a violation of city policies and raises serious legal and ethical concerns. If this incident had involved city employees rather than elected officials, I believe the response would have been markedly different. Additionally, the NAACP has reached out to you previously on various issues, but your lack of response indicates a troubling disregard for our community's concerns and values. This pattern reflects a broader issue of supremacy, wherein our voices seem to matter less to you in your role as a public official. I understand that it may be uncomfortable for you to confront these issues, but it is essential for the health of our community. Your actions appear to align with patterns that are consistent with white supremacy, particularly as your circle seems to be composed primarily of individuals who share your background. In light of these concerns, I believe it is necessary for the community to come together and make it clear that we will not tolerate bigotry or any form of intimidation or violence —especially against women of color. You may hold the title of Mayor, but it is crucial to remember that you serve the community, and we will not accept any actions that threaten our dignity or safety. While I am not a judge, I am unafraid to speak out against injustice. Your actions suggest a fear of those who do not look like you, and it is time to address this fear constructively. Thank you for considering this perspective. Sincerely, Sean Allen President San Jose/Silicon Valley NAACP References: Morgan Hill report dismisses counciimember's claims against mayor sanjosespotlight.com Morgan Hill investigation finds no evidence of assault by mayor I Morgan Hill Times I Morgan Hill, San Martin, CA morganhilltimes.com Sent from my iPhone On Jul 18, 2025, at 7:17 AM, Mark Turner <mark.turner@morganhill.ca.gov> wrote: Good morning, Carla, Thank you for your email and concern for Ms. Beltran. Your comments regarding equity are very comforting, it's unfortunate the San Jose/Silicon Valley NAACP somehow didn't feel that way when Sean Allen chose to perpetuate Ms. Beltran's lies even before the investigation was completed, revealing just how troubling Ms. Beltran's behavior has been. Something the NAACP would gasp at if others were guilty of such behavior. I even appreciate your comments about "due process." I just wish your organization would have exercised due process regarding the lies against me; however, it appears Sean Allen chose to be the judge and jury when he bought into the false accusations by Ms. Beltran. Whatever happened to, "Innocent until proven guilty?" Surely your organization still believes in that, don't they. I've changed my family vacation plans to be present on July 22nd' and I think others can do the same. Mark Turner Mayor City of Morgan Hill 17575 Peak Avenue, Morgan HiII, CA 95037 D: 408.310.4647 C: 408.221.6203 mark.turner@morganhill.ca.gov morganhill.ca.gov I facebook I twitter From: Carla Torres <xicanamagic@hotmail.com> Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2025 6:19 PM To: CityCouncil<CityCouncilPmorganhill.ca.gov>; Marilyn Librers <marilyn.librers@morganhill.ca.gov>; Soraida Iwanaga <soraida.iwanaga( morganhill.ca.gov>; Miriam Vega <miriam.vega@morganhill.ca.gov>; Mark Turner <mark.turner( morganhill.ca.gov>; Yvonne Martinez Beltran <yvonne.martinezbeltran@morganhill.ca.gov> Cc: Sean Allen <sallen6444Pyahoo.com>; Pat Marshall <o.marshall8l@ymail.com>; Sharon Jackson <mamad2ndchance( mail.com>; Seher Awan <firebrand.dr@gmail.com>; Candice Brooks <brookscandicell4Pgmail.com>; James A. Staten <.amesastaten@gmail.com>; Aram James <abjodl@gmail.com>; Ruth Silver Taube <rcthsilvertaubel6Pgmail.com> Subject: [EXTERNAL] Request to reschedule meeting Subject: Request to Reschedule Open Meeting To the Honorable Members of the City Council, On behalf of the San Jose/Silicon Valley NAACP, I am writing to respectfully request that the upcoming open meeting be rescheduled to a later date following the Council's reconvening. Councilmember Yvonne Martinez Beltran, a key stakeholder in this matter, is currently unable to attend the scheduled meeting and has expressed a strong desire to be present. We believe her participation is essential to ensuring a comprehensive and inclusive dialogue on an issue of public interest and community concern. Recent developments related to this matter, including the conclusions of an independent investigative report, highlight the importance of careful deliberation and the need to maintain public confidence in our civic processes. As such, it is critical that all perspectives, particularly those most directly involved, have an opportunity to be represented in the public forum. The San Jose/Silicon Valley NAACP is committed to upholding transparency, equity, and due process in all matters of governance. We believe that rescheduling this meeting will support a more thoughtful and informed conversation that reflects the values of fairness and accountability. We thank the Council for its continued dedication to these principles and appreciate your consideration of this request. Respectfully, Carla Torres Secretary San Jose/Silicon Valley NAACP WARNING: This message is from an external user. Confidential information such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, bank routing numbers, wire transfer information and other personally identifiable information should not be transmitted to this user. For question, please contact the Morgan Hill IT Department by opening a new helpdesk request online or call 408-909-0055. Disclaimer The information contained in this communication from the sender is confidential. It is intended solely for use by the recipient and others authorized to receive it. If you are not the recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, distribution or taking action in relation of the contents of this information is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. This email has been scanned for viruses and malware, and may have been automatically archived by Mimecast, a leader in email security and cyber resilience. Mimecast integrates email defenses with brand protection, security awareness training, web security, compliance and other essential capabilities. Mimecast helps protect large and small organizations from malicious activity, human error and technology failure; and to lead the movement toward building a more resilient world. To find out more, visit our website. From: Henry Etzkowitz To: Letters NYT Cc: Bette Kiernan; Ellen Bob; Mariza Almeica; Guilherme Ary Plonski; Aram James; Marty Wasserman; Mark Granovetter Subject: Faith Leaders' Power A19 Religion and public policy Date: Saturday, July 19, 2025 12:50:53 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. "There are no Torah rules about tariffs or tax rates or immigration laws for 21st century America.."Rabbi Jeremy Kalmonofsky, Temple Ansche Chesed, Manhattan. Other faith leaders might disagree that religious principles do not provide guidance on ostensibly secular matters. Notable examples include the Popes who authored Rerum Novarum and Mayer et Magistra, moderating the excesses of capitalism. On the other hand, Rabbi Chaim of Etz Chayim, Palo Alto, admonished the congregant who inserted a plea for peace between Palestine and Israel in the Prayer for Israel that the prayer book was not open to individual revision. Elective affinity to the Society of Friends, where political activism is an expression of spiritual life, recalled the adage, 'some of my best Friends are Jews'. Sincerely Henry Etzkowitz Neighbors for Environmental and Social Justice 2024 Candidate for Palo Alto City Council 1766 Sand Hi11 Road Palo Alto CA 94304 646 701 2695 Sent from my iPhone From: Postmaster To: Council, City Subject: You have new held messages Date: Saturday, July 19, 2025 7:13:36 AM I o You have new held messages You can release all of your held messages and permit or block future emails from the senders, or manage messages individually. Release all Permit all Block all You can also manage held messages in your Personal Portal. Spam Policy e.reply.notification@vps64867.dreamhostps.com Important Notification 2025-07-18 17:02 Release Permit Block Release all Permit all Block all © 2019 Mimecast Services Limited. From: Ashok Kapoor To: Council, City Subject: Incessant increase in the number of RVs in Palo Alto. Date: Friday, July 18, 2025 10:44:26 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. This message needs your attention • This is a personal email address. • This is their first email to your company. Mark Safe Report Powered by Mimecast Dear Council Members As a resident of Palo Alto for over 40 years, I have witnessed changes in our city but this growth in RV population is frightening. These RVs are beginning to extend their reach to the sidewalks in many cases. I see them as an extension of homeless encampments. I would like to know what plans does our city has to control them and eventually relocate them. I would be delighted to provide more details if needed. With regards Ashok Kapoor 1056 Amarillo Avenue Palo Alto Get Outlook for iOS From: Aram James To: Martin Wasserman Cc: Jeff Rosen; Jay Bovarskv; Veenker, Vicki; h.etzko@gmail.com; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Rai Javadev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneider, James; Bincer, Andrew; Gardener, Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanda Conaway; yolanda; Don Austin; jgreen@dailynewsgrouo.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonaa; roberta ahlguist; Baker, Rob; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlcuist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Freddie.Quintana@sen.ca.gov; Jeff Conrad; Burt Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District9@sanjoseca.gov; District4@sanjoseca.gov; District5@sanjoseca.gov; District2@sanjoseca.gov; EPA Today; Gennacv Shevner; Council, City; citv.council@menlopark.gov; Nash, Betsy; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero@cityofepa.orc; Cribbs, Anne; <michael.gennaco@oirgroup.com>; Stump, Molly; board@pausd.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Rodriquez, Miguel; Cait James; Tim James; Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman@assembly.ca.gov; Zelkha, Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enbera, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Tanaka. Greg; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberley; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq; Greg Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauinq; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee; Mark Turner; City Attorney; CityCouncil; Michelle Bigelow; Sean Allen; Seher Awan; Pat M; Carla Torres; David Piper Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Friday, July 18, 2025 8:26:28 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Genocide defined: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. "a campaign of genocide" On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 4:04 PM Martin Wasserman <deeDerlook@aol.com> wrote: It appears that "genocide" can be defined in several different ways. Perhaps we should stop using that term altogether and stick to words that have clear and unambiguous meanings. On Jul 18, 2025, at 12:25 PM, Aram James <a)j?d1@gmail.com> wrote: I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But contrary to the cries of Israel's fiercest critics, the evidence did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide. By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August. At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a "huge price" for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas was operating, "into rubble," and he called on "the residents of Gaza" to "leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere." Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember "what Amalek did to you," a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to "kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings" of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting "human animals" and, later, called for "total annihilation." Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on Xthat Israel's task must be "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth." Israel's actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one. This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Image People inspecting a huge pile of rubble. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend. *** The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." In determining what constitutes genocide, therefore, we must both establish intent and show that it is being carried out. In Israel's case, that intent has been publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. But intent can also be derived from a pattern of operations on the ground, and this pattern became clear by May 2024 — and has since become ever clearer — as the I.D.F. has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most genocide scholars are cautious about applying this term to contemporary events, precisely because of the tendency, since it was coined by the Jewish -Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, to attribute it to any case of massacre or inhumanity. Indeed, some argue that the categorization should be entirely discarded, because it often serves more to express outrage than to identify a particular crime. Yet as Mr. Lemkin recognized, and as the United Nations later agreed, it is crucial to be able to distinguish the attempt to destroy a particular group of people from other crimes under international law, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is because, while other crimes entail indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians as individuals, genocide denotes the killing of people as members of a group, geared at irreparably destroying the group itself so that it would never be able to reconstitute itself as a political, social or cultural entity. And, as the international community signaled by adopting the convention, it is incumbent upon all signatory states to prevent such an attempt, to do all they can to stop it while it is occurring and to subsequently punish those who were engaged in this crime of crimes — even if it occurred within the borders of a sovereign state. The designation has major political, legal and moral ramifications. Nations, politicians and military personnel suspected of, indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide are seen as beyond the pale of humanity and may compromise or lose their right to remain members of the international community. A finding by the International Court of Justice that a particular state is engaged in genocide, especially if enforced by the U.N. Security Council, can lead to severe sanctions. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox. Politicians or generals indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide or other breaches of international humanitarian law by the International Criminal Court can face arrest outside of their country. And a society that condones and is complicit in genocide, whatever the stand of its individual citizens may be, will carry this mark of Cain long after the fires of hatred and violence are put out. *** Israel has denied all allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The I.D.F. says it investigates reports of crimes, although it has rarely made its findings public, and when breaches of discipline or protocol are acknowledged, it has generally meted out light reprimands to its personnel. Israeli military and political leaders repeatedly describe the I.D.F. as acting lawfully, say they issue warnings to civilian populations to evacuate sites about to be attacked and blame Hamas for using civilians as human shields. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In fact, the systematic destruction in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure — government buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas, and parks — reflects a policy aimed at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely. According to a recent investigation by Haaretz, an estimated 174,000 buildings have been destroyed or damaged, accounting for up to 70 percent of all structures in the Strip. So far, more than 68,000 people have been killed, according to Gazan health authorities, including more than 17,000 children, who make up nearly a third of the total fatality count. More than 870 of those children were less than a year old. More than 2,000 families have been wiped out, the health authorities said. In addition, 5,600 families now count only one survivor. At least io,000 people are believed to still be buried under the ruins of their homes. More than 138,000 have been wounded and maimed. Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world. An entire generation of children subjected to ongoing military attacks, loss of parents and long- term malnutrition will suffer severe physical and mental repercussions for the rest of their lives. Untold additional thousands of chronically ill persons have had little access to hospital care. The horror of what has been happening in Gaza is still described by most observers as war. But this is a misnomer. For the last year, the I.D.F. has not been fighting an organized military body. The version of Hamas that planned and carried out the attacks on Oct. 7 has been destroyed, though the weakened group continues to fight Israeli forces and retains control over the population in areas not held by the Israeli Army. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Today the I.D.F. is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and ethnic cleansing. That's how Mr. Netanyahu's own former chief of staff and minister of defense, the hard-liner Moshe Yaalon, in November described on Israel's Democrat TV and in subsequent articlesand interviews the attempt to clear northern Gaza of its population. Image A man in shadow sorts through the rubble of a home. Credit...Mahmoud Issa/Reuters On Jan. 19, under pressure from Donald Trump, who was a day away from resuming the presidency, a cease- fire went into effect, facilitating the exchange of hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. But after Israel's breaking of the cease-fire on March 18, the I.D.F. has been executing a well -publicized plan to concentrate the enure uazan population in a quarter of the territory in three zones: Gaza City, the central refugee camps and the Mawasi coastline in the Strip's southwestern edge. Using large numbers of bulldozers and huge aerial bombs supplied by the United States, the military appears to be trying to demolish every remaining structure and establish control over the other three- quarters of the territory. This is also being facilitated by a .nthat provides — intermittently — limited aid supplies at a few distribution points guarded by the Israeli military, drawing people to the south. Many Gazans are killed in a desperate attempt to obtain food, and the starvation crisis deepens. On July 7, Defense Minister Israel Katz said the I.D.F. would build a "humanitarian city" over the ruins of Rafah to initially accommodate 600,000 Palestinians from the Mawasi area, who would be provisioned by international bodies and not allowed to leave. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT *** Some might describe this campaign as ethnic cleansing, not genocide. But there is a link between the crimes. When an ethnic group has nowhere to go and is constantly displaced from one so-called safe zone to another, relentlessly bombed and starved, ethnic cleansing can morph into genocide. This was the case in several well-known genocides of the loth century, such as that of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, now Namibia, that began in 1904; the Armenians in World War I; and, indeed, even in the Holocaust, which began with the German attempt to expel the Jews and ended up with their murder. To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust — and no institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating it — have issued warnings that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This silence has made a mockery of the slogan "Never again," transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one's own past victimhood. This is another of the many incalculable costs of the current catastrophe. As Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza and is exercising increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the moral and historical credit that the Jewish state has drawn on until now is running out. Israel, created in the wake of the Holocaust as the answer to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, has always insisted that any threat to its security must be seen as potentially leading to another Auschwitz. This provides Israel with license to portray those it perceives as its enemies as Nazis — a term uLedrepeatedly by Israeli media figures to depict Hamas and, by extension, all Gazans, based on the popular assertion that none of them are "uninvolved," not even the infants, who would grow up to be militants. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT This is not a new phenomenon. As early as Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasir Arafat, then hunkered down in Beirut, to Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker. This time, the analogy is being used in connection with a policy aimed at uprooting and removing the entire population of Gaza. The daily scenes of horror in Gaza, from which the Israeli public is shielded by its own media's self - censorship, expose the lies of Israeli propaganda that this is a war of defense against a Nazi -like enemy. One shudders when Israeli spokespeople shamelessly utter the hollow slogan of the I.D.F. being the "most moral army in the world." Some European nations, such as France, Britain and Germany, as well as Canada, have feebly protested Israeli actions, especially since it breached the cease- fire in March. But they have neither suspended arms shipments nor taken many concrete and meaningful economic or political steps that might deter Mr. Netanyahu's government. For a while, the United States government seemed to have lost interest in Gaza, with President Trump initially announcing in February that the United States would take over Gaza, promising to turn it into "the Riviera of the Middle East," and then letting Israel get on with the Strip's destruction and turning his attention to Iran. At the moment, one can only hope that Mr. Trump will again pressure a reluctant Mr. Netanyahu to at least reach a new cease-fire and put an end to the relentless killing. *** How will Israel's future be affected by the inevitable demolition of its incontestable morality, derived from its birth in the ashes of the Holocaust? ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Israel's political leadership and its citizenry will have to decide. There seems to be little domestic pressure for the urgently needed change of paradigm: the recognition that there is no solution to this conflict other than an Israeli -Palestinian agreement to share the land under whatever parameters the two sides agree on, be it two states, one state or a confederation. Robust external pressure from the country's allies also appears unlikely. I am deeply worried that Israel will persist on its disastrous course, remaking itself, perhaps irreversibly, into a full-blown authoritarian apartheid state. Such states, as history has taught us, do not last. Another question arises: What consequences will Israel's moral reversal have for the culture of Holocaust commemoration, and the politics of memory, education and scholarship, when so many of its intellectual and administrative leaders have up to now refused to face up to their responsibility to denounce inhumanity and genocide wherever they occur? Those engaged in the worldwide culture of commemoration and remembrance built around the Holocaust will have to confront a moral reckoning. The wider community of genocide scholars — those engaged in the study of comparative genocide or of any one of the many other genocides that have marred human history — is now edging ever closer toward a consensus over describing events in Gaza as a genocide. In November, a little more than a year into the war, the Israeli genocide scholar Shmuel Lederman 'off ined the growing chorus of opinion that Israel was engaged in genocidal actions. The Canadian international lawyer William Schabas came to the same conclusion last year and has recently described Israel's military campaign in Gaza as "absolutely" a genocide. Other genocide experts, such as Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the British specialist Martin Shaw (who has also said that the Hamas attack was genocidal), have reached the same conclusion, while the Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses of the City University of New York described these events in the Dutch publication NRC as a "mix of genocidal and military logic." In the same article, Ugur Umit Ungar, a professor at the Amsterdam -based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said there are probably scholars who still do not think it's genocide, but "I don't know them." ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most Holocaust scholars I know don't hold, or at least publicly express, this view. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Israeli Raz Segal, program director of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem historians Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman, the majority of academics engaged with the history of the Nazi genocide of the Jews have stayed remarkably silent, while some have openly denied Israel's crimes in Gaza, or accused their more critical colleagues of incendiary speech, wild exaggeration, well poisoning and antisemitism. In December the Holocaust scholar Norman J.W. Goda opined that "genocide charges like this have long been used as a fig leaf for broader challenges to Israel's legitimacy," expressing his worry that "they have cheapened the gravity of the word genocide itself." This "genocide libel," as Dr. Goda referred to it in an essay, "deploys a range of antisemitic tropes," including "the coupling of the genocide charge with the deliberate killing of children, images of whom are ubiquitous on NGO, social media, and other platforms that charge Israel with genocide." In other words, showing images of Palestinian children ripped apart by U.S.-made bombs launched by Israeli pilots is, in this view, an antisemitic act. Most recently, Dr. Goda and a respected historian of Europe, Jeffrey Herf, wrotein The Washington Post that "the genocide accusation hurled against Israel draws on deep wells of fear and hatred" found in "radical interpretations of both Christianity and Islam." It "has shifted opprobrium from Jews as a religious/ethnic group to the state of Israel, which it depicts as inherently evil." *** What are the ramifications of this rift between genocide scholars and Holocaust historians? This is not merely a squabble within academe. The memory culture created in recent decades around the Holocaust encompasses much more than the genocide of the Jews. It has come to play a crucial role in politics, education and identity. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Museums dedicated to the Holocaust have served as models for representations of other genocides around the world. Insistence that the lessons of the Holocaust demand the promotion of tolerance, diversity, antiracism and support for migrants and refugees, not to mention human rights and international humanitarian law, is rooted in an understanding of the universal implications of this crime in the heart of Western civilization at the peak of modernity. Discrediting genocide scholars who call out Israel's genocide in Gaza as antisemitic threatens to erode the foundation of genocide studies: the ongoing need to define, prevent, punish and reconstruct the history of genocide. Suggesting that this endeavor is motivated instead by malign interests and sentiments — that it is driven by the very hatred and prejudice that was at the root of the Holocaust — is not only morally scandalous, it provides an opening for a politics of denialism and impunity as well. By the same token, when those who have dedicated their careers to teaching and commemorating the Holocaust insist on ignoring or denying Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza, they threaten to undermine everything that Holocaust scholarship and commemoration have stood for in the past several decades. That is, the dignity of every human being, respect for the rule of law and the urgent need never to let inhumanity take over the hearts of people and steer the actions of nations in the name of security, national interest and sheer vengeance. Ima ' e People at a beach and m the water as the sun sets. El Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times What I fear is that in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide, it will no longer be possible to continue teaching and researching the Holocaust in the same manner we did before. Because the Holocaust has b so relentlessly invoked by the state of Israel and its defenders as a cover-up for the crimes of the I.D.F., een meswayand remembranceof the Holocaust -could - lose its claim to be concerned with universal justice and retreat into the same ethnic ghetto in which it began its life at the end of World War II — as a marginalized preoccupation by the remnants of a marginalized people, an ethnically specific event, before it succeeded, decades later, to find its rightful place as a lesson and a warning for humanity as a whole. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Just as worrisome is the prospect that the study of genocide as a whole will not survive the accusations of antisemitism, leaving us without the crucial community of scholars and international jurists to stand in the breach at a time when the rise of intolerance, racial hatred, populism and authoritarianism is threatening the values that were at the core of these scholarly, cultural and political endeavors of the loth century. Perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name. Israel will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity. That, despite all the horrific suffering we are currently watching, is a valuable thing, and may, in the long run, help Israel face the future in a healthier, more rational and less fearful and violent manner. This will do nothing to compensate for the staggering amount of death and suffering of Palestinians. But an Israel liberated from the overwhelming burden of the Holocaust may finally come to terms with the inescapable need for its seven million Jewish citizens to share the land with the seven million Palestinians living in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in peace, equality and dignity. That will be the only just reckoning. From: Postmaster To: Council, City Subject: You have new held messages Date: Friday, July 18, 2025 4:15:08 PM 1 You have new held messages You can release all of your held messages and permit or block future emails from the senders, or manage messages individually. Release all Permit all Block all You can also manage held messages in your Personal Portal. Spam Policy vivek.singh569@hotmail.com Recruitment buddy: as most cost-effective prices! 2025-07-18 12:30 Release Permit Block Release all Permit all Block all © 2019 Mimecast Services Limited. From: Martin Wasserman To: Aram James Cc: Jeff Rosen; Jay Bovarskv; Veenker, Vicki; h.etzko@gmail.com; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Rai Javadev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneider, James; Bincer, Andrew; Gardener, Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanda Conaway; yolanda; Don Austin; jgreen@dailynewsgroup.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonaa; roberta ahlguist; Baker, Rob; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlcuist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Freddie.Quintana@sen.ca.gov; Jeff Conrad; Burt Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District9@sanjoseca.gov; District4@sanjoseca.gov; District5@sanjoseca.gov; District2@sanjoseca.gov; EPA Today; Gennacv Shevner; Council, City; citv.council@menlopark.gov; Nash, Betsy; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero@cityofepa.orc; Cribbs, Anne; <michael.gennaco@oirgroup.com>; Stump, Molly; board@pausd.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Rodriquez, Miguel; Cait James; Tim James; Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman@assembly.ca.gov; Zelkha, Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enbera, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Tanaka. Greg; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberley; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq; Greg Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauinq; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Friday, July 18, 2025 4:04:23 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. It appears that "genocide" can be defined in several different ways. Perhaps we should stop using that term altogether and stick to words that have clear and unambiguous meanings. On Jul 18, 2025, at 12:25 PM, Aram James <abjpdl@gmail.com> wrote: I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But contrary to the cries of Israel's fiercest critics, the evidence did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide. By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August. At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a "huge price" for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas was operating, "into rubble," and he called on "the residents of Gaza" to "leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere." Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember "what Amalek did to you," a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to "kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings" of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting "human animals" and, later, called for "total annihilation." Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on Xthat Israel's task must be "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth." Israel's actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one. This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Image People inspecting a huge pile of rubble. ®.k Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend. *** The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." In determining what constitutes genocide, therefore, we must both establish intent and show that it is being carried out. In Israel's case, that intent has been publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. But intent can also be derived from a pattern of operations on the ground, and this pattern became clear by May 2024 — and has since become ever clearer — as the I.D.F. has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most genocide scholars are cautious about applying this term to contemporary events, precisely because of the tendency, since it was coined by the Jewish -Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, to attribute it to any case of massacre or inhumanity. Indeed, some argue that the categorization should be entirely discarded, because it often serves more to express outrage than to identify a particular crime. Yet as Mr. Lemkin recognized, and as the United Nations later agreed, it is crucial to be able to distinguish the attempt to destroy a particular group of people from other crimes under international law, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is because, while other crimes entail indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians as individuals, genocide denotes the killing of people as members of a group, geared at irreparably destroying the group itself so that it would never be able to reconstitute itself as a political, social or cultural entity. And, as the international community signaled by adopting the convention, it is incumbent upon all signatory states to prevent such an attempt, to do all they can to stop it while it is occurring and to subsequently punish those who were engaged in this crime of crimes — even if it occurred within the borders of a sovereign state. The designation has major political, legal and moral ramifications. Nations, politicians and military personnel suspected of, indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide are seen as beyond the pale of humanity and may compromise or lose their right to remain members of the international community. A finding by the International Court of Justice that a particular state is engaged in genocide, especially if enforced by the U.N. Security Council, can lead to severe sanctions. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox. Politicians or generals indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide or other breaches of international humanitarian law by the International Criminal Court can face arrest outside of their country. And a society that condones and is complicit in genocide, whatever the stand of its individual citizens may be, will carry this mark of Cain long after the fires of hatred and violence are put out. *** Israel has denied all allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The I.D.F. says it investigates reports of crimes, although it has rarely made its findings public, and when breaches of discipline or protocol are acknowledged, it has generally meted out light reprimands to its personnel. Israeli military and political leaders repeatedly describe the I.D.F. as acting lawfully, say they issue warnings to civilian populations to evacuate sites about to be attacked and blame Hamas for using civilians as human shields. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In fact, the systematic destruction in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure — government buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas, and parks — reflects a policy aimed at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely. According to a recent investigation by Haaretz, an estimated 174,000 buildings have been destroyed or damaged, accounting for up to 70 percent of all structures in the Strip. So far, more than 58,000 people have been killed, according to Gazan health authorities, including more than 17,000 children, who make up nearly a third of the total fatality count. More than 870 of those children were less than a year old. More than 2,000 families have been wiped out, the health authorities said. In addition, 5,600 families now count only one survivor. At least 10,000 people are believed to still be buried under the ruins of their homes. More than 138,000 have been wounded and maimed. Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world. An entire generation of children subjected to ongoing military attacks, loss of parents and long-term malnutrition will suffer severe physical and mental repercussions for the rest of their lives. Untold additional thousands of chronically ill persons have had little access to hospital care. The horror of what has been happening in Gaza is still described by most observers as war. But this is a misnomer. For the last year, the I.D.F. has not been fighting an organized military body. The version of Hamas that planned and carried out the attacks on Oct. 7 has been destroyed, though the weakened group continues to fight Israeli forces and retains control over the population in areas not held by the Israeli Army. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Today the I.D.F. is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and ethnic cleansing. That's how Mr. Netanyahu's own former chief of staff and minister of defense, the hard-liner Moshe Yaalon, in November described on Israel's Democrat TV and in subsequent articlesand interviews the attempt to clear northern Gaza of its population. Image A man in shadow sorts through the rubble of a home. Credit...Mahmoud Issa/Reuters On Jan. 19, under pressure from Donald Trump, who was a day away from resuming the presidency, a cease- fire went into effect, facilitating the exchange of hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. But after Israel's breaking of the cease-fire on Mar h 18, the I.D.F. has been executing a well -publicized lan to concentrate -the entire Gazan population in a quarter of the territory in three zones: Gaza City, the central refugee camps and the Mawasi coastline in the Strip's southwestern edge. Using large numbers of bulldozers and huge aerial bombs supplied by the United States, the military appears to be trying to demolish every remaining structure and establish control over the other three- quarters of the territory. This is also being facilitated by a planthat provides — intermittently — limited aid supplies at a few distribution points guarded by the Israeli military, drawing people to the south. Many Gazans are killed in a desperate attempt to obtain food, and the starvation crisis deepens. On July 7, Defense Minister Israel Katz 5_ald the I.D.F. would build a "humanitarian city" over the ruins of Rafah to initially accommodate 600,000 Palestinians from the Mawasi area, who would be provisioned by international bodies and not allowed to leave. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT *** Some might describe this campaign as ethnic cleansing, not genocide. But there is a link between the crimes. When an ethnic group has nowhere to go and is constantly displaced from one so-called safe zone to another, relentlessly bombed and starved, ethnic cleansing can morph into genocide. This was the case in several well-known genocides of the loth century, such as that of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, now Namibia, that began in 1904; the Armenians in World War I; and, indeed, even in the Holocaust, which began with the German attempt to expel the Jews and ended up with their murder. To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust — and no institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating it — have issued warnings that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This silence has made a mockery of the slogan "Never again," transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one's own past victimhood. This is another of the many incalculable costs of the current catastrophe. As Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza and is exercising increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the moral and historical credit that the Jewish state has drawn on until now is running out. Israel, created in the wake of the Holocaust as the answer to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, has always insisted that any threat to its security must be seen as potentially leading to another Auschwitz. This provides Israel with license to portray those it perceives as its enemies as Nazis — a term usedrepeatedly by Israeli media figures to e i t Hamas and, by extension, all Gazans, based on the popular assertion that none of them are "uninvolved," not even the infants, who would grow up to be militants. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT This is not a new phenomenon. As early as Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasir Arafat, then hunkered down in Beirut, to Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker. This time, the analogy is being used in connection with a policy aimed at uprooting and removing the entire population of Gaza. The daily scenes of horror in Gaza, from which the Israeli public is shielded by its own media's self - censorship, expose the lies of Israeli propaganda that this is a war of defense against a Nazi -like enemy. One shudders when Israeli spokespeople shamelessly utter the hollow slogan of the I.D.F. being the "most moral army in the world." Some European nations, such as France, Britain and Germany, as well as Canada, have feebly protested Israeli actions, especially since it breached the cease- fire in March. But they have neither suspended arms shipments nor taken many concrete and meaningful economic or political steps that might deter Mr. Netanyahu's government. For a while, the United States government seemed to have lost interest in Gaza, with President Trump initially announcing in February that the United States would take over Gaza, promising to turn it into "the Riviera of the Middle East," and then letting Israel get on with the Strip's destruction and turning his attention to Iran. At the moment, one can only hope that Mr. Trump will again pressure a reluctant Mr. Netanyahu to at least reach a new cease-fire and put an end to the relentless killing. *** How will Israel's future be affected by the inevitable demolition of its incontestable morality, derived from its birth in the ashes of the Holocaust? ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Israel's political leadership and its citizenry will have to decide. There seems to be little domestic pressure for the urgently needed change of paradigm: the recognition that there is no solution to this conflict other than an Israeli -Palestinian agreement to share the land under whatever parameters the two sides agree on, be it two states, one state or a confederation. Robust external pressure from the country's allies also appears unlikely. I am deeply worried that Israel will persist on its disastrous course, remaking itself, perhaps irreversibly, into a full-blown authoritarian apartheid state. Such states, as history has taught us, do not last. Another question arises: What consequences will Israel's moral reversal have for the culture of Holocaust commemoration, and the politics of memory, education and scholarship, when so many of its intellectual and administrative leaders have up to now refused to face up to their responsibility to denounce inhumanity and genocide wherever they occur? Those engaged in the worldwide culture of commemoration and remembrance built around the Holocaust will have to confront a moral reckoning. The wider community of genocide scholars — those engaged in the study of comparative genocide or of any one of the many other genocides that have marred human history — is now edging ever closer toward a consensus over describing events in Gaza as a genocide. In November, a little more than a year into the war, the Israeli genocide scholar Shmuel Lederman joined the growing chorus of opinion that Israel was engaged in genocidal actions. The Canadian international lawyer William Schabas came to the same conclusion last year and has recently described Israel's military campaign in Gaza as "absolutely" a genocide. Other genocide experts, such as Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the British specialist Martin Shaw (who has also said that the Hamas attack was genocidal), have reached the same conclusion, while the Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses of the City University of New York described these events in the Dutch publication NRC as a "mix of genocidal and military logic." In the same article, Ugur Umit Ungor, a professor at the Amsterdam -based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said there are probably scholars who still do not think it's genocide, but "I don't know them." ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most Holocaust scholars I know don't hold, or at least publicly express, this view. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Israeli Raz Segal, program director of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem historians Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman, the majority of academics engaged with the history of the Nazi genocide of the Jews have stayed remarkably silent, while some have openly denied Israel's crimes in Gaza, or accused their more critical colleagues of incendiary speech, wild exaggeration, well poisoning and antisemitism. In December the Holocaust scholar Norman J.W. Goda opined that "genocide charges like this have long been used as a fig leaf for broader challenges to Israel's legitimacy," expressing his worry that "they have cheapened the gravity of the word genocide itself." This "genocide libel," as Dr. Goda referred to it in an essay, "deploys a range of antisemitic tropes," including "the coupling of the genocide charge with the deliberate killing of children, images of whom are ubiquitous on NGO, social media, and other platforms that charge Israel with genocide." In other words, showing images of Palestinian children ripped apart by U.S.-made bombs launched by Israeli pilots is, in this view, an antisemitic act. Most recently, Dr. Goda and a respected historian of Europe, Jeffrey Herf, wrotein The Washington Post that "the genocide accusation hurled against Israel draws on deep wells of fear and hatred" found in "radical interpretations of both Christianity and Islam." It "has shifted opprobrium from Jews as a religious/ethnic group to the state of Israel, which it depicts as inherently evil." *** What are the ramifications of this rift between genocide scholars and Holocaust historians? This is not merely a squabble within academe. The memory culture created in recent decades around the Holocaust encompasses much more than the genocide of the Jews. It has come to play a crucial role in politics, education and identity. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Museums dedicated to the Holocaust have served as models for representations of other genocides around the world. Insistence that the lessons of the Holocaust demand the promotion of tolerance, diversity, antiracism and support for migrants and refugees, not to mention human rights and international humanitarian law, is rooted in an understanding of the universal implications of this crime in the heart of Western civilization at the peak of modernity. Discrediting genocide scholars who call out Israel's genocide in Gaza as antisemitic threatens to erode the foundation of genocide studies: the ongoing need to define, prevent, punish and reconstruct the history of genocide. Suggesting that this endeavor is motivated instead by malign interests and sentiments — that it is driven by the very hatred and prejudice that was at the root of the Holocaust — is not only morally scandalous, it provides an opening for a politics of denialism and impunity as well. By the same token, when those who have dedicated their careers to teaching and commemorating the Holocaust insist on ignoring or denying Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza, they threaten to undermine everything that Holocaust scholarship and commemoration have stood for in the past several decades. That is, the dignity of every human being, respect for the rule of law and the urgent need never to let inhumanity take over the hearts of people and steer the actions of nations in the name of security, national interest and sheer vengeance. Image People at a beach and in the water as the sun sets. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times What I fear is that in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide, it will no longer be possible to continue teaching and researching the Holocaust in the same manner we did before. Because the Holocaust has been so relentlessly invoked by the state of Israel and its defenders as a cover-up for the crimes of the I.D.F. ute siuuy anu remernurance of ute rioiocaust could lose its claim to be concerned with universal justice and retreat into the same ethnic ghetto in which it began its life at the end of World War II — as a marginalized preoccupation by the remnants of a marginalized people, an ethnically specific event, before it succeeded, decades later, to find its rightful place as a lesson and a warning for humanity as a whole. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Just as worrisome is the prospect that the study of genocide as a whole will not survive the accusations of antisemitism, leaving us without the crucial community of scholars and international jurists to stand in the breach at a time when the rise of intolerance, racial hatred, populism and authoritarianism is threatening the values that were at the core of these scholarly, cultural and political endeavors of the loth century. Perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name. Israel will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity. That, despite all the horrific suffering we are currently watching, is a valuable thing, and may, in the long run, help Israel face the future in a healthier, more rational and less fearful and violent manner. This will do nothing to compensate for the staggering amount of death and suffering of Palestinians. But an Israel liberated from the overwhelming burden of the Holocaust may finally come to terms with the inescapable need for its seven million Jewish citizens to share the land with the seven million Palestinians living in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in peace, equality and dignity. That will be the only just reckoning. Omer Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com. Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, lnstagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsAppand Threads. R e 1 a t e d C o n t e n t ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 11:27 AM Martin Wasserman <deeperlook@aol.com> wrote: The bill introduced by anti -Israel legislators has no chance of passing. Nevertheless, US support for Israel cannot be taken for granted. It will continue only as long as the US feels that such support is in its own national interest. The truth is, the US gets a very good return from its investment in Israel. Despite the massive international campaign of slander, defamation and baseless accusations (genocide, apartheid, etc.) designed to undermine the Jewish state, the fact remains that Israel is America's strongest and most reliable ally in the Middle East, and a powerful first line of defense against our common civilizational enemies. Martin Wasserman On Jul 17, 2025, at 9:28 PM, Aram James <a3j1d1@gmail.com> wrote: Members of Congress introduced the first ever bill that proactively seeks to prevent the U.S. from sending some of the worst weapons to the Israeli military. The Israeli military has massacred over 58,000 people in Gaza, with the true death toll likely far higher. Since the beginning of Israel's genocide lin Gaza, in October 2023, the US has given more than $30 billion in taxpayer -funded weapons to Israel to enable its atrocities, indirect violation of U.S. and international human rights laws. Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (Illinois) introduced HR 3565, the Block the Bombs Act, on May 21. Currently 26 other representatives are cosponsoring. This historic legislation that would prevent Trump from sending some of the worst -offender weapons that Israel has used to carry out genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Tell your member of Congress to endorse the Block the Bombs Act! Jvpaction.org/tell-congress-support-the-block-the- bombs-ac For local info: southbay@ewishvoiceforpeace.org Members of Congress introduced the first ever bill that proactively seeks to prevent the U.S. from sending some of the worst weapons to the Israeli military. The Israeli military has massacred over 58,000 people in Gaza, with the true death toll likely far higher. Since the beginning of Israel's genocide lin Gaza, in October 2023, the US has given more than $30 billion in taxpayer -funded weapons to Israel to enable its atrocities, indirect violation of U.S. and international human rights laws. Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (Illinois) introduced HR 3565, the Block the Bombs Act, on May 21. Currently 26 other representatives are cosponsoring. This historic legislation that would prevent Trump from sending some of the worst -offender weapons that Israel has used to carry out genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Tell your member of Congress to endorse the Block the Bombs Act! Jvpaction.org/tell-congress-support-the-block-the- bombs-act For local info: southbay@:ewishvoiceforpeace.org From: Aram James To: Martin Wasserman Cc: Jeff Rosen; Jay Bovarskv; Veenker, Vicki; h.etzko@gmail.com; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Rai Javadev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneider, James; Bincer, Andrew; Gardener, Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanda Conaway; yolanda; Don Austin; jgreen@dailynewsgroup.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonaa; roberta ahlguist; Baker, Rob; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlcuist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Freddie.Quintana@sen.ca.gov; Jeff Conrad; Burt Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District9@sanjoseca.gov; District4@sanjoseca.gov; District5@sanjoseca.gov; District2@sanjoseca.gov; EPA Today; Gennacv Shevner; Council, City; citv.council@menlopark.gov; Nash, Betsy; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero@cityofepa.orc; Cribbs, Anne; <michael.gennaco@oirgroup.com>; Stump, Molly; board@pausd.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Rodriguez, Miguel; Cait James; Tim James; Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman@assembly.ca.gov; Zelkha, Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enbera, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Tanaka. Greg; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberley; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq; Greg Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauinq; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Friday, July 18, 2025 12:26:11 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But contrary to the cries of Israel's fiercest critics, the evidence did not seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide. By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August. At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a "huge price" for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas was operating, "into rubble," and he called on "the residents of Gaza" to "leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere." Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember "what Amalek did to you," a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to "kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings" of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting "human animals" and, later, called for "total annihilation." Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on Xthat Israel's task must be "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth." Israel's actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one. This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Image People inspecting a huge pile of rubble. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press The continued denial of this designation by states, international organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend. *** The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." In determining what constitutes genocide, therefore, we must both establish intent and show that it is being carried out. In Israel's case, that intent has been publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. But intent can also be derived from a pattern of operations on the ground, and this pattern became clear by May 2024 — and has since become ever clearer — as the I.D.F. has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most genocide scholars are cautious about applying this term to contemporary events, precisely because of the tendency, since it was coined by the Jewish -Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, to attribute it to any case of massacre or inhumanity. Indeed, some argue that the categorization should be entirely discarded, because it often serves more to express outrage than to identify a particular crime. Yet as Mr. Lemkin recognized, and as the United Nations later agreed, it is crucial to be able to distinguish the attempt to destroy a particular group of people from other crimes under international law, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is because, while other crimes entail indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians as individuals, genocide denotes the killing of people as members of a group, geared at irreparably destroying the group itself so that it would never be able to reconstitute itself as a political, social or cultural entity. And, as the international community signaled by adopting the convention, it is incumbent upon all signatory states to prevent such an attempt, to do all they can to stop it while it is occurring and to subsequently punish those who were engaged in this crime of crimes — even if it occurred within the borders of a sovereign state. The designation has major political, legal and moral ramifications. Nations, politicians and military personnel suspected of, indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide are seen as beyond the pale of humanity and may compromise or lose their right to remain members of the international community. A finding by the International Court of Justice that a particular state is engaged in genocide, especially if enforced by the U.N. Security Council, can lead to severe sanctions. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox. Politicians or generals indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide or other breaches of international humanitarian law by the International Criminal Court can face arrest outside of their country. And a society that condones and is complicit in genocide, whatever the stand of its individual citizens may be, will carry this mark of Cain long after the fires of hatred and violence are put out. *** Israel has denied all allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The I.D.F. says it investigates reports of crimes, although it has rarely made its findings public, and when breaches of discipline or protocol are acknowledged, it has generally meted out light reprimands to its personnel. Israeli military and political leaders repeatedly describe the I.D.F. as acting lawfully, say they issue warnings to civilian populations to evacuate sites about to be attacked and blame Hamas for using civilians as human shields. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In fact, the systematic destruction in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure — government buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas, and parks — reflects a policy aimed at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely. According to a recent investigation by Haaretz, an estimated 174,000 buildings have been destroyed or damaged, accounting for up to 70 percent of all structures in the Strip. So far, more than 58,000 people have been killed, according to Gazan health authorities, including more than 17,000 children, who make up nearly a third of the total fatality count. More than 870 of those children were less than a year old. More than 2,000 families have been wiped out, the health authorities said. In addition, 5,600 families now count only one survivor. At least 10,000 people are believed to still be buried under the ruins of their homes. More than 138,000 have been wounded and maimed. Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world. An entire generation of children subjected to ongoing military attacks, loss of parents and long- term malnutrition will suffer severe physical and mental repercussions for the rest of their lives. Untold additional thousands of chronically ill persons have had little access to hospital care. The horror of what has been happening in Gaza is still described by most observers as war. But this is a misnomer. For the last year, the I.D.F. has not been fighting an organized military body. The version of Hamas that planned and carried out the attacks on Oct. 7 has been destroyed, though the weakened group continues to fight Israeli forces and retains control over the population in areas not held by the Israeli Army. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Today the I.D.F. is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and ethnic cleansing. That's how Mr. Netanyahu's own former chief of staff and minister of defense, the hard-liner Moshe Yaalon, in November described on Israel's Democrat TV and in subsequent articlesand interviews the attempt to clear northern Gaza of its population. Image A man in shadow sorts through the rubble of a home. Credit...Mahmoud Issa/Reuters On Jan. 19, under pressure from Donald Trui a day away from resuming the president fire went into effect, facilitating the exchang e to concentrate the entire Gazan population in a quarter of the territory in three zones: Gaza City, the central refugee camps and the Mawasi coastline in the Strip's southwestern edge. Using large numbers of bulldozers and huge aerial bombs supplied by the United States, the military appears to be trying to demolish every remaining structure and establish control over the other three- quarters of the territory. This is also being facilitated by a planthat provides — intermittently — limited aid supplies at a few distribution points guarded by the Israeli military, drawing people to the south. Many Gazans are killed in a desperate attempt to obtain food, and the starvation crisis deepens. On July 7, Defense Minister Israel Katz said the I.D.F. would build a "humanitarian city" over the ruins of Rafah to initially accommodate 600,000 Palestinians from the Mawasi area, who would be provisioned by international bodies and not allowed to leave. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT *** Some might describe this campaign as ethnic cleansing, not genocide. But there is a link between the crimes. When an ethnic group has nowhere to go and is constantly displaced from one so-called safe zone to another, relentlessly bombed and starved, ethnic cleansing can morph into genocide. This was the case in several well-known genocides of the loth century, such as that of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, now Namibia, that began in 1904; the Armenians in World War I; and, indeed, even in the Holocaust, which began with the German attempt to expel the Jews and ended up with their murder. To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust — and no institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating it — have issued warnings that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This silence has made a mockery of the slogan "Never again," transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one's own past victimhood. This is another of the many incalculable costs of the current catastrophe. As Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza and is exercising increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the moral and historical credit that the Jewish state has drawn on until now is running out. Israel, created in the wake of the Holocaust as the answer to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, has always insisted that any threat to its security must be seen as potentially leading to another Auschwitz. This provides Israel with license to portray those it perceives as its enemies as Nazis — a term usedrepeatedly by Israeli media figures to depid Hamas and, by extension, all Gazans, based on the popular assertion that none of them are "uninvolved," not even the infants, who would grow up to be militants. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT This is not a new phenomenon. As early as Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasir Arafat, then hunkered down in Beirut, to Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker. This time, the analogy is being used in connection with a policy aimed at uprooting and removing the entire population of Gaza. The daily scenes of horror in Gaza, from which the Israeli public is shielded by its own media's self - censorship, expose the lies of Israeli propaganda that this is a war of defense against a Nazi -like enemy. One shudders when Israeli spokespeople shamelessly utter the hollow slogan of the I.D.F. being the "most moral army in the world." Some European nations, such as France, Britain and Germany, as well as Canada, have feebly protested Israeli actions, especially since it breached the cease- fire in March. But they have neither suspended arms shipments nor taken many concrete and meaningful economic or political steps that might deter Mr. Netanyahu's government. For a while, the United States government seemed to have lost interest in Gaza, with President Trump initially announcing in February that the United States would take over Gaza, promising to turn it into "the Riviera of the Middle East," and then letting Israel get on with the Strip's destruction and turning his attention to Iran. At the moment, one can only hope that Mr. Trump will again pressure a reluctant Mr. Netanyahu to at least reach a new cease-fire and put an end to the relentless killing. *** How will Israel's future be affected by the inevitable demolition of its incontestable morality, derived from its birth in the ashes of the Holocaust? ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Israel's political leadership and its citizenry will have to decide. There seems to be little domestic pressure for the urgently needed change of paradigm: the recognition that there is no solution to this conflict other than an Israeli -Palestinian agreement to share the land under whatever parameters the two sides agree on, be it two states, one state or a confederation. Robust external pressure from the country's allies also appears unlikely. I am deeply worried that Israel will persist on its disastrous course, remaking itself, perhaps irreversibly, into a full-blown authoritarian apartheid state. Such states, as history has taught us, do not last. Another question arises: What consequences will Israel's moral reversal have for the culture of Holocaust commemoration, and the politics of memory, education and scholarship, when so many of its intellectual and administrative leaders have up to now refused to face up to their responsibility to denounce inhumanity and genocide wherever they occur? Those engaged in the worldwide culture of commemoration and remembrance built around the Holocaust will have to confront a moral reckoning. The wider community of genocide scholars — those engaged in the study of comparative genocide or of any one of the many other genocides that have marred human history — is now edging ever closer toward a consensus over describing events in Gaza as a genocide. In November, a little more than a year into the war, the Israeli genocide scholar Shmuel Lederman 'o] fined the growing chorus of opinion that Israel was engaged in genocidal actions. The Canadian international lawyer William Schabas came to the same conclusion last year and has recently described Israel's military campaign in Gaza as "absolutely" a genocide. Other genocide experts, such as Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the British specialist Martin Shaw (who has also said that the Hamas attack was genocidal), have reached the same conclusion, while the Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses of the City University of New York described these events in the Dutch publication NRC as a "mix of genocidal and military logic." In the same article, Ugur Umit Ungor, a professor at the Amsterdam -based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said there are probably scholars who still do not think it's genocide, but "I don't know them." ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Most Holocaust scholars I know don't hold, or at least publicly express, this view. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Israeli Raz Segal, program director of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem historians Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman, the majority of academics engaged with the history of the Nazi genocide of the Jews have stayed remarkably silent, while some have openly denied Israel's crimes in Gaza, or accused their more critical colleagues of incendiary speech, wild exaggeration, well poisoning and antisemitism. In December the Holocaust scholar Norman J.W. Goda opined that "genocide charges like this have long been used as a fig leaf for broader challenges to Israel's legitimacy," expressing his worry that "they have cheapened the gravity of the word genocide itself." This "genocide libel," as Dr. Goda referred to it in an essay, "deploys a range of antisemitic tropes," including "the coupling of the genocide charge with the deliberate killing of children, images of whom are ubiquitous on NGO, social media, and other platforms that charge Israel with genocide." In other words, showing images of Palestinian children ripped apart by U.S.-made bombs launched by Israeli pilots is, in this view, an antisemitic act. Most recently, Dr. Goda and a respected historian of Europe, Jeffrey Herf, wrotein The Washington Post that "the genocide accusation hurled against Israel draws on deep wells of fear and hatred" found in "radical interpretations of both Christianity and Islam." It "has shifted opprobrium from Jews as a religious/ethnic group to the state of Israel, which it depicts as inherently evil." *** What are the ramifications of this rift between genocide scholars and Holocaust historians? This is not merely a squabble within academe. The memory culture created in recent decades around the Holocaust encompasses much more than the genocide of the Jews. It has come to play a crucial role in politics, education and identity. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Museums dedicated to the Holocaust have served as models for representations of other genocides around the world. Insistence that the lessons of the Holocaust demand the promotion of tolerance, diversity, antiracism and support for migrants and refugees, not to mention human rights and international humanitarian law, is rooted in an understanding of the universal implications of this crime in the heart of Western civilization at the peak of modernity. Discrediting genocide scholars who call out Israel's genocide in Gaza as antisemitic threatens to erode the foundation of genocide studies: the ongoing need to define, prevent, punish and reconstruct the history of genocide. Suggesting that this endeavor is motivated instead by malign interests and sentiments — that it is driven by the very hatred and prejudice that was at the root of the Holocaust — is not only morally scandalous, it provides an opening for a politics of denialism and impunity as well. By the same token, when those who have dedicated their careers to teaching and commemorating the Holocaust insist on ignoring or denying Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza, they threaten to undermine everything that Holocaust scholarship and commemoration have stood for in the past several decades. That is, the dignity of every human being, respect for the rule of law and the urgent need never to let inhumanity take over the hearts of people and steer the actions of nations in the name of security, national interest and sheer vengeance. Image Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times What I fear is that in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide, it will no longer be possible to continue teaching and researching the Holocaust in the same manner we did before. Because the Holocaust has been so relentlessly invoked by the state of Israel and its defenders as a cover-up for the crimes of the I.D.F., People at a beach and in the water as the sun sets. the study and remembrance of the Holocaust could lose its claim to be concerned with universal justice and retreat into the same ethnic ghetto in which it began its life at the end of World War II — as a marginalized preoccupation by the remnants of a marginalized people, an ethnically specific event, before it succeeded, decades later, to find its rightful place as a lesson and a warning for humanity as a whole. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Just as worrisome is the prospect that the study of genocide as a whole will not survive the accusations of antisemitism, leaving us without the crucial community of scholars and international jurists to stand in the breach at a time when the rise of intolerance, racial hatred, populism and authoritarianism is threatening the values that were at the core of these scholarly, cultural and political endeavors of the 20th century. Perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name. Israel will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity. That, despite all the horrific suffering we are currently watching, is a valuable thing, and may, in the long run, help Israel face the future in a healthier, more rational and less fearful and violent manner. This will do nothing to compensate for the staggering amount of death and suffering of Palestinians. But an Israel liberated from the overwhelming burden of the Holocaust may finally come to terms with the inescapable need for its seven million Jewish citizens to share the land with the seven million Palestinians living in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in peace, equality and dignity. That will be the only just reckoning. Omer Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com. Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, lnstagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsAppand Threads. Related Content ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 11:27 AM Martin Wasserman <dee 3erlook@ao_.com> wrote: The bill introduced by anti -Israel legislators has no chance of passing. Nevertheless, US support for Israel cannot be taken for granted. It will continue only as long as the US feels that such support is in its own national interest. The truth is, the US gets a very good return from its investment in Israel. Despite the massive international campaign of slander, defamation and baseless accusations (genocide, apartheid, etc.) designed to undermine the Jewish state, the fact remains that Israel is America's strongest and most reliable ally in the Middle East, and a powerful first line of defense against our common civilizational enemies. Martin Wasserman On Jul 17, 2025, at 9:28 PM, Aram James <abj pol@gmail.com> wrote: Members of Congress introduced the first ever bill that proactively seeks to prevent the U.S. from sending some of the worst weapons to the Israeli military. The Israeli military has massacred over 58,000 people in Gaza, with the true death toll likely far higher. Since the beginning of Israel's genocide lin Gaza, in October 2023, the US has given more than $30 billion in taxpayer -funded weapons to Israel to enable its atrocities, indirect violation of U.S. and international human rights laws. Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (Illinois) introduced HR 3565, the Block the Bombs Act, on May 21. Currently 26 other representatives are cosponsoring. This historic legislation that would prevent Trump from sending some of the worst -offender weapons that Israel has used to carry out genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Tell your member of Congress to endorse the Block the Bombs Act! ,vpac=ion.org/tell-congress-s..pport- he -block -= he- comas-Gct For local info: southbay@.ewishvoiceforpeace.org Members of Congress introduced the first ever bill that proactively seeks to prevent the U.S. from sending some of the worst weapons to the Israeli military. The Israeli military has massacred over 58,000 people in Gaza, with the true death toll likely far higher. Since the beginning of Israel's genocide lin Gaza, in October 2023, the US has given more than $30 billion in taxpayer -funded weapons to Israel to enable its atrocities, indirect violation of U.S. and international human rights laws. Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (Illinois) introduced HR 3565, the Block the Bombs Act, on May 21. Currently 26 other representatives are cosponsoring. This historic legislation that would prevent Trump from sending some of the worst -offender weapons that Israel has used to carry out genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Tell your member of Congress to endorse the Block the Bombs Act! ,vpac:ion.org/,ell-congress-s pport-,he-block-,he- oomos-Ec, For local info: southbay@:ewishvoiceforpeace.org From: Martin Wasserman To: Aram James Cc: Jeff Rosen; Jav Bovarskv; Veenker, Vicki; h.etzko(algmail.com; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Rai Javacev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneicer, James; Bincer, Andrew; Gardener, Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanda Conaway; yolanda; Don Austin; jgreerKadailynewsgroup.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonga; roberta ahlguist; Baker, Rob; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlcuist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Freddie.Quintana(alsen.ca.gov; Jeff Conrad; Burt, Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District9@sanjoseca.gov; District4@sanjoseca.gov; District5@sanjoseca.gov; District2@sanjoseca.gov; EPA Today; Gennadv Shevner; Council, City; citv.council@menlopark.00v; Nash, Betsy; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero@cityofepa.orq; Cribbs, Anne; <michael.gennaco@oirgroup.com>; Stump, Molly; board@pausd.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Rodriquez, Miguel; Cait James; Tim James; Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman@assembly.ca.gov; Zelkha, Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enbera, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl, Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Tanaka. Greg; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberley; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq; Greg Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauinq; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee Subject: Re: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Friday, July 18, 2025 11:27:56 AM Attachments: Block the Bombs 1 2 sheet.docx CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. The bill introduced by anti -Israel legislators has no chance of passing. Nevertheless, US support for Israel cannot be taken for granted. It will continue only as long as the US feels that such support is in its own national interest. The truth is, the US gets a very good return from its investment in Israel. Despite the massive international campaign of slander, defamation and baseless accusations (genocide, apartheid, etc.) designed to undermine the Jewish state, the fact remains that Israel is America's strongest and most reliable ally in the Middle East, and a powerful first line of defense against our common civilizational enemies. Martin Wasserman On Jul 17, 2025, at 9:28 PM, Aram James <abjpol@gmail.com> wrote: Members of Congress introduced the first ever bill that proactively seeks to prevent the U.S. from sending some of the worst weapons to the Israeli military. The Israeli military has massacred over 58,000 people in Gaza, with the true death toll likely far higher. Since the beginning of Israel's genocide lin Gaza, in October 2023, the US has given more than $30 billion in taxpayer -funded weapons to Israel to enable its atrocities, indirect violation of U.S. and international human rights laws. Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (Illinois) introduced HR 3565, the Block the Bombs Act, on May 21. Currently 26 other representatives are cosponsoring. This historic legislation that would prevent Trump from sending some of the worst -offender weapons that Israel has used to carry out genocide against Palestinians in Gaza TeII your member of Congress to endorse the Block the Bombs Act! Jvpaction.org/tell-congress-support-the-block-the-bombs-act For local info: southbayCa? ewishvoiceforpeace.org Members of Congress introduced the first ever bill that proactively seeks to prevent the U.S. from sending some of the worst weapons to the Israeli military. The Israeli military has massacred over 58,000 people in Gaza, with the true death toll likely far higher. Since the beginning of Israel's genocide lin Gaza, in October 2023, the US has given more than $30 billion in taxpayer -funded weapons to Israel to enable its atrocities, indirect violation of U.S. and international human rights laws. Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (Illinois) introduced HR 3565, the Block the Bombs Act, on May 21. Currently 26 other representatives are cosponsoring. This historic legislation that would prevent Trump from sending some of the worst -offender weapons that Israel has used to carry out genocide against Palestinians in Gaza TeII your member of Congress to endorse the Block the Bombs Act! ,vpac:ion.orgLell-congress-s... pport-.he-block-}he-bombs-ac For local info: southbay@;ewishvoiceforpeace.org TELL CONGRESS: BLOCK THE BOMBS „„, • �1': JVPACT/ON Members of Congress introduced the first ever bill that proactively seeks to prevent the U.S. from sending some of the worst weapons to the Israeli military. The Israeli military has massacred over 58,000 people in Gaza, with the true death toll likely far higher. Since the beginning of Israel's genocide lin Gaza, in October 2023, the US has given more than $30 billion in taxpayer -funded weapons to Israel to enable its atrocities, indirect violation of U.S. and international human rights laws. Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (Illinois) introduced HR 3565, the Block the Bombs Act, on May 21. Currently 26 other representatives are cosponsoring. This historic legislation that would prevent Trump from sending some of the worst -offender weapons that Israel has used to carry out genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Tell your member of Congress to endorse the Block the Bombs Act! Jvpaction.org/tell-congress-support-the-block-the-bombs-act For local info: southbay@'ewishvoiceforpeace.org TELL CONGRESS:BLOCK TNE BOMBS Members of Congress introduced the first ever bill that proactively seeks to prevent the U.S. from sending some of the worst weapons to the Israeli military. The Israeli military has massacred over 58,000 people in Gaza, with the true death toll likely far higher. Since the beginning of Israel's genocide lin Gaza, in October 2023, the US has given more than $30 billion in taxpayer -funded weapons to Israel to enable its atrocities, indirect violation of U.S. and international human rights laws. Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (Illinois) introduced HR 3565, the Block the Bombs Act, on May 21. Currently 26 other representatives are cosponsoring. This historic legislation that would prevent Trump from sending some of the worst -offender weapons that Israel has used to carry out genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Tell your member of Congress to endorse the Block the Bombs Act! Jvpaction.org/tel I -congress-su pport-the-block-the-bombs-act For local info: southbay@jewishvoiceforpeace.org From: Aram James To: Lotus Fong; Roberta Ahlcuist; Sean Allen; james pitkin; Gardener, Liz; Pat M; Rick Callender; Don Austin; Gerry Gras; Dana St. George; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Council, City; GRP-City Council; citv.counciMmenlooark.gov; Bill Newell; Nash, Betsy; dcombs menlopark.gov; Dave Price; Diana Diamond; <michael.gennaco(@oircroup.com>; Rodriguez, Micuel; Damon Silver; sharon jackson; David Pioer; Seher Awan; Reckdahl, Keith; Raymond Goins Subject: Dozens come out to support protesters who vandalized Stanford president"s office Date: Friday, July 18, 2025 9:32:55 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Great comments, Lotus!! Dozens come out to support protesters who vandalized Stanford president's office - Palo Alto Online https://www.paloaltoonline.com/stanford-university/2025/07/ 17/dozens-show-out-to- su )ort-protesters-who-vanc,alized-stanford- xesic.ents-office/ From: Postmaster To: Council, City Subject: You have new held messages Date: Friday, July 18, 2025 7:15:50 AM I o You have new held messages You can release all of your held messages and permit or block future emails from the senders, or manage messages individually. Release all Permit all Block all You can also manage held messages in your Personal Portal. Spam Policy Guinn@blchpneumatic.com Global Success & Innovation: Join 100+ Countries with BLCH Pneumatic 2025-07-17 23:00 Release Permit Block Release all Permit all Block all © 2019 Mimecast Services Limited. From: Aram James To: Veenker, Vicki; Jeff Rosen; Jay Boyarsky; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; assemblymember.berman assemblv.ca.gov; Josh Becker; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq Cc: h.etzko@gmail.com; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Marty Wasserman; Marina Lopez; Cait James; Tim James; Salem Ailuni; Figueroa, Eric; Foley, Michael; Rick Callender; Tom DuBois; Holman, Karen (external); Kaloma Smith; Lori Meyers; Gennady Sheyner; Sheree Roth; planning.commission@cityofpaloalto.0rq; ParkRec Commission; Burt, Patrick; Gerry Gras; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Jasso, Tamara; Lotus Fong; Reifschneicer, lames; james pitkin; jgreen@dailynewsgroup.com; GRP-City Council; city.council@menlooark.gov; Perron, Zachary; roberta ahlauist; Robert Salonoa; Roberta Ahlauist; Baker, Rob; Rowena Chiu; aoard@oausd.orq; district)@bos.scccov.orq; board@valleywater.orq; BoardOperations; boardfeedback@smcgov.orq Subject: Withdrawn from Senate Ed Com AB 715 flyer_7.12.25 Date: Thursday, July 17, 2025 10:08:39 PM Attachments: Withdrawn from Senate Ed Com AB 715 flyer 7.12.25.docx CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. AB 715 Withdrawn from Senate Education Com. Agenda! Thanks to the tremendous efforts of the broad CA Coalition to Defend Public Education, AB 715 was pulled from the July 9th Senate Education Committee agenda! AB 715 proposes to streamline the process to make complaints against teachers and school districts for permitting so-called "antisemitic" lessons, materials or conversations in class. This bill falsely defines antisemitism as any mention of Palestine or criticism of Israel. Anonymous complaints would be allowed, and complaints would go directly to a proposed state Coordinator on Antisemitism, who would not need to consult with local educational entities. Because of the censorship proposed in this bill, it has been opposed by the CA School Boards Association, CA Latino School Boards Association, CA Teachers Association, the ACLU and over 70 community and labororganizations. The fact that AB 715 was suddenly pulled from the Education Committee shows people power works. The thousands of emails and phone calls our community members made to senate offices made clear that the public overwhelmingly rejects this legislation. As a result, the pro -Israeli lobby groups pushing this bill didn't have enough votes to ensure passage through the committee, so they pulled it from the agenda. This is an important victory but likely not the end of our fight. The politicians and lobby groups seeking to censor Palestine and repress any criticism of the State of Israel are expected to either introduce a new bill or revive and amend AB 715, probably in August, so we must remain vigilant! We will ask you to mobilize again later this summer if this bill reemerges. Sumud! Solidarity! CA Palestine Solidarity Coalition & CA Coalition to Defend Public Education https://defendcaeducation.org Local Info: southbay@jewishvoiceforpeace.org AB 715 Withdrawn from Senate Education Com. Agenda! Thanks to the tremendous efforts of the broad CA Coalition to Defend Public Education, AB 715 was pulled from the July 9th Senate Education Committee agenda! AB 715 proposes to streamline the process to make complaints against teachers and school districts for permitting so-called "antisemitic" lessons, materials or conversations in class. This bill falsely defines antisemitism as any mention of Palestine or criticism of Israel. Anonymous complaints would be allowed, and complaints would go directly to a proposed state Coordinator on Antisemitism, who would not need to consult with local educational entities. Because of the censorship proposed in this bill, it has been opposed by the CA School Boards Association, CA Latino School Boards Association, CA Teachers Association, the ACLU and over 70 community and labor organizations. The fact that AB 715 was suddenly pulled from the Education Committee shows people power works. The thousands of emails and phone calls our community members made to senate offices made clear that the public overwhelmingly rejects this legislation. As a result, the pro -Israeli lobby groups pushing this bill didn't have enough votes to ensure passage through the committee, so they pulled it from the agenda. This is an important victory but likely not the end of our fight. The politicians and lobby groups seeking to censor Palestine and repress any criticism of the State of Israel are expected to either introduce a new bill or revive and amend AB 715, probably in August, so we must remain vigilant! We will ask you to mobilize again later this summer if this bill reemerges. Sumud! Solidarity! CA Palestine Solidarity Coalition & CA Coalition to Defend Public Education https://defendcaeducation.org Local Info: southbay@jewishvoiceforpeace.org AB 715 Withdrawn from Senate Education Com. Agenda! Thanks to the tremendous efforts of the broad CA Coalition to Defend Public Education, AB 715 was pulled from the July 9th Senate Education Committee agenda! AB 715 proposes to streamline the process to make complaints against teachers and school districts for permitting so-called "antisemitic" lessons, materials or conversations in class. This bill falsely defines antisemitism as any mention of Palestine or criticism of Israel. Anonymous complaints would be allowed, and complaints would go directly to a proposed state Coordinator on Antisemitism, who would not need to consult with local educational entities. Because of the censorship proposed in this bill, it has been opposed by the CA School Boards Association, CA Latino School Boards Association, CA Teachers Association, the ACLU and over 70 community and labor organizations. The fact that AB 715 was suddenly pulled from the Education Committee shows people power works. The thousands of emails and phone calls our community members made to senate offices made clear that the public overwhelmingly rejects this legislation. As a result, the pro -Israeli lobby groups pushing this bill didn't have enough votes to ensure passage through the committee, so they pulled it from the agenda. This is an important victory but is likely not the end of our fight. The politicians and lobby groups seeking to censor Palestine and repress any criticism of the State of Israel are expected to either introduce a new bill or revive and amend AB 715, probably in August, so we must remain vigilant! We will ask you to mobilize again later this summer if this bill reemerges. Sumud! Solidarity! CA Palestine Solidarity Coalition & CA Coalition to Defend Public Education https://defendcaeducation.org Local Info: southbay@jewishvoiceforpeace.org From: Aram James To: Jeff Rosen; Jay Boyarsky; Veenker, Vicki Cc: h.etzko@gmail.com; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23; Marty Wasserman; Foley, Michael; Emily Mibach; Dave Price; planning.commission(acityofpaloalto.0rq; GRP-City Council; Raymond Goins; Rai Javadev; Patrice Ventresca; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Reifschneicer, James; Binder, Andrew; Gardener, Liz; Diana Diamond; Yolanda Conaway; yolanda; Don Austin; jgreen(alcailvnewsaroup.com; Human Relations Commission; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Perron, Zachary; Robert Salonga; roberta ahlcuist; Baker Rob; Robert. Jonsen; Roberta Ahlcuist; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Freddie.Ouintana(asen.ca.gov; Jeff Conrad; Burt, Patrick; PD Kristina Bell; Bill Newell; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; Councilmember Chappie Jones; District9(asanjoseca.gov; District4(@sanjoseca.gov; District5(@sanioseca.gov; District2(asanioseca.gov; EPA Today; Gennadv Shevner; Council, City; city.counciMmenlopark.gov; Nash, Betsy; Vara Ramakrishnan; cromero(acityofepa.org; Cribbs, Anne; <michael.gennaco(aloirgroup.com>; Stump, Molly; board(apausc.orq; BoardOperations; Damon Silver; Rodriguez, Miguel; Cait James; Tim James; Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman(a�assembly.ca.gov; Zelkha Mila; dennis burns; DuJuan Green; Gerry Gras; Enberg, Nicholas; Rowena Chiu; Barberini, Christopher; Reckdahl. Keith; Dana St. George; Blackshire, Geoffrey; Tanaka, Greg; Tom DuBois; Friends of Cubberley; Supervisor Susan Ellenberq; Greg Tanaka; Bil Barber; Ed Lauinq; Yi Chen; Donna Wallach; Mickie Winkler; Supervisor Otto Lee Subject: Block the Bombs_1_2 sheet Date: Thursday, July 17, 2025 9:29:35 PM Attachments: Block the Bombs 1 2 sheet.docx CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Members of Congress introduced the first ever bill that proactively seeks to prevent the U.S. from sending some of the worst weapons to the Israeli military. The Israeli military has massacred over 58,000 people in Gaza, with the true death toll likely far higher. Since the beginning of Israel's genocide Iin Gaza, in October 2023, the US has given more than $30 billion in taxpayer -funded weapons to Israel to enable its atrocities, indirect violation of U.S. and international human rights laws. Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (Illinois) introduced HR 3565, the Block the Bombs Act, on May 21. Currently 26 other representatives are cosponsoring. This historic legislation that would prevent Trump from sending some of the worst -offender weapons that Israel has used to carry out genocide against Palestinians in Gaza TeII your member of Congress to endorse the Block the Bombs Act! Jvpaction.org/tell-congress-support-the-block-the-bombs-act For local info: southbayCa? ewishvoiceforpeace.org Members of Congress introduced the first ever bill that proactively seeks to prevent the U.S. from sending some of the worst weapons to the Israeli military. The Israeli military has massacred over 58,000 people in Gaza, with the true death toll likely far higher. Since the beginning of Israel's genocide lin Gaza, in October 2023, the US has given more than $30 billion in taxpayer -funded weapons to Israel to enable its atrocities, indirect violation of U.S. and international human rights laws. Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (Illinois) introduced HR 3565, the Block the Bombs Act, on May 21. Currently 26 other representatives are cosponsoring. This historic legislation that would prevent Trump from sending some of the worst -offender weapons that Israel has used to carry out genocide against Palestinians in Gaza TeII your member of Congress to endorse the Block the Bombs Act! ,vpaction.org/ell-congress-s...pport-the-block-_he-bombs-Ec For local info: southbay@:ewishvoiceforpeace.org TELL CONGRESS: BLOCK THE BOMBS „„, • �1': JVPACT/ON Members of Congress introduced the first ever bill that proactively seeks to prevent the U.S. from sending some of the worst weapons to the Israeli military. The Israeli military has massacred over 58,000 people in Gaza, with the true death toll likely far higher. Since the beginning of Israel's genocide lin Gaza, in October 2023, the US has given more than $30 billion in taxpayer -funded weapons to Israel to enable its atrocities, indirect violation of U.S. and international human rights laws. Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (Illinois) introduced HR 3565, the Block the Bombs Act, on May 21. Currently 26 other representatives are cosponsoring. This historic legislation that would prevent Trump from sending some of the worst -offender weapons that Israel has used to carry out genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Tell your member of Congress to endorse the Block the Bombs Act! Jvpaction.org/tell-congress-support-the-block-the-bombs-act For local info: southbay@'ewishvoiceforpeace.org TELL CONGRESS:BLOCK TNE BOMBS Members of Congress introduced the first ever bill that proactively seeks to prevent the U.S. from sending some of the worst weapons to the Israeli military. The Israeli military has massacred over 58,000 people in Gaza, with the true death toll likely far higher. Since the beginning of Israel's genocide lin Gaza, in October 2023, the US has given more than $30 billion in taxpayer -funded weapons to Israel to enable its atrocities, indirect violation of U.S. and international human rights laws. Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (Illinois) introduced HR 3565, the Block the Bombs Act, on May 21. Currently 26 other representatives are cosponsoring. This historic legislation that would prevent Trump from sending some of the worst -offender weapons that Israel has used to carry out genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Tell your member of Congress to endorse the Block the Bombs Act! Jvpaction.org/tel I -congress-su pport-the-block-the-bombs-act For local info: southbay@jewishvoiceforpeace.org From: Ash B To: Bulatao, Eric Cc: City Mar; Council, City Subject: Re: Homeless RVs parked on Greer and West Bayshore Date: Thursday, July 17, 2025 8:51:44 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Dear Eric et al. Since my last note to you there are 2 more RVs that got added and additional cones added to take up further parking space. We hope and pray that there are no traffic mishaps given the density of cars crossing the road and children getting picked/dropped off. It's disheartening to see the lack of any action on the part of the city officials. Ash On Jul 13, 2025, at 9:40 PM, Ash B <ashtradebiz@yahoo.com> wrote: Dear Eric, Thank you for your detailed response. Appreciate you laying out the current scenario and constraints you have in dealing with the issues. Per my point, I have a few observations and possible suggestions regarding this particular situation. 1. I have not seen a Community service officer patrolling Greer Park area on Colorado Ave in a very long time. I doubt if there are any citations written to the vehicles especially RVs parked here for months now. If there is a place to view these public records, I would certainly be keen to review. 2. The RVs are exacerbating the traffic and hygiene situation. Colorado Ave is a high traffic area and there have been several near miss traffic accidents where kids are being continuously been dropped/picked up. The street parking becomes a challenge especially since a new townhome complex has come up and cars are being parked even on West Bayshore ( which is a designated No parking road) 3. The RVs are permanently parked and they also put orange cones around them to usurp more space so other cars cannot be parked. 4. These violations, along with the parking on West Bayshore is done with impunity and ostensibly no action is taken. 5. Very recently, I observed that an entire colony of RVs were cleared overnight and marked with no parking signs in Milpitas around Ranch Drive. Palo Alto is a safe and orderly city and we want to be compassionate to the folks who are underprivileged but these encroachments are becoming a big challenge for residents and potentially causing law and order issues. I'm very sure there are legal remedies for your team to handle this situation. If there are any other authorities or legal avenues we need to explore to help you, pls do let me know. Happy to oblige and thank you for your service! Ash On Jul 10, 2025, at 3:35 PM, Bulatao, Eric <Eric.Bulatao@paloalto.gov> wrote: Dear Ash, Thank you for your continued engagement and for raising these concerns. As the supervisor of the Palo Alto Police Department's Special Problems Detail (SPD), I want to provide some clarity on what our team does and how we've been addressing the RV situation near Greer Park. SPD is responsible for responding to quality -of -life concerns, crime trends, including issues related to vehicle dwellings, and unhoused individuals. Over the past several weeks, we have conducted regular checks in this area, issued citations, and towed several vehicles that were eligible under the law. Additionally, we've made multiple referrals to LifeMoves, a local outreach agency that works directly with the unhoused to connect them with services and permanent housing options. We understand the frustration many residents feel when it seems like enforcement is limited. However, towing inhabited RVs poses significant challenges, including locating available tow companies willing and equipped to remove and store these types of vehicles, legal limitations on removing occupied dwellings, and the high cost of towing and storage. Even though the municipal code in Palo Alto does not require outreach before towing the vehicle, this has been the practice for many years to avoid potential constitutional violations, especially when the RV is inhabited. That said, we are not ignoring the problem. We will continue monitoring the area, issuing citations when violations occur, towing when legally and logistically feasible, and referring individuals to outreach services to balance enforcement with compassion and long-term solutions. We appreciate your patience as we work within these constraints and remain committed to addressing the safety, hygiene, and traffic impacts affecting the community. Respectfully, Sergeant Eric Bulatao Palo Alto Police Department Special Problems Detail 275 Forest Avenue Palo Alto, CA 94301 Office: (650) 838-2866 From: Ash B <ashtradebiz@yahoo.com> Sent: Friday, June 27, 2025 6:48 PM To: Lu, George <George.Lu@paloalto.gov>; City Mgr <CityMgr@paloalto.gov>; Council, City <city.council@PaloAlto.gov> Cc: Ashish Bhattacharya <ashtradebizPyahoo.com> Subject: Re: Homeless RVs parked on Greer and West Bayshore CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Thank you George for your response. Hopefully you folks will come up with a solution. Meanwhile the situation is getting bad to worse due to lack of enforcement. Now we see a lot of trash piling up on the sidewalk. The RV residents are putting cones to block off additional parking and a few more RVs have come in since you responded. There is absolutely NO Community service officer. Greer Park is a very busy park with a lot of kids playing and parents are driving and picking/dropping. Traffic is an absolute nightmare and the number of RVs are exacerbating the situation. Please do something about this. I'm copying the city manager for visibility and action. Thank you Ash On Jun 21, 2025, at 11:44 AM, Lu, George <George.LuCdpaloalto.gov> wrote: Hi Ash, Thank you for writing in. I was speaking with the city manager on Wednesday about these kind of RVs. The city is revisiting its approach for noticing, ticketing, and towing RVs, with an emphasis for public health risks. I don't have a lot of details, particularly those that I can share right now, but there will be some enforcement changes over the near future. In August, the Council's Policy and Services Committee will also discuss overall homeless / RV policies before more discussion in the full council. I'd welcome more public comment and any updates you observe. I appreciate the patience. We can do better for both RV residents, and the environment, businesses, homes, etc.. Best, George Lu Council Member, City of Palo Alto Cell Phone: 650-307-7143 Book an Appointment From: Ash B <ashtradebiz@yahoo.com> Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2025 6:43 AM To: Lauing, Ed <Ed.Lauing@oaloalto.gov> Cc: Lu, George <George.Lu@aaloalto.gov>; Burt, Patrick <Pat.Burt@PaloAlto.gov>; Lythcott-Haims, Julie <Julie.LythcottHaims@PaloAlto.;ov> Subject: Re: Homeless RVs parked on Greer and West Bayshore CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Dear Council members, Can I get an update or at least an acknowledgement to my numerous requests? I have reached out to the PA police department also. Is there any other way to officially submit a call to action? Twitter or press? Thank you On Jun 16, 2025, at 9:20 PM, Ash B <ashtradebiz@yahoo.com> wrote: Dear Council members ( Pat, George and Julie) I'm having a hard time reaching our esteemed mayor since the last couple of weeks, so reaching out to you folks. As you see in my communication below, I'm highlighting the issue of homeless RVs being parked ( growing in numbers by the day) on Colorado Ave and West Bayshore. This is a very busy road and the traffic and driving hazards exacerbates especially during the weekend when there are soccer matches. There are a lot of small children getting dropped and picked around and the big RVs ( some even have orange cones that take up more parking space) This is a traffic hazard and a hygiene issue. I'm requesting implementation of the 72 hour parking rule at the very least. Haven't seen a community service officer around in months! We have personally voted for some of you to be in office and I hope you will kindly take action. Thank you Ashish On Jun 11, 2025, at 6:31 PM, Ash B <ashtradebiz@yahoo.com> wrote: Dear Mr Mayor, Could you please acknowledge and let us know what we are doing or able to do about the situation? Should I visit the City council office? I spoke with the PD and they also suggested the same. I'm genuinely worried about citizen traffic safety and hygiene around the area. Thank you On Jun 8, 2025, at 12:52 AM, Ash B <ashtradebiz@yahoo.com> wrote: Dear Mr.Mayor, I have tried to raise this issue with the abandoned vehicles hotline several times but to no avail. I believe there are no community service officers that come to the Greer park area ever. We are alluding to the growing number of Homeless RVs parked on Colorado Ave opposite Greer Park. While we are sympathetic to the unhoused population, the problem of the RVs parked at this location is exarcebating the traffic and parking snarls due to the large number of soccer games during the weekend and also the construction workers who park there during weekdays. There have been several near miss accidents due to views being blocked by the RVs. Additionally there is a hygiene issue also around these vehicles and is unsafe for pedestrians. Could you pls take a look at the issue and resolve it before we run into bigger problems? Thank you Residents around Greer Park. From: Aram James To: Veenker, Vicki Cc: Reckdalt Keith; Shikada Ed; Ed Lauinq; Lauing, Ec; Dana St. George; Gennadv Shevner; Gerry Gras; Josh Becker; assemblymember.berman(aassembly.ca.gov; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Deleaate, Assembly District 23; s.ennis burns; Don Austin; Yolanda Conaway; EXT.Richard.Ho)bs; Rick Callender; Burt, Patrick; GRP-City Council; Council, City; Palo Alto Renters" Association; planning.commission@ citvofpaloalto.0rq; ParkRec Commission; Dave Price; Emily Mibach; Gennacv Shevner; EPA Today; city.counciI menlopark.gov; Nash, Betsy; dcombs(@menlopark.gov; Raymond Goins; Reifschneider, James; Binder, Andrew; Cait James; Aram James; lames pitkin; iosh(alsaniosespotliuht.com; joshgoshsalcman.com; Zelkha, Mila; Bryan Gobin; h.etzko(agmail.com;<michael.gennaco(aoirgroup.com>; Foley, Michael; Figueroa, Eric; Lotus Fong; Marina Lopez; Pat M; The Office of Mayor Matt Mahan; board(apausd.org; board(a valleywater.orq; BoardOperations; boardfeedback(asmcgov.orq; Bill Newell; BiI Barber; Patricia.GuerreroCaliud.ca.uov; Patrice Ventresca; Friends of Cubberlev; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; roberta ahlcuist; jgreen(adailynewsgroup.com; Raj Jayadev; Baker Rob; Jeff Rosen; Jay Boyarsky; Lewis fames; Salem Ailuni; Stump, Molly; Sean Allen; Cribbs, Anne; Templeton, Cari; Tim James; Lori Meyers; Sheree Roth; Palo Alto Free Press; Diana Diamond; Human Relations Commission; Lewis James; Afanasiev, Alex; Jensen, Eric; Enberg, Nicholas; Barberini, Christopher; Rowena Chiu; Nicole Chiu-Wanq; Tom DuBois; Greg Tanaka; Holman. Karen (external); Jeff Conrad; Perron, Zachary; citycouncikkmountainview.gov; Clerk, City; City Attorney; Rocriauez, Miguel; Damon Silver; Daniel Kottke; Mickie Winkler; mark weiss Subject: I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza Date: Thursday, July 17, 2025 4:12:06 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. July 17, 2025 Hi Folks, Please take a moment to listen to what Omer Bartov, a US -Israeli citizen and professor at Brown University who served in the Israeli military and is an internationally recognized Holocaust expert, said today on Democracy Now. His insights are particularly relevant as we consider the position the Palo Alto City Council should take on AB 715, the resolution to block weapons shipments to Israel, and the ongoing genocide in Palestine. After hearing from Professor Bartov, I believe you will agree that there is only one morally defensible stance we can take on each of these issues. Best, Avram "Eliminate The State of Israel Now" ( one state solution!) Finkelstein (aka Aram James) P.S. Palo Alto Vice Mayor Vicki Veenker: Now is your opportunity to say it loud: End The Genocide In Palestine Now!!!! "I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza I Democracy Now! https://www.democracynow.org/2025/7/17/omer_bartov From: Postmaster To: Council, City Subject: You have new held messages Date: Thursday, July 17, 2025 12:13:37 PM 1 You have new held messages You can release all of your held messages and permit or block future emails from the senders, or manage messages individually. Release all Permit all Block all You can also manage held messages in your Personal Portal. Spam Policy christinajoanwebseo@outlook.com RE: Dedicated Remote Recruiter ! 2025-07-17 08:54 Release Permit Block Spam Policy kortneyrowe anmyperfectwebsites.com Let's Elevate Your Online Presence 2025-07-17 08:59 Release Permit Block Release all Permit all Block all © 2019 Mimecast Services Limited. From: fnattOevolutionarvteams coal To: fridaysforfutureoaloaltoraamail.com: Palo-AltoCotfridaysforfutureusa.orq Subject: FFF Follow Up from July 11 (Week #183) Date: Thursday, July 17, 2025 9:57:08 AM Attachments: im ae003.ong CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. This message needs your attention . Some Recipients have never replied to this person. Mark Safe Report Powered by Mimecast Blaine joined us for the first time and contributed the land acknowledgment, reminding us that we are on unceded Muwekma Ohlone land. Colonization and the forceful acquisition of land became a notable theme for us on Friday —more later. Meanwhile, Blaine shared that he is a tech wizard and wicked chocolate maker. We're definitely looking forward to sampling his magic! Thanks for joining us, Blaine! Rick is delighted to be organizing with Indivisible Mid -Peninsula and preparing for the Good Trouble Lives On rally in San Mateo. We're sorry he can't join us for the rally in Palo Alto, but delighted that he will be making Good Trouble on the peninsula. Thanks, Rick! Brigette expressed concern for the flood victims in Texas and FEMA's horrifically inadequate response under the leadership of Kristi Noem. These floods, and now the flooding in the Northeast this week, highlight that we can now longer count on the federal government for assistance in this era of never-ending, globalwarming-induced extreme weather catastrophes. We must build up resilience at the local level to mitigate harm. Thanks, Brigitte, for alerting us. Ingrid's son Stephan joined us as we celebrated Ingrid's performance of her updated version of Our Country `Tis of Thee at Stand Up for Science and Sanity. If you listen closely, you can hear the audience singing along with Ingrid. Listen to her beautiful performance hem. Thanks, Ingrid, and thanks Stephan for joining us. Pria has recovered from her surgery and was well enough to join us. Welcome back Prial Since many people are asking her how she is doing, she has taken to responding, "Is he still president?" We all got a chuckle out of that. George reflected on the difference between earnings and profits, noting that the pursuit of profit is destroying our one -and -only habitable planet. Yes, indeed. Thanks to you both for joining us. Deboroh, a life-long biodiversity and climate activist, sadly announced that she will no longer attend our climate strikes. As a self-proclaimed Zionist, Deb cannot abide that some people in our group, notably your newsletter author, condemn the horrific ethnic cleansing— the forcible removal of native people from their land — that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza. I must admit that I struggle to understand how people who have been staunchly on the left their entire life can be so fully supportive of the far -right wing project led by Netanyahu. Deb left behind a leaflet and bid us farewell. More on the leaflet later. Debbie expressed admiration for the recent protests but shared that they are too physically demanding for her. She will look for actions she can do that are less physically demanding like calling representatives, writing letters and continuing to Learn as much as she can, including joining our weekly climate strike. Thanks, Debbie, for joining us! Your newsletter author Matt claimed that last week's new scientific paper about the SMOC (Southern Meridional Overturning Current) is the most important news on the planet, and nobody even knows about it! Antarctic sea ice suffered an abrupt and steep decline starting in 2015, and the newly released paper, based on CERES satellite data, demonstrated that starting in 2015 SMOC shifted bringing warmer, saltier water closer to the continent which is causing the melting and reduced refreezing of the sea ice. With reduced sea ice, glaciers can now more easily slip into the oceans accelerating sea -level rise. Also, ice reflects 90% of sunlight compared to 10% for ocean water, so with less sea ice the oceans can absorb the sun's energy thereby heating our planet. Since the shift in SMOC started in 2015 and has persisted now for ten years, it may be a tipping point that has tipped. (This tipping point wasn't even on my tipping point bingo card!) Well, now you know the news —buckle up, folks. Ian and Carol joined us to share their thoughts and feelings. They are encouraged by the focus on voting and voting rights that Indivisible is emphasizing, especially with the upcoming Good Trouble Lives On rally. See you at the rally, Ian and Carol! Mimi couLdn'tjoin us. She is recovering well after her surgery and looks forward to joining us again soon. She communicated thatJosh Becker's Pathways bill (SB 540) appears to be sidelined. After passing in the senate, it appears to be stalled in the assembly. We'll need to pay attention because Big Tech will regroup and try to move this forward again. But for the moment Mimi is celebrating! We wish Mimi a speedy recovery and hope she joins us again soon! Rebecca joined us after a years -Long hiatus. As our district 7 water district board representative, she has been working to bring more accountability to the water board and has received considerable pushback. Thanks, Rebecca, for fighting the good fight. Stephan asked that we discuss the leaflet that Deborah left behind. Coincidentally, Rebecca provided much of the information to Deborah for the leaflet. A fascinating, lengthy debate ensued. As time was short, we paused the conversation to take our picture. Afterwards, some continued the conversation and others left. Some expressed that they thought the debate went on too Long. I reminded them that one of our rules is "Do Not Monopolize the Conversation." At any time, anyone can invoke that rule if they think the conversation is monopolized. Meanwhile, our other rule is "Generous Listening." We want to ensure that everyone has a chance to express what is on their mind. With these guidelines in place, we can navigate even difficult conversations and ensure everyone feels heard. Indivisible Palo Alto Plus is doing an amazing job organizing this week's rally on Thursday 7/17 -TODAY! - with terrific speakers and many information tables. The rally program starts at 5:30, kicked off with songs by the Raging Grannies. Mitchell Park Band will perform before the rally at 4:30 and afterwards starting at 7. It will be a joyous event. Come join the fun! On Friday (7/18) we will debrief the Purge Palantir rally, the Good Trouble rally, and the Bannering 101 actions. Also, we will look towards upcoming actions and events. Keep Up the Fight! RISE UP AND RESIST! Upcoming Events • Thursday, July 17, 5:30 to 7PM: Good Trouble Lives On Voting Rights Rally, King Plaza, 250 Hamilton. Details sere. • Friday, July 18, Noon to 1:00: Climate Strike! —We meet at King Plaza in front of Palo Alto City Hall. • Every Wednesday, 4 to 6PM: Palo Alto Protests Elon Musk's Illegal Government Takeover on Wednesdays at the Testa Showroom, 4180 EL Camino Real. httos://www.mobilize.us/ipaplus/ • Every Saturday, Noon to 2PM, Testa Showroom at Stanford Shopping Center: Palo Alto Protests Elon Musk's Illegal Government Takeover. ittps://www.mobilize.us/ioaplus/ • Every Saturday, see link for time, Testa Showroom, 4180 EL Camino ReaL. Palo Alto Protests Eton Musk's Illegal Government Takeover. https://www.mobilize,ushoaplus/ • Friday, July 25, Noon to 1:00: Climate Strike!— We meet at King Plaza in front of Palo Alto City Hall. Palo Alto City Meetings: httos://www.cityogaloalto.org/Deoartments/City-Clerk/City-MeetingGro ps/Meeting-Agendas-and-Minutes Climate Community Center: httos://climatecommunitycenter.org/ Peninsula Peace and Justice Center calendar: httos://neaceandiustice.org/events-calendar/ Photos and Videos of Recent Actions Weekly photo: httos://ohotos.aop.goo.gU6REtHdEA1 hxU6oat8 Ingrid's beautiful performance: Ingrid Rogers performs at Stand Up for Science and Sanity What We Are Reading/Watching/Listening to: Climate Casino on Doomerism: https://climatecasino.net/2025/06/doomism-at-the-end-of-the-universe/ Reporting by Democracy Now! here Commentary by The Majority Report: here Heat Pumo Water Heater and Home Electrification Program Update As of: 7/1 6/2 5/1 3/31 HPWH full -service interest list signups 1411 1385 1364 1333 Site assessment agreements (SAA) sent 1411 1385 1364 1333 Signed SAAs 1169 1149 1127 1013 Completed site assessments 1064 1055 1040 1023 Installations Total Full Service HPWHs installed 433 427 421 414 Total DIY HPWH installed 132 131 126 115 Total Emergency HPWH installations 24 22 19 19 Total HPWHs installed 589 580 566 548 Target Installations 1000 1000 1000 1000 Monthly Installation Rate Monthly Installation Rate 9 14 18 14 Target Monthly Installation Rate 83 83 83 83 The Home Electrification Program (Phase 3 soft launched on 1,/21/2025) has had: 19 Heat Pump HVAC rebates & 22 HPWHs rebates, and 3 gas meter removal incentives . 43 Online assessments & HEPs completed (through QuitCarbon) . 40 Consultations given (byQuitCarbon's new Palo Alto expert) Follow Fridays For Future Palo Alto: Instagram: ittps://www.instagram.com/fridaysforfuture paloatto/ YouTube: httos://www.youtube.com/CTFridaysForFuturePaloAlto Email notifications of FFF Palo Alto events: https://mailchi.mp/c8c130127345/join-fridays-for-future-palo-alto You are receiving this email because you have expressed an interest in supporting climate action in Palo Alto. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, please let me know. Matt Schlegel Schlegel Consulting 650-924-8923 Author: Teamwork 9.0 Website: evolutionaryteams.com YouTube: voutube.com/channeVUCL <UMHuG4HVa831 s9yeoZ5O From: Deborah Goldeen To: publiccomment@caltrain.com Cc: Lo, Ria; Star -Lack, Sylvia; City Mgr; Police; Council, City; Nicole Rodia; Ellson, Penny Subject: For BATAC - Motorcycles on CalTrain Date: Thursday, July 17, 2025 9:06:30 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. There are packs of moatly male youths using CalTrain to transport their not street legal electric powered dirt "bikes" into several cities because 1) those cities, like Palo Alto, have good cycling infrastructure/bike-ped pathways and 2) not being in their own community, they can avoid being recognized. These scofflaw youth have knocked down and elderly couple in Palo Alto, they harassed a cyclist by repeatedly "buzzing" him on the Bol Park bike path and, just last week, three youths on electric powered cycles terrorized a twelve year -old girl - bumping into her wheel and calling her a dumbass - in Menlo Park. These dirt "bikes" have fixed "pedals"/foot rests (circled in red). This means they are legally classified as MOTORCYCLES. CalTrain does not allow motorcycles on board. Apparently CalTrain conductors don't know that. Please note: these bikes are so wide in their barrels that you can only fit one bike per stall. It seems reasonable that some kind of restriction on width of barrel/chassis could be instituted. Thank you for your consideration. Deborah Goldeen, Birch St., Palo Alto From: Aram James To: Veenker, Vicki Cc: Shikada, Ed; Council, City; Reckdahl, Keith; Gerry Gras; Dana St. George; Raymond Goins Subject: San Jose homeless population is still rising Date: Thursday, July 17, 2025 6:55:35 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. However, homelessness in Santa Clara County is higher than ever. There are 10,711 homeless people per preliminary data from a point -in -time count conducted in January — more than 800 people from two years prior. The county has yet to publicly release all data specific to local cities and municipalities. San Jose homeless population is still rising - San Jose Spotlight https://sanjoses lotlight.com/san-jose-homeless- o �ulation-is-still-rising/ From: League of Women Voters of Palo Alto To: Council, City Subject: LWVPA: Join us for Good Trouble THIS THURSDAY July 17 at 5:30pm at PA City Hall Date: Wednesday, July 16, 2025 7:25:38 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. JOIN US FOR GOOD TROUBLE LIVES ON: A NATIONAL DAY OF ACTION Thursday, July 17, 2025 5:30 to 7:00pm King Plaza, City Hall 250 Hamilton Ave, Palo Alto 94301 Show our electeds that we care! and want them to represent us well. Come out and be counted, and bring friends, neighbors and family! We'll have materials to educate voters, plus fun family -friendly activities. And if you can stay for a while, visit and chat with guests! Wear your white clothes and defiantly red lipstick - like the suffragettes did! "Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble... and help redeem the soul of America." - John Lewis, civil rights activist and US House of Representatives, Georgia's 5th congressional district, 1987-2020 Dear City Council, On July 17, the 5th anniversary of Congressman John Lewis's passing, we invite you to join us in a national day of action to respond to the attacks on our civil and human rights by this administration. Together, we'll remind them that in America, the power lies with the people. Coined by Lewis, "good trouble" is the act of coming together to take peaceful, nonviolent action to challenge injustice and create meaningful change. The civil rights leaders of the oast have shown us the Dower of collective action. That's why on July 17, communities across the country will take to the streets, courthouses, and community spaces to carry forward his fight for justice, voting rights, and dignity for all. From felony disenfranchisement to voter suppression bills like the SAVE Act, anti - democracy forces are working overtime to silence our voices. Sixty years ago, President Johnson federalized the National Guard to protect peaceful civil rights marchers in Selma. Now, the current President is calling the Guard to stop protestors from using their voice and to block progress on issues we care about. We can't wait. We need Good Trouble now! We're sending a clear message: in the United States, the power lies in the hands of the people. We demand an end to the: • extreme crackdown on our civil rights by the current administration, from our right to vote to our right to protest and free speech; • attacks on black and brown Americans, immigrants, trans people, and other communities; and • slashing of programs that working people rely on, including Medicaid, SNAP, and Social Security. Join us on Thursday, July 17 at King Plaza, Palo Alto City Hall from 5:30 to 7:OOpm for "Good Trouble Lives On," a national day of nonviolent action to call on our leaders to defend the freedom to vote and protect American democracy. This is more than a protest; it's a moral reckoning. A continuation of the movement Lewis helped lead, and a new front in the struggle for freedom. Please note: A core principle behind our Good Trouble Lives On actions is a commitment to nonviolence in all we do. We expect all participants to seek to de- escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values. DETAILS: • DATE: Thursday, July 17, 2025 • TIME: 5:30 to 7:OOpm • PLACE: King Plaza, City Hall - 250 Hamilton Ave, Palo Alto 94301 • MAP: Google Maps REGISTER HERE El CONTACT INFO: Our mailing address is: LWVPA, 3921 E Bayshore Road, Palo Alto, CA 94303 Email: communications@Iwvpaloalto.org Subscribe to our newsletters: Sign up using the subscription form Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list. From: Postmaster To: Council, City Subject: You have new held messages Date: Wednesday, July 16, 2025 7:21:12 AM 1 You have new held messages You can release all of your held messages and permit or block future emails from the senders, or manage messages individually. Release all Permit all Block all You can also manage held messages in your Personal Portal. Spam Policy publicityna Iwvpaloalto.orq LWVPA: Join us for Good Trouble THIS THURSDAY July 17 at 5:30pm at PA City Hall 2025-07-15 19:56 Release Permit Block Spam Policy bexley-gianna@hotmail.com Re: 2025-07-16 05:54 Release Permit Block Release all Permit all Block all © 2019 Mimecast Services Limited. From: Aram James To: Jeff Rosen; Jay Boyarsky; Veenker, Vicki; Jessica Speiser, Educational Leader for California Democratic Delegate, Assembly District 23 Cc: boardftausd.orq; board Cavalleywater.orq; boardfeedbackc smcgov.orq; BoardOperations; assemblvmember.berman(aassemblv.ca.aov; Josh Becker; Council, City; GRP-Citv Council; city.councilR@menlopark.gov; Nash, Betsy; dcombs(amenlopark.gov; jgreeradailynewsgroup.com; Dave Price; Emily Mibach; EPA Tocav; Diana Diamond; Stump, Molly; Figueroa, Eric; Sean Allen; Pat M; Raymond Goins; Gardener, Liz; Lotus Fong; h.etzko gmail.com;<michael.gennaco(aoirgroup.com>; Binder, Andrew; Baker Rob; Robert Salonga; Rowena Chiu; Vara Ramakrishnan; Gennady Sheyner; Salem Ajluni; PD Kristina Bell; Reifschneider, James; james pitkin; Steve Wagstaffe; Wagner, April; Foley, Michael; Friends of Cubberley; WILPF Peninsula Palo Alto; Zelkha, Mila; Rodriguez, Miuuel; Human Relations Commission; planning.commissionCa�cityofoaloalto.0rq; ParkRec Commission; Don Austin; Yolanda Conaway Subject: In Colombia, The Hague Group Charges Israel With Genocide Date: Tuesday, July 15, 2025 3:37:19 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. In Colombia, The Hague Group Charges Israel With Genocide https://www.cro Dsitenews.com/ /israel-genocic.e-united-states-the-hague-grou 3-colomDia- international-law-united-nations?publicationid=2510348&utmcampaign=email-post- title&r=fjmzt&utm_medium=email From: Friends of the Palo Alto Junior Museum & Zoo To: Council, City Subject: Who"s New in the Zoo? Date: Tuesday, July 15, 2025 12:22:08 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. El Summer Sights at the JMZ July 15, 2025 Hello Friends, The weather continues to warm, and many of the critters in the zoo are happy to soak up some sun. While last month's newsletter shared exciting dates from the and other spaces outside the JMZ, this month we're turning our attention to the zoo. The JMZ's zoo was realized thanks to the generous donors to the JMZ Initiative Capital Campaign. This innovative space, 'Loose in the Zoo," is a thriving ecosystem full of colorful birds, furry mammals, and flowering plants, which continue to delight visitors of all ages. I hope you have the opportunity to visit the JMZ soon and enjoy all that this space has to offer. With gratitude, Lauren Angelo President, Friends of the Palo Alto Junior Museum & Zoo Who's New in the Zoo? New Flamingo Chick The JMZ's newest resident hatched on June 22. Born to parents Ruby and Sal, this amazing flamingo chick is being watched attentively by the flock. It might come as a surprise, but flamingos are born grayish white. It will take about two to three years — and a steady diet of carotenoid-rich foods —for the chick to develop its iconic pink hue. Lately, the adult flamingos have been less active during public feedings, but their interest in food is picking up again as the little one grows. If you're lucky, you might catch a glimpse of the chick being fed. All photos courtesy of Lee Harper. Welcome, Kala, the Female Meerkat Kala, short for "Kalahari," is the JMZ's newest meerkat. Kala recently joined Scout and Dash, the zoo's two male meerkats, and together they've added even more energy to an already lively habitat. You can spot all three sprinting around and doing much less sun-bathing than they did before! Zookeepers were intentional about the introduction between Kala and the two boys. Meerkats can be territorial when a new member enters their habitat, but luckily all three meerkats were quick to adjust. When looking for Kala, pay special attention to her warm brown fur color and pointy tail. Zazu in the Zoo After being out of view for a few months, Zazu the hornbill is back in the zoo. Zazu is one of the JMZ's most mischievous characters. With a bright orange -and -yellow beak, he is hard to miss as he explores the zoo. You can often spot Zazu investigating Edward's habitat and saying "hi" to the macaws. Hornbills are ground foragers, so don't be surprised if he's pecking around the grass instead of perched in a tree. l_n Friends of the Palo Alto Junior Museum & Zoo 11451 Middlefield Road I Palo Alto, CA 94301 US Unsubscribe I Update Profile I Constant Contact Data Notice From: Postmaster To: Council, City Subject: You have new held messages Date: Tuesday, July 15, 2025 12:17:29 PM 1 You have new held messages You can release all of your held messages and permit or block future emails from the senders, or manage messages individually. Release all Permit all Block all You can also manage held messages in your Personal Portal. Spam Policy info-friendsjmz.org@shared1.ccsend.com Who's New in the Zoo? 2025-07-15 10:08 Release Permit Block Release all Permit all Block all © 2019 Mimecast Services Limited. From: City Mgr To: Council, City; Shikada. Ed Cc: Executive Leadership Team; Citv Mar; Clerk, City Subject: City Council Bundle - July 15 Date: Tuesday, July 15, 2025 7:51:49 AM Attachments: FW Redressing No -Notice Program Change.msq RE Boulware park questions.msq image001.pnq imac e002. pnq FW Request for Action Off -Leash Dogs Creating Unsafe Conditions.msq Fw Homeless RVs parked on Greer and West Bayshore.msq RE Why the New El Camino "No Turn on Red" Signs.msq RE Overcrown sidewalks and obstruction of site lines. Nextdoor.msg Dear Mayor and Council Members, On behalf of City Manager Ed Shikada, please see the attached staff responses to emails received in the Council inbox through July 15, 2025. Respectfully, Danille CITY OF PALO ALTO Danille Rice Administrative Assistant City Manager's Office l Human Resources l Transportation (650) 329-2229 l danille.rice@PaloAlto.aov www.PaloAlto.gov Please click here to provide feedback on our City's services From: Postmaster To: Council, City Subject: You have new held messages Date: Tuesday, July 15, 2025 7:24:48 AM I o You have new held messages You can release all of your held messages and permit or block future emails from the senders, or manage messages individually. Release all Permit all Block all You can also manage held messages in your Personal Portal. Spam Policy noreply(c�digiverifier.com Action Required: Account Verification 2025-07-15 04:56 Release Permit Block Release all Permit all Block all © 2019 Mimecast Services Limited. From: John Guislin To: Planning Commission; Council, City; Shikada Ed Subject: Another example why residents are losing faith in local government Date: Monday, July 14, 2025 5:06:40 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. This message needs your attention • This is a personal email address. • This is their first mail to some recipients. Mark Safe Report Powered by Mimecast Today (July 14, 2025) we received a letter from the City of Palo Alto advising us that permit parking rates would increase on July 1, 2025 and encouraging us to buy our parking permits by June 30, 2025 to avoid the price increase. The letter was pos marked July 1" . Is the city so disorganized that they do not even understand that it is pointless to advise residents to take time -limited action when the date for that action has already passed? Is anyone in city government aware of this error or even a little bit embarrassed? The rates for all parking permits, residential and commercial, increased by 10%. The city states the price increase is to minimize the use of single occupancy vehicles, but charging a resident more to park near their home is quite different from charging more to someone who drives a single -occupancy vehicle to Palo Alto. Increasing the cost for residents will not reduce their trips to Palo Alto since they live here! Residential permit parking was implemented to protect residential neighborhoods being overrun by commercial drivers seeking free/low cost parking. Increasing the costs of commercial permits makes sense, aligning with the goal of reducing single -occupancy vehicle trips to Palo Alto. Parking garages offer ample parking for commercial use. Alas, this type of disfunction is not limited to parking issues. What can residents do? Tell your elected officials you demand better government. John Guisllin From: Aram James To: Richard Konda; Susan Hayase; Carla Torres; Raymond Goins; Sean Allen; Brad Imamura; Lythcott-Haims, Julie; Kaloma Smith; Human Relations Commission; Council, City Cc: ladoris cordell Subject: Fed judge: Immigration officials can"t stop people in L.A. based on race or spoken language Date: Monday, July 14, 2025 3:18:47 PM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Be cautious of opening attachments and clicking on links. Ladoris Cordell on MSNBC TODAY. Great job!! Fed judge: Immigration officials can't stop people in L.A. based on race or spoken language https://www.msnbc.com/katy-tur/watch/fed juc.ge-immigration-officials-can-t-stop-people-in- 1-a-based-on-race-or-s Doken-language-243 194949509