Despite growing consensus, many Jewish and Christian groups loath to admit genocide in Gaza
(UPDATE – FāVS News – Jan. 16) Despite a ceasefire announcement Wednesday (Jan. 15) between Israel and Hamas, Israel airstrikes overnight killed at least 72 people in Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a “last minute crisis” with Hamas paused the ceasefire temporarily, Religion News Service reports. Both sides are known to increase military operations in the final hours before a ceasefire to project strength.
Despite near worldwide consenses, debates about whether the latest conflict between Israel and Gaza counts as a genocide populates conversations within Jewish and Christian group in the U.S.
Yonat Shimron reports from RNS.
News Story by Yonat Shimron | Religion News Service
(RNS – Jan. 15) In the past four years, the United States has recognized the Uyghur genocide in China and the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. Just recently (Jan. 7), the U.S. accused a Sudanese paramilitary group and its proxies of committing genocide.
But when it comes to Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians, injured thousands more and flattened the coastal strip, making it largely uninhabitable, the U.S. government is nowhere near arriving at that conclusion. The same is true for many U.S. religious groups, including Jews and Christians who have, with some exceptions, remained silent despite growing recognition of the crime.
In a lengthly New York Times interview earlier this month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken denied there was a genocide. And in a sign that the incoming Trump administration would likely take the same position, the U.S. Congress last week passed legislation that would impose sanctions on officials at the International Criminal Court for seeking to charge Israeli leaders with war crimes. Forty-five Democrats joined Republicans to approve the measure, which has a good chance of passing in the new Republican-led Senate.
International organizations define war in Gaza as genocide
Increasingly, a growing list of international organizations, including the United Nations and various human rights groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders, have concluded that Israel is committing genocide. So, too, have dozens of Holocaust scholars.
Last week, members of the American Historical Association, the country’s largest group of professional historians, overwhelmingly approved a resolution that said the destruction of most of Gaza’s education infrastructure amounted to “scholasticide.”
“Scholars of genocide very much recognize that the destruction of Gaza fits our understanding of what constitutes a genocide, whether it’s the fairly narrow definition of the 1948 U.N. Convention or the more expansive understandings that different scholars employ in their research,” said Barry Trachtenberg who holds an endowed chair in Jewish History at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He voted in favor of the scholasticide resolution and agrees Israel is committing genocide.
‘Israel is not committing genocide’
Yet aside from many, if not most, American Muslims, U.S. religious groups, including American Jewish organizations and a wide swath of Christians, particularly evangelicals, have been loath to argue for genocide despite the pleas of Palestinian Christians in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.
“Israel is not committing genocide,” was the bold headline issued in a statement by the American Jewish Committee last month. The AJC said Israel is acting in self-defense against Hamas, a terror group that killed 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023.
Among evangelical groups, Luke Moon, head of the Philos Project, a nonprofit based in the U.S. that “seeks to promote positive Christian engagement in the Near East,” recently wrote, “For lasting peace, Hamas must be destroyed. Diplomatic agreements are a part of the history of war, but lasting diplomacy only exists in the aftermath of a decisive victory.”
Resistance to U.S. groups who do say Israel is committing genocide
Christian and Jewish groups that do label Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide and who advocate for an end to the war often find stiff resistance for saying so.
Last week, The New York Times rejected a digital ad from a Quaker group that referred to Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.
The American Friends Service Committee, which works for peace and justice around the world, has worked on humanitarian relief in Gaza for more than 70 years.
It found a donor willing to pay for a digital ad said: “Tell Congress to stop arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza now. As a Quaker organization, we work for peace. Join us. Tell the President and Congress to stop the killing and starvation in Gaza.”
The New York Times ad department, however, asked that the word “genocide” be replaced with “war.” The AFSC refused.
“We consider it an attempt on their part to silence us and to police our narrative,” said Joyce Ajlouny, general secretary of the AFSC and a Palestinian from Ramallah.
The New York Times, in a statement, said the Quaker ad did not meet their “acceptability guidelines.” It did not specify what those guidelines were.
U.S. ‘complicit in genocide’?
Part of the problem of accepting the genocide designation for Israel’s attack on Gaza is that by funding Israel’s military offensive with billions of dollars in aid, the United States is complicit in the genocide, said Raz Segal, an Israeli-American scholar and associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in Galloway, New Jersey.
“This is a joint Israeli-U.S. genocide because it’s just a matter of fact that without U.S. support, Israel would not be able to perpetrate this genocide,” said Segal.
Segal,too, paid a high price for his willingness to speak out. In June, he was offered a job to lead the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, but that offer was rescinded after the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas mounted a campaign against him because of his assessment that Israel was committing genocide.
For Jews, it is hard to admit genocide because Jews have suffered genocide themselves.
“Our understanding of the Jewish people historically has always been one of victims of horrific violence, and so I think it’s really hard for many of us to conceive that Jews working collectively, at least through the state of Israel, have the capacity to commit genocide,” said Trachtenberg, the Wake Forest scholar.
Pope Francis speaks out
One religious leader who has spoken about genocide is Pope Francis. In November the pontiff called for an investigation to determine if Israel’s attacks in Gaza constitute genocide, according to excerpts from an upcoming new book.
Since then, Francis has repeatedly criticized the bombings, loss of life and starvation in Gaza.
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations promptly criticized Francis in a public letter, calling the pope’s comments “incendiary.”
Jonathan Kuttab, a human rights lawyer who is Palestinian and now directs Friends of Sabeel North America, a Christian group that advocates for justice and peace on behalf of Palestinians, said he sees similar denials among evangelicals.
“The church correctly critiques itself for its silence during the Holocaust,” said Kuttab. “The church was reluctant and quiet and timid and complicit. But right now they are failing again even though the facts are much clearer and much more obvious. It’s an issue of the moral cowardice and unwillingness to deal with the political consequences of recognizing that the genocide is taking place.”
