I support Israel and I support Palestine. I pray for Peace
“Dear friends,
This morning, we filled the entirety of Parliament Square in London with a banner quoting a leading Israeli Holocaust Professor who says Israel’s assault on Gaza now constitutes a genocide.
Professor Amos Goldberg has researched and taught the Holocaust, genocide and state violence for 30 years. In a statement issued to coincide with the Parliament Square protest, the respected author and scholar says: “Yes, it’s a genocide. And once you come to this conclusion you cannot remain silent.”
All of our projects are considered carefully as we develop and deliver them, but perhaps none more so than this one because of the seriousness of the indictment. But as Professor Goldberg says, once you are clear in your own mind that a genocide is being committed, it becomes imperative to speak up and name it.
Professor Goldberg is not the only Israeli scholar to say the assault on Gaza is a genocide. Professor Omer Bartov is a Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University in the US. He says: "This is clearly an operation whose goal is to destroy the ability of Palestinians to live in that area as a group. And in my definition, that is genocide."
You can hear Professor Goldberg's words in the film of today's intervention or read his statement in full below.”
My name is Amos Goldberg. I am an Israeli Professor of Holocaust Studies. For nearly 30 years I have researched and taught the Holocaust, genocide and state violence.
And I want to tell whoever is willing to listen, that what’s happening now in Gaza is a genocide.
A year ago when October 7th happened, like all Israelis I was in shock. It was a war crime and a crime against humanity. 1200 people - more than 800 of them civilians - were killed in one day. Children and the elderly were among those taken hostage. Communities were destroyed. It was outrageous, traumatizing, personal. Like most Israelis, I know people who were killed, who lost loved ones or whose loved ones were taken hostage.
But immediately afterwards came Israel’s response and within weeks thousands of civilians were killed in Gaza. It took me some time to digest what was unfolding before my eyes. It was agonizing to confront that reality. I was reluctant to call it a genocide.
But if you read Raphael Lemkin – the Jewish-Polish legal scholar who coined the term ‘genocide’ and was the major driving force behind the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention – what is happening in Gaza now is exactly what he had in mind when he spoke about genocide.
It does not need to look like the Holocaust to be a genocide. Each genocide looks different and not all involve killing of millions or the entire group. The United Nations Genocide Convention explicitly asserts that genocide is the act of deliberately destroying a group in whole or in part. Those are the words.
But there does need to be a clear intent.
And indeed, there are clear indications of intent to destroy Gaza: Israel’s leaders - including the prime minister and the minister of defence - and many high-ranking military officers, media personalities, rabbis as well as ordinary soldiers were very open about what they wanted to achieve. There were countless documented incitements to turn the whole of Gaza into rubble and claims that there are no innocent people living there. A radical atmosphere of dehumanization of the Palestinians prevails in Israeli society to an extent that I can’t remember in my 58 years of living here.
Now that vision has been enacted. Tens of thousands of innocent children, women and men have been killed. Over a hundred thousand were wounded. There is a near total destruction of infrastructure, intentional starvation and blocking of humanitarian aid. There are mass graves and reliable testimony of summary executions. Children that were shot by snipers. All the universities and almost all hospitals are gone. Almost all the population is displaced. There have been numerous bombings of civilians in so-called ‘safe zones’. Gaza does not exist anymore. It is completely destroyed. Thus, the outcome fits perfectly with the stated intentions of Israel’s leadership.
Lemkin - that scholar who coined the term ‘genocide’ - described two phases of a genocide. The first is the destruction of the annihilated group and the second is what he called “imposition of the national pattern” of the perpetrator. We are now witnessing the second phase as Israel prepares ethnically cleansed areas for Israeli settlements.
And therefore, I have come to the conclusion that this is exactly what a genocide looks like. We don’t teach about genocides in order to realize it retrospectively. We teach about it in order to prevent it and to stop it.
But like in every other case of genocide in history right now we have mass denial. Both here in Israel and around the world.
But reality cannot be denied.
So yes, it is a genocide.
And once you come to this conclusion you cannot remain silent.