Marty Levine
December 11, 2024
When I was in Poland, I visited the villages that no longer had Jewish communities and the sites of the death camps. I asked how those who lived as neighbors in those places could not have seen what was occurring in plain sight. How could they have gone about their lives as death, destruction, and genocide, were taking place around them?
As I visited the Polish town of Tiktin and saw the buildings that had been the homes of a sizeable Jewish Community and walked through the largest remaining building in the village that had been the town’s Holiday Synagogue I could not grasp how those still living there were still silent. As I walked under Auschwitz’s “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes You Free) entrance gate it was impossible not to see the farmhouses that stood just beyond the fence that separated their fields from the crematoria where the bodies of a million or more Jews had been burned.
That willful ignorance, that ability to blot out crimes being conducted against whole classes of people was mirrored across the world; evidence of the horrors was seen as an impediment to other geopolitical concerns, even when eyewitnesses directly reported it:
In 1942, Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground resistance, witnessed the horrors suffered by Jews both in the Warsaw Ghetto and in a transit camp View this term in the glossary near a Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Poland. Karski met President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House on July 28, 1943, and told the president about the dire situation Jews faced under the Nazi regime. Karski later recalled that FDR promised the Allies would win the war but that the president made no mention of rescuing Jews.
From the mistakes of that time, the Jewish community embraced “Never Again” as our mantra.
Mirroring the message Jan Karski delivered on December 5th from two different sources the world was told that genocide and war crimes had been conducted by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza over the 14 months since Hamas committed serious war crimes during its attack across the Gaza Border fence into southern Israel.
In an extensive report entitled “ ‘YOU FEEL LIKE YOU ARE SUBHUMAN’ ISRAEL’S GENOCIDE AGAINST PALESTINIANS IN GAZA” Amnesty International (AI) told the world what it had found after an in-depth review of events on the ground. Over more than 290 pages, AI documented the evidence that Israel’s leadership and military forces had committed intentional acts which violate category a, b and c of international law’s specific definition of genocide:
“… genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
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- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
AI’s report tried to capture the scope of the devastation that has been inflicted on Gaza and its people in response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack
By 7 October 2024, the Gaza-based Ministry of Health had recorded 42,010 Palestinian fatalities in Gaza, the vast majority of which were of Palestinians killed during Israel’s offensive, and 97,590 other Palestinians injured since 7 October 2023. The actual toll of those killed during the offensive may be higher and will only become apparent once the conflict is over, including when rescue teams are able to count the dead and retrieve missing bodies from under the rubble. The armed conflict in Gaza has seen some of the highest known death tolls among children (13,319 by 7 October 2024), journalists, as well as health and humanitarian workers of any recent conflict in the world.
The level and speed of damage to and destruction of homes and infrastructure across all sectors of economic activity has similarly not been seen in any other conflict in the 21st century, with remote sensing experts noting that it was “much faster and more extensive” than anything they had mapped before. About 62% of all homes in Gaza were damaged or destroyed by January 2024, affecting approximately 1.08 million people, according to a joint Interim Damage Assessment published by the World Bank, the EU and the UN in March 2024. By July 2024, around 63% of the total structures in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed, according to a UN Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) satellite imagery-based assessment. Amnesty International estimated that there was, on average, one damaged or destroyed building every 17 metres in Gaza by then. Meanwhile, some 625,000 students missed out on an entire academic year, with an estimated 85% of schools having sustained some form of damage.
And from the very beginning of Israel’s response to the blow they had suffered it was clear that the intent was to destroy the Palestinian people of Gaza.
In a widely publicized statement made at a press conference on 12 October 2023, President Isaac Herzog held all Palestinians in Gaza responsible for Hamas’s attacks: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved.” While he maintained that his words had been misinterpreted, the slogan “there are no uninvolved civilians” was later scrawled near settlements in the occupied West Bank, demonstrating the statement’s spread.
In another illustrative example, on 11 November 2023, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a video clip from a show on Israeli TV in which he said that Palestinians who expressed support for Hamas and its actions were considered “terrorists” and must also be destroyed. He added this comment: “To be clear, when they say that Hamas needs to be eliminated, it also means those who sing, those who support and those who distribute sweets, all of these are terrorists. And they should be eliminated!”
Page by painful page AI asks us to see what has been before us since October 2023: The massive and intentional destruction of an entire community of over 2 million men, women, and children.
And AI is not alone. On the same December day, Israeli historian Lee Mordechai published his latest update of “Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War”, his project which gathered evidence of what has transpired in Gaza as Israel responded to Hamas
I, Lee Mordechai, a historian by profession and an Israeli citizen, bear witness in this document to the situation in Gaza as events are unfolding. The enormous amount of evidence I have seen, much of it referenced later in this document, has been enough for me to believe that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza. I explain why I chose to use the term below. Israel’s campaign is ostensibly its reaction to the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, in which war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed within the context of the longstanding conflict between Israelis and Palestinians that can be dated back to 1917 or 1948 (or other dates). In all cases, historical grievances and atrocities do not justify additional atrocities in the present. Therefore, I consider Israel’s response to Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7 utterly disproportionate and criminal.
As reported in Haaretz, Mordechai’s motivation for taking on this undertaking of researching and collecting the evidence of what has occurred was to prevent us from saying we did not know, we saw nothing.
“I felt that I couldn’t go on living in my bubble, that we’re talking about capital offenses, and that what’s going on is just too large, and contradicts the values I was raised on here,” Mordechai says. “I’m not out to confront people or to argue. I wrote the document so it would be out there. So that in another half a year or year or five years or 10 or 100 – people will be able to go back and see that this is what was known, this is what it was possible to know, as early as this past January, or March, and that those among us who didn’t know, chose not to know.
“My role as a historian,” he continues, “is to give voice to those who cannot sound their own voices, whether they were eunuchs in the 11th century or children in Gaza. I deliberately seek not to appeal to people’s emotions, and don’t use words that may be controversial or unclear. I don’t talk about terrorists or about Zionism or about antisemitism. I’m trying to use as cold and dry a language as possible, and to stick to the facts as I understand them.”
Each of these reports contains painful details of numerous individual acts by soldiers and their leaders that show us that what has occurred in Gaza is not just the brutality of war. It is Genocide.
But for too many what is seen does not register.
The voices speaking out to reject this evidence seem to see these reports as just the biased, even anti-Semitic rantings of voices who hate Israel. They see each act as justified by what Hamas did on October 7th and Hamas’s own statements that they wish to destroy Israel. Their logic is simple, one act of genocide is ample justification for another.
In a posting on X, the Israeli Foreign Ministry not surprisingly totally rejected AI’s findings:
The deplorable and fanatical organization Amnesty International has once again produced a fabricated report that is entirely false and based on lies. The genocidal massacre on October 7, 2023, was carried out by the Hamas terrorist organization against Israeli citizens. Since then, Israeli citizens have been subjected to daily attacks from seven different fronts. Israel is defending itself against these attacks acting fully in accordance with international law.
AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) defended Israel in similar ways:
Once again, Amnesty International has issued a slanderous attack on Israel that amounts to a blood libel against the Jewish state. In reality, it is Israel that has been the victim of a genocidal attack that was launched by proxies of the Iranian regime that has vowed to eliminate the Jewish state. Israel is doing what any other country would do when faced with enemies that seek its elimination – it is fighting a just and moral war of self-defense.
From the AJC (American Jewish Committee) comes similar words:
American Jewish Community (AJC) decries a report by Amnesty International that repackages and repeats the baseless and inflammatory charge of genocide that Israel’s enemies have made in the media and international forums for the past year. It not only egregiously distorts the reality of the conflict in Gaza and maligns the legal concept of genocide but will embolden terrorist organizations like Hamas to continue their tactics of exploiting civilians and violating international law.
Amnesty’s report parrots’ countless false claims originating from Hamas and Hamas-controlled sources in Gaza that consider the Jewish state’s existence an abomination. Lacking access on the ground, the organization disregards the voluminous evidence published by the IDF and others that Hamas has deliberately embedded its operations inside, next to, and underneath nominally civilian areas in Gaza like residential buildings, schools, mosques, and hospitals, and cities, instead determining that Israeli forces were engaged in a widespread campaign of wanton and deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians as such.
In 1942 when Jan Karski delivered his eyewitness report it was not enough to cause the world to see the genocide for what it was, to see that that beyond a war between two world powers there was the destruction of a people taking place and that this required not sticking with business (war) as usual.
Today we can choose to see what those living in Tiktin refused to see, what those living along the Auschwitz fences refused to see, and what the whole world refused to see and react to. Or we can do what Israel’s defenders are calling us to do, close our eyes and just listen to the words of Israel’s leaders and their apologists and ignore reality.
If you believe that Never Again means something, the choice should be clear. But from the silence I am hearing in the halls of power, I fear it is not. Only one people seems entitled to being able to wrap themselves in the cloak of victims of grave harm; others just have to bear the pain until the bombs and bullets run out.
