Not all opinions are created equal.
Our new mayor, Nithya Raman, is entitled to her opinions regarding Israel. She’s entitled to criticize Israeli policies, whether in Gaza or elsewhere.
The problem is that saying Israel committed genocide in Gaza is more than an opinion. It’s a defamatory accusation with dangerous repercussions for Jews.
Raman deserves credit for being among the first councilmembers to release a statement condemning the Oct. 7 attacks. She also criticized a statement from her local Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter after the attacks as “lacking empathy.”
None of that, however, mitigates accusing the Jewish state of the worst crime in human history.
“She has called Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide,” Jewish Federation leader Rabbi Noah Farkas writes in this week’s Journal. “I believe that charge is false and misuses a legal term with a specific meaning.”
Indeed, it does.
“The charge has become a dangerous vehicle for scapegoating Jews and fueling antisemitism around the world,” according to a letter signed by more than 5,000 prominent leaders across entertainment, academia and public life.
The letter, co-written by Yossi Klein Halevi, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, Rabbi Micha Odenheimer and Professor Jonathan Karp, and released by Creative Community for Peace at Rosh Hashanah, does not hold back:
“We are outraged and sickened by the latest blood libel to be inflicted on the Jewish people. We reject this accusation with contempt.”
The letter zeroes in on the Gaza war and makes a succinct case against a reckless libel:
“The unprecedented combat conditions of the war – hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, thousands of boobytrapped homes – the conflating of combatants with ‘journalists’ and ‘human rights workers,’ the ratio of civilian-to-terrorist casualties, considered low for asymmetrical urban warfare, the absence of mass starvation despite repeated claims of imminent catastrophe, the warnings given to civilians before attack: All these factors were erased in the eagerness to indict Israel for genocide.”
Given that the genocide charge has spread like a global virus against Jews, neutralizing it ought to be an obvious priority for our community.
The point is not that Israel didn’t make any blunders in Gaza. The point is that “genocide” is an extreme and sinister lie that poisons Jews and endangers Jewish lives.
“Why does it have to be that word?” Haviv Rettig Gur asks on a recent podcast. “There are so many crimes short of the greatest crime, but none of them are useful because none of them are quite as demolishing and destabilizing and delegitimizing. And that’s the point. The point is to turn Israel definitionally into a genocidal thing. And you know why Israel needs to be definitionally a genocidal thing? So that it can be destroyed.”
Rettig Gur is no over-the-top polemicist. He’s known for his fair and knowledgeable takes. When he says that “the point is to turn Israel definitionally into a genocidal thing,” attention must be paid.
Will the new mayor of Los Angeles pay attention to this travesty? I’m sure she’d much rather talk about things like adding security to synagogues and other such policies.
But the genocide lie is a security issue. It gives ordinary people permission not just to hate Jews but to harm Jews.
“When an ordinary person hears the word genocide,” Rettig Gur writes, “they don’t think of the complexities of the specific definition…they think a people is exterminated. There’s no greater crime than exterminating a people for their identity.”
The truth matters.
If the truth about genocide matters to our new mayor, I suggest she reads Gerald Posner’s in-depth cover story in the Journal, where he debunks the genocide lie “by every metric that matters — legal, historical, statistical.”
Should a search for truth be part of a mayor’s agenda? Can Nithya Raman revisit a horrific charge against the Jewish state if it means having to correct her own position?
Here’s the thing. “Genocide” is not just another item on a list of issues. For Jews today, it is the item. The fact that the lie has become so accepted is precisely why it must be taken so seriously.
If Raman is serious about making Jewish Angelenos feel safe, it’s time for her to take on the lie of the century.
Don’t just do it for the Jews. Do it for the truth.
