Stop the Blood Libel Before It Kills Again…and Again

In Christianity’s second millennium, Christian polemicists labelled/libeled the Jewish people as killers of God and so cruel as to slaughter children to bake their blood into their ritual bread (matzah).  The evil fabrication provided cover for an unending cycle of segregation, discrimination, killings, pogroms, torture and expulsions of Jews. The Jews never could stop the spread of the libel. Instead the Nazis exploited the aura of demonic cruelty which it conferred on Jews, to identify the Jews as the evil ones who must be exterminated in order to bring about the millennium for humankind. After the Holocaust, Western Christianity — especially the Catholic Church — recognized its role in setting up the Jews for genocide. It repented and sought to treat Judaism and Jews with respect and dignity.  But the six million murdered Jews could not be called back.

In this decade, jihadi Islam, aided and abetted by a biased United Nations and ideologically warped human rights organizations (who have identified with the worst aspects of their clients’ behavior, e.g. terror and genocidal impulses) have pinned a label of committing genocide on Israel,  for its war of self-defense against Hamas’ all-out terror attack. They falsely alleged that Israel was inflicting mass starvation on civilians. Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, was demonized as a colonialist-settler project. In fact, the Jewish state is the only case of an indigenous people, exiled and displaced by conquerors, who came back and successfully regained and rebuilt their homeland. The “genocide” libel is a declaration of open season on Jews and the Jewish state. It has already served as cover for murdering Jews praying at synagogue in America, for massacring them at a holiday celebration in Australia, for killing them when going to a museum, and for Iran’s plans to inflict nuclear holocaust on the citizens of Israel.

We reject the genocide accusation with contempt, but it is already out there and out of control. It serves as a shorthand shutdown of Jews trying to defend Zionism and Israel. It isolates Israel as beyond the pale, leaving it subject to violence and boycott with no right to defend itself. However, the Jewish people alone cannot stop the relentless spread of the onslaught. We must call on all decent people, on all who believe in justice and security in the Middle East, to sign on with us and to act together to stop the spread of this pathological falsity before it leads to catastrophic assaults on the Jewish people worldwide. We do not want another mass murder of Jews to be carried out in order to stop the spread of the libel.

As for the Gaza war, the difference between war as tragedy and war as genocide lies in intent. In this war, only one side intended to commit genocide and that is Hamas. In the Gaza war, Israel went to war to break the hostile ring of fire of Iranian allies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, which threatened to make life unlivable in the Jewish state.

There have been an estimated 70,000 deaths and casualties in Gaza. But terrorists/fighters make up about 25,000 of those killed. The ratio of civilians killed to fighters is less than 2 to 1. While we mourn every single innocent individual killed in Gaza, the ratio is historically unprecedentedly low — evidence of Israel’s all-out effort to minimize civilian casualties. Considering that Hamas built miles of tunnels to hide its soldiers, embedded its terrorists among the civilian population and deliberately put Palestinians in harm’s way as human shields, the Israeli results are a testimony to the tireless effort —ranging from evacuation of civilians from neighborhoods about to become the scene of fighting, to phone warnings and knock-on shells to alert people to leave before fighting engulfs them, to use of special armaments to reduce scatter and collateral damage, to military missions scrubbed due to the presence of civilians.

The most outrageous aspect of the genocide charge is that it is aimed at the one state that has been threatened with genocide all the years of its existence. Adding moral insult to injury, the Nazi nomenclature in trying to exterminate the Jews has been twisted and applied to besmirch Israel. The libel is intended to delegitimate the Jewish state and isolate it so that it can be liquidated.

We call on all decent people to join us and foil this vicious plot. There is a healthy debate among Jews and Israelis as to the morality of all of the steps pursued in the Gaza war as well as the spread of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. But stopping this libel is beyond politics.

We call on all decent people to join us and foil this vicious plot. There is a healthy debate among Jews and Israelis as to the morality of all of the steps pursued in the Gaza war as well as the spread of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. But stopping this libel is beyond politics. All society must unite to declare that this falsification is beyond the pale. Even those who support a two-state solution (currently 80% of Israelis have given up hope that a Palestinian state will live in peace with Israel) must join in checking this monstrous libel which leaves no room for the existence of a Jewish state. Justice for the Palestinians as well as the Israelis can only be worked out, once the poisonous libel is stopped dead in its tracks.

Those of you who want to act on Yitz Greenberg’s condemnation of the genocide libel against Israel can click on this link and sign the mass petition rejecting the libel. https://forms.gle/cRcyCRJgq2nV81pn9

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg serves as the President of the J.J. Greenberg Institute for the Advancement of Jewish Life (JJGI) and as Senior Scholar in Residence at Hadar.