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benjamin netanyahu
Never Again—Not in Our Name
I was taught to believe L’chaim referred to the value of all human life. If so, for the toast to be more than an empty gesture we must recognize the plight of the Palestinians since the creation of the State of Israel.
Mar 21, 2025
The most important way to confront antisemitism and to respect the memory of the Holocaust is to speak the truth. We saw the truth of genocide in action when the Israelis killed more than 400 people and injured even more on a single night when they resumed bombing Gaza. These casualties joined the tens of thousands killed and those surviving without limbs, whose bodies and minds have been burned and broken, whose children have died or have been orphaned.
According to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), in an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro in The New York Times, those charging Israel with genocide are antisemitic. “And it is vicious of the opponents to call this genocide. Criticize it? For sure. Say Israel went too far? For sure. And you know what it does? It increases antisemitism, because they’re making Israel and the Jewish people look like monsters, which they are not.”
As I write this, doctors in Gaza are tending to shrapnel wounds penetrating the bodies and brains of children fighting for their lives in the face of genocide.
How could anyone viewing the devastation and the children’s bodies wrapped in shrouds as the result of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s most recent political games think of those responsible for this carnage are anything but monsters? Of course, those who committed atrocities on October 7 are monsters too. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are responsible for tens of thousands more deaths and by numerous estimates more than 100,000 casualties.
The latest wave of destruction and slaughter during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan was a particularly vicious way to end the cease-fire. Netanyahu and the Israeli leadership and large swaths of Israelis and Americans place as little value on Palestinian lives as the Nazis did regarding Jews. I’m not making false comparisons, but rather I am referring to what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called the Banality of Evil. The darkening of hearts that enabled the acceptance of the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust is at work in the commission of genocide in Gaza today.
“Hear o Israel the Lord our God the Lord is One” —the Shema is the most essential Jewish prayer. The 10 Commandments given by God are supposed to be the central ethical and moral tenants of Jewish life. How then can Jews massacre Palestinians when the commandment says, “Thou shall not murder?”
Consider the future of young Israelis in the military who are conditioned to see every Palestinian as an enemy whose life is worth pennies on the dollar. What will happen to those involved in war crimes and brutal injustices? Will their moral compasses ever reset? Will their hearts drown in tears or will they remain steadfast and pass on cruelty to the next generation?
Hold up a cup and say, “L’chaim,”—the Jewish toast to life. I was taught to believe L’chaim referred to the value of all human life. If so, for the toast to be more than an empty gesture we must recognize the plight of the Palestinians since the creation of the State of Israel.
The toast, which has been said for more than 2,000 years, is meant to be a celebration of humanity. We affirm the joy of living while feeling the weight of history. L’chaim must be said with conviction and passion. We toast the lives of you who have survived; we pray that someday your children and grandchildren can live as friends with our own.
As I write this, doctors in Gaza are tending to shrapnel wounds penetrating the bodies and brains of children fighting for their lives in the face of genocide.
Never Again was said after the Holocaust—Not in Our Name is what Jews opposed to genocide are shouting today.
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International Legal Coalition Launched to 'Pursue Israeli War Crimes Suspects'
"Under international law, states have a duty to investigate and prosecute war crimes, yet these obligations have been systematically neglected," one of the initiative's founders lamented.
Mar 19, 2025
Lawyers from half a dozen countries on Tuesday launched a coalition dedicated to bringing Israelis and dual nationals accused of war crimes in Palestine to justice.
The U.K.-based International Center of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) hosted a launch event in London for the new initiative, called Global 195. ICJP said lawyers will "pursue Israeli war crimes suspects across the world" via arrest warrant applications and the initiation of legal proceedings including private prosecutions against implicated members and veterans of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), as well as "figures spanning the entire Israeli military and political chain of command, from senior policymakers to operational personnel, who are directly or indirectly responsible for violations of international law."
Participants include attorneys from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Malaysia, Norway, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, where "advanced preparations have already been made to pursue legal action against British citizens suspected of joining the IDF or committing war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank."
For the past 18 months, ICJP has been collecting evidence as part of its Justice for Gaza campaign, including 135 eyewitness testimonies backed by open-source intelligence. Documented violations of international law include indiscriminate and disproportionate bombing of civilians, attacks on designated "safe zones,"s airstrikes targeting refugee camps, use of starvation as a weapon of war, and forced displacement.
"The obstruction of international legal institutions in pursuing individuals responsible for war crimes in Palestine, coupled with the failure of national police forces to fulfill their obligations under humanitarian law and universal jurisdiction principles, has allowed impunity for Israeli suspected war criminals to persist," ICJP director Tayab Ali said in a statement.
"Under international law, states have a duty to investigate and prosecute war crimes, yet these obligations have been systematically neglected," Ali added. "The launch of Global 195 is a necessary legal intervention to remedy this failure. By activating domestic legal mechanisms across multiple jurisdictions, we are ensuring that those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza are subject to legal accountability and no longer have anywhere to hide."
Huseyin Disli, vice president of the Worldwide Lawyers Association, noted that "no domestic court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli genocide war criminals, exposing the failure of the international legal order" and called the global legal community "incoherent in its goals."
Israel is currently the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case filed by South Africa, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are fugitives from the International Criminal Court, which last November issued arrest warrants over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. However, key nations including the United States—which has not ratified the Rome Statute upon which the ICC is based—have ignored the warrants, and last month the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the tribunal.
Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 175,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. On Tuesday, Israel unilaterally abandoned an eight-week cease-fire and resumed its assault on Gaza, killing more than 400 people including at least 174 children in airstrikes that wiped out entire families.
United Nations experts, international jurists, human rights groups, and others have found that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, as well as crimes including indiscriminate and disproportionate killing of civilians, extrajudicial killing, torture, sexual violence including rape, use of starvation as a weapon of war, and forced displacement.
The launch of Global 195 follows the establishment last September of the
Hind Rajab Foundation, a Belgium-based legal group that pursues arrest warrants for alleged Israeli war criminals traveling abroad. The organization is named after a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed—along with six relatives—by Israeli forces in January 2024 while trying to flee to safety in a car. Two paramedics who tried to rescue her were also killed.
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The Genocide Denial of the 'Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace' Crowd
The Israeli government has displayed clear and unequivocal genocidal intent. Continuing to arm Israel with U.S. weapons means full complicity in what they do with them.
Mar 19, 2025
Israel’s renewed assault on Gaza comes several months after both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports concluding without equivocation that Israel was engaged in genocide. But very few members of Congress dare to acknowledge that reality, while their silence and denials scream out complicity.
In a New York Timesinterview last weekend, the Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer put deep moral evasion on display. Among the “slogans” that are used when criticizing Israel, he said, “The one that bothers me the most is genocide. Genocide is described as a country or some group tries to wipe out a whole race of people, a whole nationality of people. So, if Israel was not provoked and just invaded Gaza and shot at random Palestinians, Gazans, that would be genocide. That’s not what happened.”
Schumer is wrong. The international Genocide Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”—with such actions as killing, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
It would be untenable to publicly acknowledge the reality of Israeli genocide while continuing to support shipping more weaponry for the genocide.
Such actions by Israel have been accompanied by clear evidence of genocidal intent—underscored by hundreds of statements by Israeli leaders and policy shapers. Scarcely three months into the Israeli war on Gaza, scholars Raz Segal and Penny Green pointed out, a database compiled by the Law for Palestine human rights organization “meticulously documents and collates 500 statements that embody the Israeli state’s intention to commit genocide and incitement to genocide since October 7, 2023.”
Those statements “by people with command authority—state leaders, war cabinet ministers and senior army officers—and by other politicians, army officers, journalists and public figures reveal the widespread commitment in Israel to the genocidal destruction of Gaza.”
Since March 2, the United Nations reports, “Israeli authorities have halted the entry of all lifesaving supplies, including food, medicine, fuel and cooking gas, for 2.1 million people.” Now, Israel’s horrendous crusade to destroy Palestinian people in Gaza—using starvation as a weapon of war and inflicting massive bombardment on civilians—has resumed after a two-month ceasefire.
On Tuesday, children were among the more than 400 people killed by Israeli airstrikes, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed that “this is only the beginning.”
It’s almost impossible to find a Republican in Congress willing to criticize the pivotal U.S. backing for Israel’s methodical killing of civilians. It’s much easier to find GOP lawmakers who sound bloodthirsty.
A growing number of congressional Democrats—still way too few—have expressed opposition. In mid-November, 17 Senate Democrats and two independents voted against offensive arms sales to Israel. But in reality, precious few Democratic legislators really pushed to impede such weapons shipments until after last November’s election. Deference to President Biden was the norm as he actively enabled the genocide to continue.
This week, renewal of Israel’s systematic massacres of Palestinian civilians has hardly sparked a congressional outcry. Silence or platitudes have been the usual.
For “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J Street, the largest and most influential liberal Zionist organization in the United States, evasions have remained along with expressions of anguish. On Tuesday the group’s founder and president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, issued a statement decrying “the decision by Netanyahu to reignite this horrific war” and calling for use of “all possible leverage to pressure each side to restore the ceasefire.” But, as always, J Street did not call for the U.S. government to stop providing the weapons that make the horrific war possible.
This week, renewal of Israel’s systematic massacres of Palestinian civilians has hardly sparked a congressional outcry. Silence or platitudes have been the usual.
That’s where genocide denial comes in. For J Street, as for members of Congress who’ve kept voting to enable the carnage with the massive U.S.-to-Israel weapons pipeline, support for that pipeline requires pretending that genocide isn’t really happening.
While writing an article for The Nation (“Has J Street Gone Along With Genocide?”), I combed through 132 news releases from J Street between early October 2023 and the start of the now-broken ceasefire in late January of this year. I found that on the subject of whether Israel was committing genocide, J Street “aligned itself completely with the position of the U.S. and Israeli governments.”
J Street still maintains the position that it took last May, when the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its military offensive in Rafah. “J Street continues to reject the allegation of genocide in this case,” a news release said.
It would be untenable to publicly acknowledge the reality of Israeli genocide while continuing to support shipping more weaponry for the genocide. That’s why those who claim to be “pro-peace” while supporting more weapons for war must deny the reality of genocide in Gaza.
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