Marty Levine
July 23, 2025
How come my whole community is not protesting with me?
This is not the first time since October 7, 2023, that I have asked myself (and anyone who is near me) that question.
Over the weekend, Haaretz published a piece by Gideon Levy headlined “Opinion | It’s Clear – Israel Now Has a Plan for the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians From Gaza”. I am going to share a good piece of it so you can understand why I am again asking “How can we all not stand up and protest?” Here’s some of what Levy asked us to pay attention to:
David Barnea, the head of Mossad, Israel’s CIA and grandson of a holocaust survivor recently visited Washington to discuss the “evacuation” of the Gaza Strip’s population. Barak Ravid reported on Channel 12 News that Barnea told his interlocutors that Israel has already begun talks with three countries on this issue, and the irony of history hid its face in shame. A grandson of a refugee of ethnic cleansing in Germany discusses ethnic cleansing, and no memory comes to mind…
Last week, the BBC published an investigative report based on satellite photos, showing systematic destruction carried out by the IDF across the Gaza Strip. Village after village is being wiped off the face of the earth, which is being flattened for the sake of constructing the concentration camp, so that life in Gaza will no longer be possible…
This is no longer a rolling war. One can no longer accuse Benjamin Netanyahu of waging a war with no purpose. There is a purpose to this war, and it’s a criminal one. One can no longer tell army commanders that their troops are dying for no reason: They are dying in a war of ethnic cleansing.
The ground is ready, one can move to the transfer of people, the want ads are on their way. After moving the population is completed, and the residents of the humanitarian city start missing their lives among the ruins, amid hunger, disease and bombing, it will be possible to move to the final stage: forcible placement on trucks and planes enroute to the new and longed-for homeland – Libya, Indonesia or Ethiopia.
Yes Israel is acting out the plan that my President and Israel’s Prime Minister have agreed upon. Here’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu at their most recent White House meeting:
“President Trump had a brilliant vision. It’s called free choice. If people want to stay, they can stay, but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave. It shouldn’t be a prison. It should be an open place, and give people a free choice,” Netanyahu said, shortly after presenting Trump with his letter formally nominating the president for the Nobel Peace Prize.
“We’re working with the United States very closely about finding countries that will seek to realize what they always say that they want to give the Palestinians a better future. We’re getting close to finding several countries, and this will give Palestinians the freedom to choose,” Netanyahu added.
All this said about the two million Palestinians who call Gaza their home and who are being starved to death on a land where almost every habitable building, almost every hospital, almost all of the agricultural land, and almost all of the civic infrastructure that makes it possible to live has been destroyed.
The pre-eminent Israeli-American Genocide and Holocaust Scholar has reached his conclusion and has spoken up. From a recent essay published by Omer Bartov in the NY Times:
My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.
This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
Is there doubt that this is correct? Is there any doubt that we should be protesting and doing everything we can to bring it to an end? Is there any doubt?
How is it that organizations that claim to speak on behalf of a Jewish Community that survived the horrors of the Holocaust remain silent or, more horrifically, express continued support for the government that is perpetrating these crimes? How is that they can lead an effort to silence those in their community who are moved to stand up, and stand alongside their Palestinian brothers and protest?
In an extensive statement of its vision of the truth of almost two years of destruction, my home city’s Jewish United Fund has no word of even sorrow for the fate of the Gazan people, let alone any hint of condemnation for how Israel has conducted itself. It actually blames the Palestinians for their own fate. “Any loss of civilian life is a tragedy whose responsibility is Hamas.”
The same silence in the face of a horror being conducted in their name is found if you search the web sites of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (which speaks for 50 member organizations representing a wide spectrum of organized American Jewish life), The ADL (the organization which has energized the effort to make opposition to Israel the same as antisemitism), The Federations of North America and the (American Jewish Committee). All are organizations that would have condemned the silence of the 1930s, and would have supported the very international legal framework that recognizes what Israel is doing as a war crime.
Yet they remain silent. Yet they excuse every Israeli abuse as justified acts of self-defense.
How can this be?
How can you not be standing up in protest?
Post script: after posting this, I saw this statement by the Central Conference of American Rabbis that could go as far as protesting the murder of an American Citizen who was murdered in his family’s village in Palestinian territory by Israeli settlers. But no mention of the horrors going on day after day just miles to the west in Gaza!
Post Post script: Here’s a brave Jewish voice, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, saying words that we pray are heard where mine are not
…a sign of hope: https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/gazaletter/?ref=everybody-celebratory-liberation-forward-nourishment-for-your-heart-soul-and-noggin-newsletter
