Marty Levine
July 30, 2026
Some days ago, a former Illinois State Senator and Jewish Communal Leader, Elliott Hartstein, posted a very long Facebook post that he then published in the Blogs of The Times of Israel. He titled it “Words Matter About Israel and Palestinians.” It is a long piece, but I urge you to read it end to end because I think it illustrates a central problem in the American Jewish community’s internal struggle over Israel/Palestine. It illustrates the all too common he ability of so many of those in the American Jewish Community to allow their support of Israel to blind them to the horror taking place in plain sight.
What struck me about Elliott’s piece is that he seems to believe that there are no facts or experts needed to support his assertions that Israel is being smeared by those of us who have cited it for committing Genocide in Gaza or for being an Apartheid state. He asserts we just don’t understand what those words really mean.
So here’s a long, open letter to Elliott that shared with him as a comment on both Facebook and the Times of israel that I wanted to share with you as well.
I know it is long, but I just needed to put some facts on the record.
“An Open Letter to Elliott Hartstein
Dear Elliott,
I read with great interest and great pain your lengthy Facebook post about Israel, Palestine, Genocide, Apartheid and the “Danger of turning complex issues into Political labels.”
I am writing to you to take your injunction that “Words matter” and “Precision, Fairness, and Honest Debate Matter in Israel and Palestine” seriously.
I think these are objectives that we should strive to apply.
Unfortunately, I think you have failed to heed your own words.
On Genocide
You are very correct that Genocide has a precise definition.
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Article II
In the present Convention, 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.
And it is the strong existence of evidence of Israel’s intent that has moved Gaza from just one more example of the brutality of modern warfare to a textbook example of Genocide.
The conclusion that this is so comes, not from those manning the protest lines, but from those who have devoted their lives to the study of Genocide and the Holocaust. That they have painfully reached this conclusion is not disputable; it is not political rhetoric; it is a very somber finding.
Last July, renowned scholar of the Holocaust Professor Omer Bartov reached the conclusion that Israel’s actions met this definition of genocide. He published his findings in an article that the New York Times entitled “ I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”
He explained that when Israel began its response to Hamas’ violent breakout on October 7, 2023, he had seen some evidence that members of the IDF had committed war crimes, but he did not see the war’s brutal moment as evidence of genocidal intent. But after the evacuation of the northern part of Gaza affecting 1 million men, women and children and the destruction of the supposed sanctuary city, Rafah, they had been directed to southern Gaza, the line had been crossed.
He cited the words of Israeli government officials, those responsible for the actions of their state, as the evidence he needed that these were not just bad actors and bad actions but were acts of genocide.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a “huge price” for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas was operating, “into rubble,” and he called on “the residents of Gaza” to “leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere.”
Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember “what Amalek did to you,” a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to “kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings” of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting “human animals” and, later, called for “total annihilation.” Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on X that Israel’s task must be “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” Israel’s actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.
Professor Bartov is not an outlier.
Just days later, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) released a statement of its conclusion that Israel’s conduct meets the legal definition as laid out in the UN Convention on Genocide. And referenced numerous other organizations that had already reached that conclusion.
Acknowledging that the International Court of Justice found in three provisional measures order in the case of South Africa v. Israel — January, March, and May 2024 — that it is plausible that Israel is committing genocide in its attack in Gaza and ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement of genocide and to ensure the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza;
Acknowledging that leading global international law organizations and UN bodies, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Forensic Architecture, DAWN, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, and the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, have conducted extensive investigations and issued reports concluding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza;
Acknowledging that a number of Israeli, Palestinian, Jewish, and other scholarly experts working in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and in International Law have concluded that Israeli governmental and military actions constitute genocide;
(IAGS) Declares that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948);
(IAGS) Declares that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity as defined in international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court…
Have you seen these and other expert opinions?
Why are you ignoring all of this evidence when you accuse critics of Israel of “wrongfully manipulating public opinion and voters” when they accuse Israel of Genocide?
On Apartheid
Elliott, you urge your readers to reject the use of Apartheid to describe Israel. Again, let us start with a definition.
Apartheid refers to the implementation and maintenance of a system of legalized racial segregation in which one racial group is deprived of political and civil rights. Apartheid is a crime against humanity punishable under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
As with accusations of Genocide, there are reputable sources who, long before October 7, 2023, were accused of being an Apartheid state.
In 2018, shortly before he died, the renowned Israeli and staunch Zionist A.B. Yehoshua wrote of his country as beset by the ills of apartheid.
Yet, just when the term ‘Palestinian state’ is becoming a staple fixture in the international sphere, I and some of my good friends who fought for it for 50 years feel – and I hope I am proved wrong – that this vision is no longer viable in practice. Indeed, it has become only a deceptive and crafty cover for a slow but ever-deepening slide into a condition of vicious occupation and legal and social apartheid…
In 2022, the Israeli human rights group B’Tzelem published “Not a ‘Vibrant’ Democracy – This is Apartheid,” which documented their conclusion that Israel has given up a claim to being a democracy for all it ruled and should now be seen as built on a framework of systematic racial/ethnic separation and discrimination.
Roughly 15 million people, about half of them Jews and the other half Palestinians, live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, under a single rule. The perception that there are two separate regimes in this territory – a democracy on one side of the Green Line, within Israel’s sovereign borders, and a temporary military occupation on the other – is divorced from reality.
All of us, Jews and Palestinians alike, live in this area in a binational reality, under a single regime. However, not everyone will be permitted to vote in the coming elections, which will determine the government and our lives in the coming years. About half of the population – all the Palestinians who live in this area, whether they are citizens, permanent residents or subjects – are either fully or partially excluded from this decision-making process.
One regime governs the entire area and the fate of everyone in it. This regime operates according to a single organizing principle: advancing and cementing the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians. Under this regime, Jewish citizens have the monopoly on political power. Only they have a true seat at the table where their fate, and the fate of Palestinians, is determined.
This is not a democracy. This is apartheid.
In the same year, Amnesty International reached the same conclusion.
Their report, “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity”, presents a reasoned assessment of the legal and social reality which treats Israeli Jews and Palestinians differently and meets the definition of “apartheid.”
Amnesty International has demonstrated that Israel has imposed a system of oppression and domination over Palestinians wherever it exercises control over the enjoyment of their rights – across Israel and the OPT and with regard to Palestinian refugees. The segregation is conducted in a systematic and highly institutionalized manner through laws, policies and practices, all intended to prevent Palestinians from claiming and enjoying equal rights to Jewish Israelis within Israel and the OPT, and thus intended to oppress and dominate the Palestinian people. This oppression and domination have been cemented by a legal regime that controls (by negating) the rights of Palestinian refugees residing outside Israel and the OPT to return to their homes. Over decades, Israeli demographic and geopolitical considerations have shaped policies towards Palestinians in each of the different areas of Israel, East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in different ways. This means that, today, Israel’s system of control is not applied uniformly across all areas. Palestinians experience this system in different ways and face differing levels across Israel and the OPT and against Palestinian refugees and their descendants outside the territory. Amnesty International has also concluded that the patterns of proscribed acts perpetuated by Israel both inside Israel and in the OPT form part of a systematic as well as widespread attack directed against the Palestinian population, and that the inhuman or inhumane acts committed within the context of this attack have been committed with the intention to maintain this system and amount to the crime against humanity of apartheid under both the Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute. of repression based on their status and the area in which they live.[ML3] The organization has concluded that Israel has perpetrated the international wrong of apartheid, as a human rights violation and a violation of public international law wherever it imposes this system. It has assessed that almost all of Israel’s civilian administration and military authorities, as well as governmental and quasi-governmental institutions, are involved in the enforcement of the system of apartheid against Palestinians
Many of the rationales you offer for differences between Jewish and Palestinian life under Israeli rule are considered by Amnesty International and B’Tzelem. They have concluded that the differences are designed to live out the words of Prime Minister Netanyahu that “Israel is not a state of all its citizens… [but rather] the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them.” (Message posted online in March 2019)
If anything, the situation has gotten worse since 2022.
Have you read the findings of those who find apartheid applicable to Israel?
On Zionism, Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism
Zionism grew from the plight of Eastern European Jewry, living as a minority in nation states which tolerated or encouraged their violent persecution. Zionism took our[ML4] religious dream of returning to the ancient home as part of the messianic age and transformed it into a political movement aiming to establish a modern homeland for scattered, beleaguered Jewish populations. It was realized when a colonial power ceded its control of Israel/Palestine and was energized by the horror of the holocaust.
Zionism sought to reclaim a Jewish state that had not existed since the beginning of the modern age and ignored the history of what had come after, and the people who were living there.
This allowed us to create a mythological story of Israel’s creation. Jews were reclaiming their homeland as a “people without a land” and were coming to “a land without a people.”
But there was a people. And they needed to be removed. The leaders of the Israeli state-in-formation needed to evict 750,000 Palestinians and destroy their homes and villages to fulfill their desire for a Jewish state. And they had to deny what they had done, which was a foundational element of the Israel we see today.
Understanding the reality of the Nakba (the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians) can not be left out of the story of Zionism and in the meaning of anti-Zionism.
What we are seeing today cannot be separated from this history.
The more and more aggressive effort to remove Palestinians from the lands that were designated for a Palestinian state is not an aberration; it is not just the action of a fringe minority. It is the policy of a government that desires to control land that is not theirs. It represents a consistent element of the translation of Zionism’s vision of a Jewish state into government policy.
It follows the consistent line from 1948 to 2026.
Is it hard to view this story without seeing that maybe there is an element of colonialism in play?
Not Judging Israel by the Actions of its Leaders
As you express sympathy for Palestinian pain, you assert that “Supporting Israel does not require supporting every Israeli government”
But what, then, are you supporting?
There is no significant opposition party that is running in the upcoming elections with a platform that argues for a significant change in course.
No major Israeli party will lead or even join a coalition that includes the Israeli Arab parties.
No major Israeli party is calling for a Palestinian state.
The political arguments that are shaping the upcoming elections appear to be over how powerful in a new government the representatives of Ultra-orthodox and settler-supporting parties will be. The Issues that will shape this election and the next government are about the lives of Israel’s Jewish citizens, not its Palestinian minority and certainly not the millions of Palestinians who are living as non-citizens under Israeli governance, and will have no vote in this election.
The arguments appear to be about policies that affect the Jewish citizenry of Israel, not all of the 14 million people now living under Israeli rule.
Parties that center equality and equity will be lucky to cross the electoral threshold and be a part of the next Knesset. And even if they are seated, that will be ignored have no voice in shaping a different Israel.
So, if this is not what you are supporting, what is it that you want Israel to be? And when it falls short, as it has for all of the many years that Netanyahu has been the leader, what is it you are supporting?
Some Concluding Thoughts
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” This was a lesson that Martin Luther King Jr. told us he had learned as he battled the inequities of our nation. (from “A Proper Sense of Priorities”)
I thought of this as I read your piece, Elliott.
Too many of us seem unwilling to recognize there are unpleasant truths that we must see if we are to reach a better future.
This was underlined recently in a conversation with my youngest son when he referred me to a recently published book, Haifa Republic by the Israeli philosopher and New School professor Omri Boehm. Here’s an excerpt from my thinking about what I found in Boehm’s musings.
Boehm wrote this book advocating for a single bi-national confederation which allowed both Jews and Palestinians a shared nation which would be Democratic but not give either people dominant control. He did this both reflecting back to the beginnings of the Zionist movement, before 1948 where Jewish thinkers and leaders of the Zionist movement recognized that this was what they were hoping for. He did this recognizing what so many do not want to see, that a Jewish state as it is being built is discriminatory, not democratic.
Here is a section of his takedown of the Jewish and Democratic myth (forgive the length of this excerpt but I think, Boehm’s words should not be paraphrased).
To see the consequences of such self-deception, consider the recently legislated quasi-constitutional Basic Law: Israel, the Nation State of the Jewish People, in relation to the country’s Declaration of Independence. For the first seventy years of Israel’s existence, its identity as both Jewish and democratic was defined by the declaration’s pledge that the Jewish state would ensure “complete equality…irrespective of religion, race or sex” …The Declaration of Independence has often been celebrated as a beacon of liberal Zionist politics, but the truth about it has always been messier and uglier. For some time now, it’s been an open secret that there will be no two-state solution, and that Israel has claimed for itself the whole of Palestine’s territory. Accordingly, the nation-state law asserts that “the right to self-determination” in the country is “unique to the Jewish People,” and flouts the pledge to universal equality, specifying that the “development of Jewish settlement” is from now on “a national value”… The point of this law is to put in place the legal infrastructure for future annexations… It is also actively used to expropriate Arab citizens and Palestinian inhabitants… The new nation-state law didn’t have to openly prioritize Israel’s Jewishness over its democratic procedures because another Basic Law, the one regulating the country’s elections, already does just that. Clause 7A of Basic Law: The Knesset specifies that any person or party who in word or deed negates Israel’s “Jewish and democratic character” must be banned from running for the Knesset. The spirit behind this clause is the familiar principle of “militant democracy”—roughly, the idea that democracies may legitimately exclude from democratic participation extremist political actors who aspire to abuse elections to undermine democracy from within… It undermines the right for democratic representation in defense not of democracy, but of ethnocracy, and of a particular state ideology, namely Zionism, and aren’t the same as those of Jews… Constituting a percent of Israel’s citizens, Arab Israelis cannot be expected to support the country’s Jewish character any more than African Americans could support the United States as a white country. Arab Israeli representatives are tolerated, but their standing is conditional… For the same reason that the Jewish state drove out its large Arab majority, it must regard the votes of those Arabs who did not flee as potentially subversive: they could “abuse” democracy to oppose the state’s Jewish character. But again, this is not a defense of democracy but a prioritization of the Jewishness of the state over democracy…
The reason for the inability to offer an alternative positive agenda is not difficult to find. Committed as these liberals are to the principle of a Jewish democracy, they require separation from the Palestinians in order to ensure a Jewish majority. And though separation is now plainly untenable, democratic visions for Israel beyond the two-state solution are perceived as anti-Zionist forms of betrayal—quite literally, as treason. Accordingly, liberal Zionists can only seek refuge in criticizing Netanyahu’s corruption, fighting for the legalization of light drugs, and promoting women’s and gay rights: important objectives, but also ways not to talk about Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank, and the future of a country where liberal democracy is ever more at risk.
The most recent violence on the West Bank has shown how dangerous ignoring reality is to both Jews and Palestinians. Settlers violently invade a Palestinian village. The villagers defend themselves, an act that is legal for Jewish homeowners, but severe retribution against the Palestinians is promised by Israeli leadership across the political spectrum. From Haaretz’ Gideon Levy
Between Benjamin Netanyahu’s “we’ll act with force against the terrorists and their dispatchers” and Golan’s “we’ll defeat terror with a harsh military hand,” there was no difference. The left and the right are the same. When it comes to core issues, there is no difference between Golan and Netanyahu.
So, Dr. King’s lesson resonated with me as I read your words.
I, as you, would love Israel to be a place that lives up to the noble words of its Declaration of Independence. I would love it to be a place where I can connect with my history. I would love it to be the miraculous place I hoped to encounter when I first traveled there decades ago.
But I know it is not that place. And it will not be that place as long as we refuse to recognize reality, even when it pains us.
