Opposition to Israel’s policies isn’t anti-Semitic, it is anti-genocide

• Published date: 07 January 2024
• Author: Jeffrey D Sachs
• Publication title: Sunday Tribune

An arms package for Israel is not only against America’s interests but also against Israel’s interests. The only path to real security for Israel is peace with Palestine. The US can help bring this about by ending the supply of munitions for Israel’s brutal war and by promoting the two-state solution as called for by international law

The brutality in Gaza is becoming a true threat to Israel’s survival. Because of Israel’s extraordinary violence, the world is uniting against Israel. Incredibly, some Israeli leaders are now openly advocating an even wider war in the Middle East, one that could well spell utter disaster for Israel.

The surging global opposition to Israel’s policies is not anti-semitic. It is anti-genocide. It is also pro-peace, pro-Israel, and pro-Palestine. If Israel ends the genocide, it will end the global opposition it now faces.

The Israeli government argues that it is in a mortal fight for survival against Hamas, and therefore it must take every measure, including the destruction of Gaza, to survive. This is false. There is no ethical, practical, legal or geopolitical case for destroying Gaza – killing tens of thousands of civilians, and uprooting 2 million people – to protect Israel against the kinds of threats that Hamas actually poses.

During the years 2008-2022, Hamas and other militants killed about a dozen Israeli civilians per year, while Israel usually killed at least ten times more civilian Palestinians. There was a spike in 2014, when Israel invaded Gaza, with 19 Israeli civilians killed versus 1 760 Palestinian civilians.

In all the years of Hamas rule in Gaza after 2007, Hamas has never captured Israeli territory, much less remotely threatened Israel’s existence or survival.

On October 7, Hamas fighters made a surprise incursion into Israel that lasted that horrific day. This did not reflect a new super-ability of Hamas to invade Israel but rather a shocking failure of Israeli security. Israeli leaders had ignored extensive warnings of an upcoming Hamas attack and had inexplicably left the Gaza-Israel border severely under-manned. Even more astoundingly, they did so just days after Israeli extremists had stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex, one of Islam’s holiest sites. Hamas exploited Israel’s astounding security lapse by breaching the border in an attack that led to about 1100 Israeli civilian deaths, and Hamas’ taking of 240 hostages, with an unknown number of the Israeli civilian deaths that day caused by Israeli aerial bombing and crossfire in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF’s) counterattack.

By re-fortifying the border with Gaza, Israel has stopped...