Maine Jewish group’s call for peace fell short | Opinion

Loren Johnston of Scarborough developed and taught a course exploring the refugee and displaced persons experience and development of international law at the University of New England and is a student and teacher of the Holocaust and modern European history.

The Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine recently issued a Call for Peace and Responsible Rhetoric containing many positive references supporting peace. Its statements included “We also believe the Israeli government should do everything it can to protect the lives of Palestinian civilians” and “The suffering of Palestinians in Gaza is immense.”

It is an empathetic position toward a people who are associated with a national tragedy in a country that they identify with. However, the letter objects to the use of the term “genocide” to describe the recent situation in Gaza.

“It erases essential moral and legal distinctions, diminishes the meaning of genocide, and inflames hatred for the local Jewish community,” the letter reads, and “The worldwide Jewish population still has not recovered to its pre-Holocaust levels; over the last 25 years, the population of Gaza has more than doubled.”

What is the legal definition? The term itself was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to describe the Holocaust as well as the violent suppression of indigenous peoples by colonizers. The legal term “genocide” was defined by the United Nations Committee on Genocide in 1948 and refers to certain acts “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

There is no minimum number of victims or percentages necessary or percentages to meet that definition. The acts that constitute genocide fall into five categories:

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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.

It is not just left-wing politicians who are characterizing the continued war in Gaza as genocide. B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights — Israel, both based in Israel, each published reports concluding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza as defined by international law.

Amos Goldberg, professor in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and former J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar in Residence at the United States Holocaust Museum, states, “In most cases of genocide …perpetrators said they were acting in self-defense. The fact that what is happening in Gaza does not resemble the Holocaust does not mean that it is not genocide.”

The largest professional organization of scholars studying genocide, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, has concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

I would agree that genocide is both an emotional as well as a legal term. However, if one believes that what is happening in Gaza is genocide, should we not address the fact that we are complicit by providing Israel with offensive weapons that cause unacceptable levels of civilian deaths?

Do we not have a moral responsibility to object to that level of brutality in what we view as a crime against humanity? How do we justify our objections to continue providing the tools that make it possible without acknowledging the severity of the atrocities being committed?

It is not just the use of the term “genocide” that is fueling the rise in antisemitism. More importantly, it has been the constant reports and videos of Palestinian men, women and children for the past three years being removed from collapsed houses, transported to makeshift cemeteries in blood-stained sheets, children teetering on the verge of starvation and begging for food, dying due to the lack of medicine and forever traumatized by three years of death and destruction.

It is also the public statements from some American and Israeli politicians advocating the use nuclear weapons as a final solution to the Palestinian problem, referring to Palestinians as animals, pigs, rats and an Israeli cabinet minister boasting of the destruction of 5,700 Bedouin homes.

Dialogue is important, but the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine’s criticism of others’ sincerely held beliefs as “irresponsible,” “without merit,” “anti-democratic,” “hateful” and “misleading” is not pursuing the dialogue that will result in a better understanding of all points of view. In failing to do so, it promotes the rhetoric that drives us apart.

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