To: Letters To Ed <letters@washpost.com>
Subject: Rep Tlaib
November 7, 2023
Letters to the Editor
The Washington Post
Re: “Rep. Tlaib’s incendiary smear of President Biden (Column by Jim Geraghty, November 6, 2023)
To the Editor:
Hamas’ murderous attacks on Israelis should not blind us to a companion truth about genocide. Two wrongs do not make a right.
Genocide is defined in the Genocide Convention to include “[d]eliberately inflicting on [a national, ethnical, racial or religious] group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Two days after the Hamas-Israel war began on October 7, 2023, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant thundered without dissent from the Israeli government, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” The Defense Minister’s siege of “everything” includes water, shelter, medicines, and clothes.
Can anyone deny that withholding from 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza the bare necessities of life coupled with Dresden-like bombings are calculated to destroy the group in whole or in part? The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda held in Akayesu Trial Judgment that “subjecting a group…to a subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes and the reduction of essential medical services below the minimum requirement” constituted genocide as “methods of destruction by which the perpetrator does not immediately kill the members of the group, but which ultimately seek their physical destruction.”
Representative Tlaib’s observations about the seeds the Gaza war largely echo Israel’s legendary founder and first prime minister David Ben Gurion:
“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and stolen their country. Why would they accept that?” (Spoken to Nahum Goldman, then head of the World Zionist Organization who included these candid words in his book “The Jewish Paradox” (p.121), published by Grosset & Dunlap, NY 1978.).
Truth is ordinarily more chiaroscuro than prime colors.
Sincerely,
Bruce Fein, associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan, 1981-83, and author of American Empire Before The Fall
300 New Jersey Avenue, N.W., Suite 900
Washington, D.C. 20001
Phone: 202-465-8728; 703-963-4968 (M)
Email: bruce@feinpoints.com