Sorrow and fury: a letter from American rabbis to President Biden.
Dear President Biden,
As American rabbis, we write to you with deep sorrow and fury.
Tomorrow is the UN – designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day: a time to honor the memory of the millions of people murdered through the genocide committed by the Nazi regime, including six million of our Jewish ancestors. On this day, we honor the enormity of our losses, the impact of dehumanization and attempted annihilation on those who survived, and the still-reverberating trauma that has shaped so many of our families and communities.
With sorrow, we will also remember this as the time in which Israel was committing a genocide, aided and abetted by the United States.
We are compelled to speak with moral clarity about what is happening to Palestinians at this very moment. We do so not in spite of our histories, but because of them. We know in our bones what it means to hear Israeli officials dehumanize an entire people, to witness the Israeli military mass murder tens of thousands of Palestinians, to watch Israel systematically destroy civilian infrastructure, cultural institutions, universities, and hospitals. To see Israel purposefully deny food, medicine, and shelter to refugees.
We hold the traumatic history of our people with care and sensitivity — and know how painful it is for Jews to grasp that a Jewish state could possibly commit a genocide. Nevertheless, we must agree with increasing numbers of scholars and international rights experts who have determined that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute, in the words of Prof. Raz Segal, “a textbook case of genocide.” …
President Biden, what is happening right now in Gaza is no accident of history — and your complicity has been anything but silent. We call upon you to be true to your word and end U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. To continue reading, click here.
