The Belated Voices Against The U.S.-Israeli Genocide of The Palestinians

Edited by Sam Thielman

"DURING THE FIRST six months of Donald Trump’s time in office," House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said on Friday, "the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has reached a breaking point." By that, Jeffries means that the advanced stages of malnutrition for the Palestinians of Gaza, particularly for the strip's children, have arrived. 

Trump, an enduring disgrace and the product of acute social, economic, political and security rot in 21st century America, has eagerly aided the culling of the Palestinians. He told Israel on Friday to "finish the job." That isn't much different from what he said before he was elected. Jeffries' framing, however—that this is all happening "during the first six months of Donald Trump's time in office"—is an attempt to divert blame from what the Biden administration, Democrats in Congress, and he himself contributed to reaching that "breaking point." 

In January 2024, Israel alleged without evidence that 12 employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) were complicit in the October 7 attack, an accusation that would later swell to "hundreds." UNRWA employs some 30,000 people, 13,000 of them in Gaza. Following a U.N. investigation, UNRWA's Philippe Lazzarini fired nine people whom the investigation didn't clear, even if its findings didn't affirmatively document their complicity. But the point of Israel's accusation was not the nine employees of UNRWA, but the 29,991 (or, if you prefer, the 12,991 of them in Gaza). UNRWA provides state-like services, from education to health care to microfinance, for stateless Palestinians. The point of weakening it is to stop those services from reaching those people—and to divert similar services into the hands of controllable entities that can weaponize them.

That is what the Biden administration and the Republican-controlled Congress did. Once Israel made the accusation, President Biden and eight other global leaders suspended funding for UNRWA. Lazzarini called the suspension "shocking" and warned them that his organization "is the primary humanitarian agency in Gaza, with over 2 million people depending on it for their sheer survival.   Many are hungry as the clock is ticking towards a looming famine." 

In March 2024, Congress made the suspension of that aid law as part of a massive spending bill. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, having received from the United States a contribution to the genocide no less potent than U.S.-provided missiles and warplanes, had already envisioned, in an official "Day After Hamas" plan released a month earlier, the replacement of UNRWA with "responsible international aid organizations." More than a year later, it is obvious what that "responsible" organization is: the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an appalling, murderous Squid Game for starving Palestinians, created by the Israelis and a CIA veteran. 

Voting in favor of the bill codifying the UNRWA suspension was Hakeem Jeffries. 

Rep. Andre Carson, an Indiana Democrat, in March 2025 introduced a bill to restore UNRWA's funding. "UNRWA [provides a] unique and indispensable contribution to immediately addressing urgent humanitarian needs in Gaza," the bill reads, "especially in mitigating and stopping the spread of famine and disease." According to Congress.gov, the bill remains bottled up in the foreign-affairs committee. 

If Jeffries—or any of the other liberal policymakers, journalists and influencers who have recently and belatedly said the bare minimum about Gaza—wants to actually do something beyond pretending that the genocide began on January 21, he can start by agitating for the House to take up Carson's UNRWA funding bill. Then he can join Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)'s legislation for an arms embargo on Israel. These are material and not rhetorical steps to stop the genocide and save Palestinian lives. The choice is his. The judgment is history's. 

PETER BEINART'S newsletter today is a provocation: 

The question that occurs to me is: do our rabbis believe in God? Because it seems to me, if you believe in God, and you believe that human beings—all human beings, Palestinians included—are created equal, b’tzelem elohim, in the image of God, and you see what Israel is doing to Palestinians, you have no choice but to speak out as forcefully as you can against this. …

[T]he reason I ask whether these rabbis believe in God is that when I hear from rabbis, and I hear from people who have talked to rabbis about what they don’t speak, what I hear again and again is they are afraid of their response from their congregants, that they’re afraid that there will be people in their communities who get very angry at them, and perhaps who even imperil their jobs. And it seems to me this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a rabbi is supposed to do. That, yes, of course a rabbi needs to be concerned about what their congregants, what Jews feel. But their fundamental, their higher obligation, is to try to wrestle with the question of what God wants for them.

As a member of the community in whose name the State of Israel claims to act, it has been a heartbreaking education to see American Jewish leadership, at a minimum, acquiesce to—and, more often, ignore or rationalize—a genocide committed by Israel with material and diplomatic support from the United States. I do not believe that a single Palestinian life is outweighed by all the Jewish anguish that Israel weaponizes. And I struggle with what it means for the future of Judaism that I am in the minority. (Barney Rubin has much stronger words here.)

This is not only a matter for Jewish communities to struggle with. Every community in the United States must, as this is an American genocide as much as it is an Israeli one. The manifest unpopularity of the genocide is yet another testament to how undemocratic U.S. foreign policy is. However much we consider our political system to be the very definition of democracy, it is a system that insulates foreign policy (and not just foreign policy, but this is my area of expertise) from democratic accountability. It does not produce a foreign policy that enjoys democratic legitimacy. Once again, that system has instead produced genocide. We as Americans must understand that this is not an aberration. If we want it to be, I would argue that we need to replace this system with socialism, and then struggle eternally to keep socialism democratic. 

All that said, on Sunday, the leadership of Reform Judaism in the U.S. issued a statement that also talked about b'tzelem elohim. "One consequence of this is the moral priority, which is affirmed throughout the Bible and rabbinic tradition, of feeding the hungry—both for the individual and for the self-governing Jewish community," the statement reads, correctly. But the statement is full of disturbing rhetorical cover for Israel, as if such cover had not led us to this point. It begins: 

The ongoing crisis in Gaza is a devastating reminder of the immense human cost of war. Nearly two years into Israel’s war against Hamas, Israelis are still waiting for the return of their loved ones held hostage, and innocent Palestinians are caught in a mounting humanitarian catastrophe. Hamas has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to sacrifice the Palestinian people in its pursuit of Israel’s destruction, but Israel must not sacrifice its own moral standing in return. Neither escalating military pressure nor restricting humanitarian aid has brought Israel closer to securing a hostage deal or ending the war. 

The genocide, a word the Reform statement can't bring itself to use, is not a reminder of "the immense human cost of war." It is a deliberate choice of the Israeli government and abetted at every stage by the U.S. government, first Biden's and now Trump's. It was obvious from the start of the war that the Israeli government's concern for the hostages was secondary to the opportunity it seized to destroy Gaza. That is not a choice made by Hamas—and Hamas can reap the blame for its own decisions in due course—but by Israel. Credulity on this issue is fidelity to earthly power, not to truth, and not to God. 

Israel's actions vaporized its "moral standing" long ago, much as America's did. I have noticed throughout the War on Terror that time and again, following scandals resulting from the torture, the drone strikes, the occupations, the indefinite detentions and so forth, commentators and politicians would lament the damage to America's moral credibility. They spoke as if the U.S. held accounts in a Bank of Moral Credibility that could never be overdrawn. To talk to those who have experienced the realities of U.S. foreign policy is to know otherwise. Only in Israel, America and parts of the west would anyone speak of Israel possessing any "moral standing." And that is not an indictment of those outside the west.

You can read the Reform statement for yourself. While my heart wants to latch on to the basic humanity of calling for Palestinians not to starve to death, the statement's many evasions of what Israel is doing makes it read like an ass-covering. "We are encouraged by Saturday night’s announcement that the Israeli military would revive the practice of dropping aid from airplanes and make it easier for aid convoys, including those from the U.N.’s World Food Program, to move through Gaza along 'designated humanitarian corridors' and to temporarily cease fighting in Gaza for a humanitarian pause," it reads. That "pause" has killed at least 65 people in Gaza since the sun rose today. "No one should spend the bulk of their time arguing technical definitions between starvation and pervasive hunger," it correctly notes. Well, tell it to Netanyahu, who again today said "There is no starvation." 

More plainly, Yoav Gallant, the former defense minister, said two days after October 7 that Israel would permit "no electricity, no food, no water, no gas" into Gaza. Gallant predicated the intensified siege on fighting what he called "human animals." Israel Katz, who eventually replaced Gallant at the defense ministry, said that "no one will preach us morality" while Israel dealt out collective punishment. And in an allusion the rabbis behind the statement would not have misunderstood, Netanyahu ordered the IDF into Gaza by telling the soldiers that they were facing Amelekites.  

I can't answer why the onset of mass starvation crosses a "breaking point" that Israel's siege of Gaza, its destruction of hospitals, its mass domicide, its bombing of people huddled into tents, its damage to Gaza's coastal aquifer, its lethal targeting by algorithm, its sexual assault of Palestinian detainees, its slaughter of Gaza's journalists and on and on did not. At Zeteo, Diana Buttu excoriates the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem for only today calling Israel's actions a genocide. "We are only believed when someone—anyone—other than one of us states these conclusions," she writes. "In the hierarchy of 'to be believed,' the rank usually lies with the war criminals, followed by Israeli soldiers (including probable war crime perpetrators), followed by Israeli human rights organizations, followed by international human rights organizations, followed by (non-Palestinian; non-Arab) international journalists." 

When it comes to the Reform statement, I linger on its closing lines: "Let us not allow our grief to harden into indifference, nor our love for Israel to blind us to the cries of the vulnerable. Let us rise to the moral challenge of this moment. " All these nearly 22 months, your love for Israel indeed blinded you. What will you do now that you tell us your eyes are open? 

ERIC ADAMS EAGERLY SOLD OUT New York's immigrant communities to ICE in exchange for his own freedom. On Thursday, the Trump administration sued New York to weaken its sanctuary-city protections. In a page out of The Jakarta Method, it is using the shooting of an off-duty Customs and Border Protection agent as a pretext. And the administration specifically takes Adams to task for it all. I'll have more to say about this in a forthcoming piece for The Nation that my editor there just texted me about. But Adams is the only one who didn't foresee that the scorpion ferrying him across the river would sting him. Only it's not Adams who gets poisoned, it's our neighbors.