HASAfter fifty-seven years of occupation with humiliation, expulsion from their homes and lands, arbitrary detention, multiple killings, the establishment of settlements and the failure of various peaceful actions, we can understand that many Palestinians refuse to condemn the Hamas action of October 7, which Israel Considers a legitimate act of resistance against colonization and state terrorism.
We can also understand that after 1,200 murders, rapes, sexual violence and the kidnapping of nearly two hundred hostages, most of them civilians, many Israelis supported the military’s murderous actions as a legitimate response to Hamas’s actions. However, we condemn all these terrorist acts.
It is not because we are Jewish that we condemn acts of terrorism and war crimes such as murder, rape, sexual violence and kidnapping of civilians committed by Hamas commandos. It is not as Jews that we condemn the terrorist acts and war crimes that are the bombings, destruction and mass killings, mostly of women and children, perpetrated by the Israeli army and settlers. Three months longer than in Gaza and the West Bank.
It is because we are attached to the dignity of every human person that we condemn them, regardless of whether Palestinians or Israelis are criminals or terrorists by nature.
In the name of this past
This condemnation is not without links to our Jewishness, a component among other elements of our multiple identities, a family legacy that connects some of the signatories to the history of the genocide of Europe’s Jews. Many of our families in Central and Eastern Europe were murdered by the Nazis and their local collaborators during the Holocaust.
Some of us, our parents and our grandparents, survived the hunt for Jews led by the Gestapo and the Vichy police. Refusing to obey orders to declare themselves Jewish and wear the yellow star, they chose to resist, hide and hide their children. Many of them escaped death thanks to the solidarity and civil disobedience of the non-Jewish French people, who hid them at the risk of their own lives, without asking who they were or where they came from.
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