UN premises, such as the WHO compound in Deir Al-Balah (pictured), have been struck during the Gaza conflict. Credit: WHO
By James E. Jennings
ATLANTA, USA, Jul 24 2025 – The dramatic story of Israel’s birth in 1948 following the Nazi Holocaust captured the wonder and admiration of the world. Its founders claimed that Israel would be a light to the nations, but now the Jewish State’s identity has gone from being the victim of genocide to perpetrator in less than two generations.
Israel’s Likud government stands accused of genocide in Gaza by a UN Special Committee, the World Court’s admission that the accusation is plausible, and recently by 28 nations acting in concert to declare Israel in violation of International Humanitarian Law.
What happened? Rather than face the truth of 75 years of injustice to Palestinians that led to the terrible slaughter and hostage-taking by HAMAS in 2023, most Israelis support the daily overkill in Gaza, now nearly two years long. After more than 100,000 casualties under constant bombing of the civilian population with no one shooting back, famine has begun.
By contrast, the speech of Israel’s founding father David Ben Gurion on Israel’s Independence Day declared that:
The State of Israel will…foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
A woman and child walk through the heavily bombed town of Khuza’a in the Gaza Strip. Credit: UN Women/Samar Abu Elouf
Every observer can now see that Israel as a society and government have performed exactly in the opposite way. Israel lost its soul by becoming racist, then racialist, the doctrinaire view of Menachem Begin that Jews are by nature and divine right superior to other races. This has led to suppression of the Palestinians, and, if given the opportunity, to their extermination, as is now evident in Gaza.
If the state exists for the benefit of all its inhabitants, why did President Jimmy Carter, who succeeded in brokering peace between Israel and Egypt, write a book titled Peace, Not Apartheid? If Israel exists for all its citizens, why are the Israeli Arabs second class citizens? Why do Palestinians who fled their homes in 1948 and 1967 still live in camps, with nearly six million persons still classified as refugees?
Why under its decades-long military occupation of Palestine, have Arabs been killed, imprisoned, wounded, neighborhoods bombed, houses destroyed, streets plowed up, families and neighborhoods imprisoned behind concrete walls, and an entire population denied the right to travel? Why, if Israel safeguards the Holy Places of all religions, has its air force bombed nearly 1,000 mosques in Gaza and now the few churches and a Christian hospital there too?
The Zionist’s answer to these questions may be that the Palestinians under decades of military rule are not actually citizens of Israel. That is a distinction without a difference, because the occupying authority has legal responsibility for the population under occupation, including the West Bank and Gaza.
True, there are areas declared to be administered by the Palestinians alone, but no one pretends that the Palestinian territory is truly free and independent. The occupied territory and its people remain wards of the Israeli state.
The idea that the Israeli government for most of its history, and especially now, is faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations is laughable. Even though the UN created Israel, its various governments have long denied any right of the UN to curtail its expansionist aims and war-making powers.
That is made clear most recently by two actions: the joint June 2025 Israel-US stealth attacks on Iran, a member state of the UN, and the years-long systematic bombing and dismantling of UN agencies, offices, schools, and food distribution sites in Gaza.
A Jewish Holocaust survivor, Raphael Lemkin, coined the word genocide and made it his lifelong task to see it implemented in international law. The Genocide Convention was ratified by the United Nations in 1948 but is being deliberately flaunted by Israel in Gaza.
Genocide is a serious charge, but its terms in international law are clear: no killing or setting up conditions for the destruction of a people group just because they are members of that group; no forced expulsion or transfers of that group; and no public advocacy to do so, which is a key provision already violated by Messrs. Netanyahu, Trump, Galant, and others.
In January 2024 the International Court of Justice (ICJ), joined by an Israeli ad hoc Judge, Aharon Barak, voted to urge punishment of those advocating expulsion or transfer of the population of Gaza.
What responsibility do the citizens of Israel have for the actions of their government? Complete responsibility in corporate terms, but not as individuals unless they specifically vote for or advocate genocidal actions. Israeli opposition figures, of which there are very few, are courageous and deserve praise.
What about the citizens of the United States where both Democrats and Republicans have long aided and abetted Israel’s violence toward those under its protection?
Governments and citizens everywhere must join forces to prevent famine from claiming more children in Gaza. US citizens must raise our voices now or be forever classed with those who allowed and abetted today’s Genocide.
James E. Jennings PhD is President of Conscience International, and Leader of US Academics for Peace delegations to Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan, and other countries. He taught Middle East History, Archaeology, and Religion at several universities, including The University of Illinois, The University of Tennessee, The University of Akron, and Wheaton College.
IPS UN Bureau
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+’://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, ‘script’, ‘twitter-wjs’);
