More than 6,000 academics reject that Israel committed genocide in Gaza

The defamatory narrative mounted against the State of Israel has suffered a devastating blow from the global academic elite worldwide. Published this Saturday, it has been revealed that more than 6,000 academics, historians, and legal experts of the highest caliber signed an open letter categorically rejecting the claim that Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip. The initiative, which initially started with over 5,000 signatories before surpassing the 6,000 mark, bluntly describes this accusation as a nefarious "blood libel."

The authors of the letter argue that this malicious accusation not only contradicts the actual conduct of Israel during military operations but has been globally instrumentalized with the wicked aim of excluding and attacking Jews. Disseminated through Creative Community for Peace, the declaration was promoted by figures such as Yossi Klein Halevi, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, Rabbi Micha Odenheimer, and Jonathan Karp, a renowned historian from Binghamton University. While the declaration acknowledges that there are internal debates within the Jewish community regarding the development of the war as a "sign of moral health," it emphasizes the urgent need to maintain unity to dismantle this false accusation.

From a geopolitical and strategic perspective, the text makes it clear that Israel was compelled to engage in combat following the atrocities of October 7 with the firm objective of breaking a "siege of terrorist enclaves directed by Iran." Although the unfounded genocidal accusations were triggered almost immediately after that date, a rigorous analysis of the facts demonstrates the falsehood of the anti-Israel narrative.

On the operational ground, specialists highlight the conditions of extreme complexity faced by Israeli forces in Gaza, characterized by hundreds of kilometers of tunnels built by Hamas, thousands of homes rigged with explosives, and the deliberate terrorist tactic of blending in with the population by using individuals presented as journalists or human rights workers.

The rigor of the data completely dismantles the propaganda manipulation when analyzing the ratio of civilians to combatants killed. By cross-referencing the records from the Gaza Ministry of Health —an entity that does not distinguish between civilian casualties and combatants— with the estimate made in May by the INSS of over 23,000 combatants/terrorists killed, the resulting rate stands at approximately two civilians for every neutralized terrorist.

Legal and military experts emphasize that this ratio is extraordinarily low and unprecedented for the context of an asymmetrical urban war. Furthermore, analysts stress the total absence of a massive famine —disproving warnings of imminent catastrophe— and highlight the protocol of warnings given to civilians prior to the execution of strategic attacks.

The intellectual backing for the operational decisions of the government led by Benjamin Netanyahu includes some of the most respected and qualified names in the world. In the academic and scientific field, notable figures include Steven Pinker, eminent professor at Harvard; Jesse Fried and Anat Alon-Beck, also affiliated with Harvard; as well as renowned historians of global stature such as Niall Ferguson, Benny Morris, and Simon Sebag Montefiore. They are joined by Deborah Lipstadt, Holocaust historian and former U.S. special envoy to combat antisemitism; Dina Porat, former chief historian of Yad Vashem; Judea Pearl, professor at UCLA; and Jonathan Sarna, emeritus professor at Brandeis.

The military technical analysis has the undeniable endorsement of John Spencer, head of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point. Meanwhile, the legal doctrine is represented by Irwin Cotler, former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada; Robert Hockett, professor of Law at Cornell; Jeffrey Mausner, former prosecutor of the Nazi war crimes unit of the U.S. Department of Justice; and Eugene Kontorovich, professor of Law at George Mason University. Irwin Cotler himself stated that the fabricated accusation against the Jewish state constitutes a crude "historical, moral, legal, and normative inversion of the facts, law, and history."

Finally, the stance in favor of legal truth and the defense of Israel has the explicit backing of high-ranking international political leaders, including Boris Johnson, former British Prime Minister; Nadhim Zahawi, former British minister of Iraqi origin; and Robert Wilkie, former U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs.