The Hypocricy of the “Rabbis’ Letter” Against Exterminating Gazans
By Eric Zuesse
Eric’s Substack
July 30, 2025
Many news-media throughout the world have reported on a “Rabbis’ letter,” which by now has over a thousand signers, and which opposes Israel’s starving to death whatever Gazans haven’t already been killed by Israel’s troops using the bullets and bombs supplied 69% from the U.S. and 30% from Germany. I haven’t seen in any of those news-reports a link to the document itself, but I finally found the letter in Polish, and autotranslated it by Google; and here it is, titled “The Jewish People face a grave moral crisis: A Letter from Rabbis Worldwide”.
The “letter” (or whatever it is) says:
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We abhor the violence of such nihilistic terrorist organizations as Hezbollah and Hamas. We call on them immediately to release all the hostages, held for so long captive in tunnels in horrendous conditions with no access to medical aid. We unequivocally support the legitimacy of Israel’s battle against these evil forces of destruction. We understand the Israeli army’s prioritization of protecting the lives of its soldiers in this ongoing battle, and we mourn the loss of every soldier’s life.
But we cannot condone the mass killings of civilians, including a great many women, children and elderly, or the use of starvation as a weapon of war. Repeated statements of intention and actions by ministers in the Israeli government, by some officers in the Israeli army, and the behaviour of criminally violent settler groups in the West Bank, often with police and military support, have been major factors in bringing us to this crisis. The killing of huge numbers of Palestinians in Gaza, including those desperately seeking food, has been widely reported across respectable media and cannot reasonably be denied. The severe limitation placed on humanitarian relief in Gaza, and the policy of withholding of food, water, and medical supplies from a needy civilian population contradict essential values of Judaism as we understand it.
They pretend — as does Israel’s Government — that this genocide against what had previously been 2.1 million Gazans, is a response to the 7 October 2023 event, in which, as Wikipedia reports, “In total, 1,195 people were killed:[35][e].” That would be a ratio of nearly two thousand to one. During Hitler’s regime, such high ratios, and such wantonness, in revenge, were viewed as being acceptable, but anyone who nowadays supports it is considered to be downright evil. When the thousand-plus signing rabbis opened by basically doing that (assuming that the Octobeer 7th event is what drives this genocide), they implicitly gave credit to some of the most vicious lies by the Israeli Government and its supporters. At the very outset, they thereby greatly weakened their case against that Government. But, in fact, this genocide of Gazans capstones the 1948 Nakba till today. It is part of that, which Israel has been doing ever since its birth on 14 May 1948 (the Nakba started the following day).
Furthermore, their alleging that “The severe limitation placed on humanitarian relief in Gaza, and the policy of withholding of food, water, and medical supplies from a needy civilian population contradict essential values of Judaism as we understand it” is bizarre, since Judaism is the Torah, which says:
Genesis 15:18-21
“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt [the Nile] to the great river, the Euphrates, including the lands of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amoriotes, the Caananites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’”
Deuteronomy 7:1-2
“You must not let any living thing survive among the cities of
these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance: the
Girgashites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites,
and the Jebusites. You must put them all to death.”
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Deuteronomy 7:16
“Destroy every nation that the Lord your God places in your power, and do not show them any mercy.”
Deuteronomy 20:16-18
“When you capture cities in the land he Lord your God is giving you, kill everyone. Completely destroy all the people: the Hittites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord has ordered you to do. Kill them so that they will not make you sin against the Lord by teaching you to do all the disgusting things they do in the worship of their gods.”
Israel’s Government takes such passages as ‘justifying’ what they do to Palestinians. And the vast majority of Israelis agree with that viewpoint. They have the Torah on their side. I wish that the Old Testament’s genocidal hatred of Palestinians weren’t there, just as I wish that the New Testament’s genocidal hatred of Jews (John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, Luke 19:27, and from Paul, 1 Thes. 2:14-16) weren’t there, but pretending it’s not there, and even claiming Israel’s actions after 7 October 2023 “contradict essential values of Judaism as we understand it” is simply bizarre coming from teachers of Judaism. You can’t just make up a religion — it goes straight back to its ‘holy’ scripture. If that isn’t what you (rabbis and other clerics) teach, then what are you? And if it IS what you teach, then why DO you? (Because look at the genocides it has caused.)
This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.
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