HASfter fifty-seven years of occupation accompanied by humiliations, expulsions from their homes and lands, arbitrary imprisonments, multiple murders, establishment of colonies and failures of various peaceful actions, we can understand that many Palestinians refuse to condemn the Hamas action of October 7, considering it a legitimate act of resistance to colonization and State terrorism by Israel.
We can also understand that after the 1,200 murders, rapes, sexual violence and the kidnapping of nearly two hundred hostages, the majority of whom were civilians, many Israelis supporting the army’s murderous actions as a legitimate response to the actions of Hamas. However, we condemn all these terrorist acts.
It is not because we are Jews that we condemn terrorist acts and war crimes such as murders, rapes, sexual violence and kidnappings of civilians perpetrated by Hamas commandos. It is not as Jews that we condemn the terrorist acts and war crimes which are the bombings, destruction and massive massacres, the vast majority of women and children, committed by the Israeli army and the settlers. in Gaza and the West Bank for more than three months.
It is because we are attached to the dignity of every human person that we condemn them, without considering that Palestinians or Israelis are criminals or terrorists by nature.
In the name of this past
This condemnation is not without links to our Jewishness, one component among others of our multiple identities, a family heritage which links some of the signatories to the history of the genocide of the Jews of Europe. Many of the families of those of us from 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 the injunctions to declare themselves Jewish and wear the yellow star, they chose to resist, to hide and hide their children. Many of them escaped death thanks to the solidarity and civil disobedience of 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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