LONDON: High-profile Israeli public figures have called for “crippling sanctions” to be launched against Israel by the international community to avert further disaster in Gaza.
The appeal came in a letter to The Guardian by a group of 31 signatories, including academics, artists and public intellectuals.
The letter was signed by Academy Award recipient Yuval Abraham; former Attorney General of Israel Michael Ben-Yair; former Parliament Speaker Avraham Burg; and winners of the Israel Prize, the country’s top cultural award, among others.
Israel is “starving the people of Gaza to death and contemplating the forced removal of millions of Palestinians from the strip,” the letter says.
Its signatories are esteemed figures in journalism, science, academia and more, representing a significant shift in Israeli public life, as more prominent figures begin to criticize the war in Gaza.
The letter’s endorsement of severe international sanctions against Israel is also taboo; politicians in the country have called for the targeting of those who promote such measures.
Israel’s war in Gaza, which is reaching the two-year mark, is also generating further public angst and criticism of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The wider Jewish diaspora is engaged in renewed debate over the trajectory and morality of the war.
This week, two of Israel’s top human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, published reports that described their country’s actions in Gaza as “genocidal.”
Tuesday’s letter says: “The international community must impose crippling sanctions on Israel until it ends this brutal campaign and implements a permanent ceasefire.
“No one should be unaffected by the pervasive hunger experienced by thousands of Gazans. No one should spend the bulk of their time arguing technical definitions between starvation and pervasive hunger.
“The situation is dire, and it is deadly. Nor should we accept arguments that because Hamas is the primary reason many Gazans are either starving or on the verge of starving, that the Jewish state is not also culpable in this human disaster. The primary moral response must begin with anguished hearts in the face of such a large-scale human tragedy.
“Blocking food, water, medicine, and power — especially for children — is indefensible,” it said. “Let us not allow our grief to harden into indifference, nor our love for Israel to blind us to the cries of the vulnerable. Let us rise to the moral challenge of this moment.”
Earlier this month, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in comments to The Guardian, condemned his country’s planned “humanitarian city” in southern Gaza as a concentration camp.
Forcing Palestinians inside the zone from the rest of the enclave would amount to ethnic cleansing, he added.
Netanyahu and his government continue to deny the existence of famine in Gaza, or any potential Israeli links to the disaster unfolding in the territory.
