A group of high-profile Israeli public figures, including academics, artists and public intellectuals, has called for ‘crippling sanctions’ to be imposed by the international community on Israel, amid mounting horror over its starvation of Gaza.
The 31 signatories of a letter to the British newspaper Guardian include an Academy award recipient, Yuval Abraham; a former Israeli attorney general, Michael Ben-Yair; Avraham Burg, a former speaker of Israel’s parliament and former head of the Jewish Agency; and a number of recipients of the prestigious Israel prize, Israel’s highest cultural honour.
The figures come from the worlds of poetry, science, journalism and academia, and the letter accuses Israel of ‘starving the people of Gaza to death and contemplating the forced removal of millions of Palestinians from the strip’.
It adds: “The international community must impose crippling sanctions on Israel until it ends this brutal campaign and implements a permanent ceasefire.”
The letter is significant both for its unvarnished criticism of Israel and for breaking the taboo of endorsing stringent international sanctions, in a country where politicians have promoted laws targeting those advocating such measures.
Among other signatories are the painter Michal Na’aman; Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, an award-winning documentary filmmaker; Samuel Maoz, the director of the Golden Lion-winning film Lebanon; the poet Aharon Shabtai and the choreographer Inbal Pinto.
The mounting international horror over the trajectory of Israel’s war in Gaza is increasingly being reflected inside Israel itself – and within the wider global Jewish diaspora – amid images of emaciated Palestinian children and reports of the shooting by Israeli forces of hungry Palestinians at food distribution centres.
The letter was published as it was announced that more than 60,000 Palestinians had been killed in the 21-month Israel-Gaza war.
On Monday two well-known Israeli human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, released reports assessing for the first time that Israel was conducting a ‘genocidal’ policy against Palestinians in Gaza, breaking another taboo.
On Sunday the Reform movement, the largest Jewish denomination in the US, said the Israeli government was ‘culpable’ in Gaza’s spreading famine.
The latest interventions follow comments earlier this month by the former Israel prime minister Ehud Olmert, who told the Guardian that a ‘humanitarian city’ Israel’s defence minister has proposed building on the ruins of Rafah would be a concentration camp, and forcing Palestinians inside would amount to ethnic cleansing.
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