Prominent scholars, legal experts among 6,000 signatories to letter rejecting Gaza genocide charge

Prominent academics, legal experts, and historians are among more than 6,000 signatories of an open letter released earlier this month rejecting as a “blood libel” the accusation that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.

The letter, which launched with more than 5,000 signatories and later surpassed 6,000, argues that the accusation of genocide is contradicted by Israel’s actual conduct in the war and has been weaponized as a pretext to exclude and attack Jews around the world.

The letter was released by Creative Community for Peace in partnership with its authors: Yossi Klein Halevi, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, Rabbi Micha Odenheimer, and Binghamton University historian Jonathan Karp.

Open letter: 'We must unite in repudiating the lie of genocide'

“There is a vigorous debate within the Jewish community over aspects of how this war was fought, and that is a sign of moral health. So is our pain over every innocent life lost. But we must unite in repudiating the lie of genocide,” the letter states.

It goes on to address the “unprecedented combat conditions” in Gaza, including Hamas’s use of “hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, thousands of boobytrapped homes [and] the conflating of combatants with ‘journalists’ and ‘human rights workers.’”

It also addresses the civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio, which it says is “considered low for asymmetrical urban warfare.”

Taking the Gaza Health Ministry’s current death toll, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, alongside INSS’s May estimate of more than 23,000 terrorists killed, the implied civilian-to-combatant ratio would be roughly 2:1.

The letter also cites “the absence of mass starvation despite repeated claims of imminent catastrophe” and “the warnings given to civilians before attack,” and asserts that “All these factors were erased in the eagerness to indict Israel for genocide.”

Meanwhile, the letter argues that Israel went to war after October 7 to break what it calls an “Iranian-led siege of terror enclaves” on its borders, while noting that anti-Zionists were already leveling accusations of genocide against Israel the following day.

Letter: In 'bitter irony,' Israel is only country to face 'sustained war of attempted genocide'

“The bitter irony is that Israel, home to half the world’s Jews, is the only country to face a sustained war of attempted genocide – from its inception in 1948 until today,” the letter states.

Prominent scholars who signed the letter include Harvard professor and public intellectual Steven Pinker. Other Harvard-affiliated signatories include Harvard Law professor Jesse Fried and visiting scholar Anat Alon-Beck, a professor of law at Case Western Reserve University.

Other notable scholars who signed on include historian Niall Ferguson, Israeli historian Benny Morris, Holocaust historian and former US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, Tel Aviv University professor emerita and former Yad Vashem chief historian Dina Porat, historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore, UCLA professor Judea Pearl, and Brandeis University professor emeritus Jonathan Sarna.

The signatories also include John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point.

Prominent legal figures include former Canadian justice minister and attorney general Irwin Cotler, Cornell Law professor Robert Hockett, Jeffrey Mausner, a former prosecutor with the US Justice Department’s Nazi War Crimes Unit, and Eugene Kontorovich, a professor of law at George Mason University’s Scalia Law School and director of its Center for the Middle East and International Law.

“The genocide libel is a case study in the longstanding – and intensified post-October 7th – historical, moral, legal and normative inversions of fact, law and history,” Cotler said in a statement cited by CCFP.

Political signatories include former UK prime minister Boris Johnson, Iraqi-born former UK cabinet minister Nadhim Zahawi, and former US secretary of veterans affairs Robert Wilkie, among others.