We Charge Genocide: The Shofar Calls Us to Account on Rosh Hashanah

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

Every year at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, synagogues across the world sound the shofar, a ram’s horn that represents the signature moment of the holiday.

Over the centuries, Jewish commentators have offered a variety of explanations for this ritual. Moses Maimonides famously called it a wake-up call to personal atonement; others view it as a call to action or a tribute to God’s power. This new year, however, I believe one reason stands out among all others. Today, we sound the shofar as a call to moral accountability

At Rosh Hashanah, we begin the holiest season of the year for the Jewish community: the 10 Days of Awe, which conclude on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). Over the next ten days, we will be challenged to break open the shells of inertia and complacency that have built up over the past year. The shofar is sounded on Rosh Hashanah to herald the inauguration of a deep, collective soul searching: to look deep within, to face honestly what must be faced, if we are to truly begin our new year anew.

I cannot remember a Rosh Hashanah when the collective moral stakes were any higher for the American Jewish community than this year. I would even go as far as to say it may be the most morally consequential High Holiday season of our lifetimes. As we begin this new year, the shofar calls us to account for a genocide, ongoing even as we speak, perpetrated by a nation acting in the name of the Jewish people.

How can we begin to fathom a moral accounting of the genocide being waged in our names? Over 41,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza to date and over 95,000 injured, the majority of whom are women and children, according to official reports. According to one estimate, the ultimate death toll may already be closer to 200,000.

Whole extended families, entire Palestinian bloodlines, have been wiped out completely. Much of Gaza has been literally reduced to a human graveyard, with scores of bodies buried beneath the rubble of destroyed and bulldozed homes. Neighborhoods and regions have been literally wiped off the map.

Gaza’s infrastructure and health care system has been decimated. According to the UN, an “intentional and targeted starvation campaign” has led to widespread famine and disease throughout the Gaza strip. Polio has now broken out, and relief workers are struggling to deliver vaccines to children as bombs and missiles fall around them.

Health care workers, humanitarian workers and journalists are being killed, injured and imprisoned in massive numbers. Human rights agencies have documented widespread torture and abuse of prisoners, including sexual abuse, throughout a network of torture camps.

Please note that this unspeakable litany is not a review of the past year. It is a description of a nightmare that continues in this very moment, with no end in sight.

As we contemplate this inhuman status quo, it occurs to me that this Rosh Hashanah, the broken sound of the shofar is more than a mere call to accounting. It is a broken wail of grief — and a desperate moral challenge. This year the shofar calls out to us in no uncertain terms: We Charge Genocide.

This is not a point upon which we can equivocate. Not today. On this day, we face what must be faced and say out loud what must be said. To argue this point now would frankly be a sacrilege.

From a purely legal point of view, a myriad of academic and legal experts have long since confirmed the charge of genocide. As far back as October, Holocaust and genocide scholar Raz Segal has called Israel’s actions in Gaza “a textbook case of genocide.” On October 18, almost 800 scholars, lawyers and practitioners called on “all relevant UN bodies … as well as the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to immediately intervene … to protect the Palestinian population from genocide.” More recently, Omer Bartov, a respected historian of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, accused Israel of “systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions.”

But beyond the legal arguments, there is a critical, moral imperative behind this claim. For many Jews, it’s impossible to imagine — let alone say out loud — that a Jewish state, founded in the wake of the Holocaust, could possibly be perpetrating a genocide.

This year the shofar calls out to us in no uncertain terms: We Charge Genocide.

I understand the pain behind this refusal. I know it confronts many Jews with an unimaginable prospect: to accept that we have become our own worst nightmare. But if we cannot admit the truth on this of all days, then why bother gathering for Rosh Hashanah in the first place? To dither on this point would make a sham of a festival we dare to call the holiest season of the year.

Not long ago I had a long conversation with my dear friend and colleague Rachel Beitarie, director of the Israeli organization Zochrot. Rachel is among the precious few Israeli activists who are in unabashed solidarity with Palestinians. Among other things, she spoke about what it was like to be an Israeli activist for Palestinian liberation who grew up on a kibbutz near the Gaza border, who personally knew Israelis who were killed and taken hostage on October 7.

During our recent conversation, Rachel and I talked in particular about how Israel metabolizes the traumatic memory of the Holocaust as a way to rationalize its genocidal violence in Gaza. In a follow-up letter after our conversation, Rachel wrote the following words to me:

As years go by and most Holocaust survivors are no longer with us, the identification and reliving of the trauma of former genocide seem to only grow, in direct relation to the crimes committed under the excuse of the right to defend ourselves and “prevent a second Holocaust.”

Because of this unrelenting propaganda, the linkage of the Hamas attack of October 7 to the Holocaust, was made immediately, even though it was logically bogus. ​​It was understandable at first, especially from people — many of my friends and acquaintances among them — who personally experienced the horrors of that day, waiting for help that took many hours to come.

Having grown up in Israel, exposed as we are to retraumatizing Holocaust education, the associative connection was almost inevitable. Soon however, it became clear that this linkage was being overblown and manipulated to justify the annihilation of Gaza; to justify, dare I say it, another Holocaust.

Many outside Israel have made the linkage between October 7 and the Holocaust as well. Almost immediately in fact, the terrible massacres of that day were openly characterized as “the single worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.” As Rachel pointed out, the two events have nothing to do with each other whatsoever. Still, it is indeed painfully poignant to consider that this mass killing occurred in a state founded in the wake of the Holocaust in order to safeguard Jewish lives once and for all.

As we start to reckon with the terrible events of October 7, I would suggest that the first step would be to admit that this date was not a starting point. If we are to truly and honestly commemorate this anniversary, we must understand it in the context of the ongoing violence and injustice known as the Nakba — a nightmare that began decades ago and is still ongoing.

As Israel’s violence in Gaza escalated during the final months of 2023, the board of my congregation, Tzedek Chicago, had numerous conversations about whether or not to issue a congregational statement. As an anti-Zionist congregation that has been very active in the Palestine solidarity movement, we felt we had a unique voice to offer on this issue. And so, in December 2023, we released a statement entitled, “In Gaza, Israel is Revealing the True Face of Zionism.” Here’s an excerpt:

We … know there was a crucial, underlying context to [the] horrible violence [of October 7]. We assert without reservation that to contextualize is not to condone. On the contrary, we must contextualize these events if we are to truly understand them — and find a better way forward.

The violence of October 7 did not occur in a vacuum. It was a brutal response to a regime of structural violence that has oppressed Palestinians for decades. At the root of this oppression is Zionism: a colonial movement that seeks to establish and maintain a Jewish majority nation-state in historic Palestine.

While Israel was founded in the traumatic wake of the Holocaust to create safety and security for the Jewish people, it was a state founded on the backs of another people, ultimately endangering the safety and security of Jews and Palestinians alike. Israel was established through what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba: the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948. And since that time, Israel has subjected Palestinians to a regime of Jewish supremacy in order to maintain its demographic majority in the land.

This ongoing Nakba is the essential context for understanding the horrifying violence of the past three months. Indeed, since October 7, Israeli politicians have been terrifyingly open about their intentions, making it clear that the ultimate end goal of their military assault is to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its 2.2 million Palestinian residents. One prominent member of the Israeli government put it quite plainly: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba. Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.” More recently, Prime Minister Netanyahu was reported as saying that he is actively working to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza. The problem, he said, “is which countries will take them.”

Israeli leaders are being true to their word: we are witnessing the continuation of the Nakba in real time. As in 1948, Palestinians are being driven from their homes through force of arms. As in 1948, families are being forced to march long distances with hastily-collected possessions on their backs. As in 1948, entire regions are being razed to the ground, ensuring that they will have no homes to return to. As in 1948, Israel is actively engineering the wholesale transfer of an entire population of people.

It is now eight months since we released that statement, and I believe it is more accurate than ever. In her letter to me, Rachel observed the irony that more and more Israelis are now threatening a “second Nakba” when “until recently Israelis denied that the Nakba ever happened.” Now however, many Israelis are using the term with unabashed vengeance. Through word and deed, Israel’s ultimate end game is becoming all too clear: It is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

This past August, in fact, the Israeli press revealed the presence of a government plan for Israel’s long term occupation of Gaza on “the day after.” According to the plan, as described in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

Israel will control the northern Gaza Strip and drive out the 300,000 Palestinians still there. Major Gen. Giora Eiland, the war’s ideologue, proposes starving them to death, or exiling them, as a lever with which to defeat Hamas. The Israeli right envisions a Jewish settlement of the area, with vast real estate potential of convenient topography, a sea view, and proximity to central Israel.… The southern Gaza Strip will be left for Hamas, which will have to care for the destitute residents under Israeli siege, even after the international community loses interest in the story and moves on to other crises.

In other words, a “real time Nakba” is being discussed openly in Israeli political and academic circles. More recently, on September 15, professor Uzi Rabi, a prominent researcher at Tel Aviv University, actually said these words in a radio interview: “Remove the entire civilian population from the north, and whoever remains there will be lawfully sentenced as a terrorist and subjected to a process of starvation or extermination.”

Indeed, from the very beginning of this genocide, Israeli leaders and politicians have been all too transparent about their intentions. Just as the founders of the Zionist movement themselves, from Theodor Herzl to David Ben-Gurion promoted the “transfer” of the native Palestinian population to make way for a majority Jewish state. Then, as now, we must take these leaders at their word. We must take them very seriously. We can never say we didn’t know.

More than ever before, this High Holiday season calls for Jewish communities to reckon seriously with what Zionism has wrought. Not only in Gaza, but throughout the West Bank, where violence and ethnic cleansing is running rampant, and in Lebanon, which is now experiencing its own carnage and displacement, bringing the entire region ever deeper into war.

How could it be otherwise? This is what comes of an ideology and movement that from the beginning viewed Jewish safety as zero sum; in which our security can only be achieved at the expense of others, empowerment gained through the sheer power of superior military technology, stronger weapons and higher walls.

And finally, this High Holiday season, we must take this opportunity to ask ourselves collectively: Where have we fallen short? This is a critical question, particularly for those of us who have been active in the Palestine solidarity movement.

If this is indeed the season for hard truths, we must face the fact that despite all our efforts this past year, we failed to stop a genocide. For all our calls for ceasefire, on street corners and in the halls of city governments, for all of the mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, for all of the courageous student activism, a ceasefire seems farther away than ever at the moment.

This is not to say that there has not been genuine progress this past year. But how do we measure these successes against the mass killing that has occurred and continues to occur every single day?

Sumaya Awad of the Adalah Justice Project offered a powerful challenge on this point at the Socialism 2024 conference in Chicago last month:

We know that there has been a massive shift in the United States around Palestine. We have seen poll after poll show that the majority of Americans support an arms embargo, the majority of Americans don’t want to support Israel, are critical of Israel and yet we haven’t seen that translate into the mass action we need.

Despite this massive shift, we grapple with the fact that this shift came at the expense of how many lives lost? How many people murdered? Who paid the price for these people to shift? And it’s not to say that this shift is not tremendous and incredible and good — it is all of those things, but we must also grapple with the fact that lives are being lost on the daily. And that it is all by design and that it all can be stopped in basically a moment.

And I say all of this not to pity Palestinians, quite the opposite, nor that we must grieve more. Grief is necessary, but that’s not the answer. I say it all because … we have to keep asking ourselves — you have to ask yourselves — what am I doing with this knowledge? What am I doing with this education? How is it translating into action? How does it translate into action that does not preach to the choir, but preaches to those who are not yet where we need them to be?

And you have to have an answer to that question. Because a year from now, when you are back here, you have to have an answer. Don’t find yourself just asking the same question. Be ready to answer, what have I done in the last year?

I find these words deeply appropriate to the sacred imperative of this new year. A year from now, when we are back here, we will have to have an answer. We can’t find ourselves just asking the same question. We must be ready to answer: What did we do in the last year to bring this genocide to an end?

And years from now, when the history of this genocide is written, we will be asked: Did we speak out? And if so, what did we say? What did we risk?

For now, that book is still open, even if every new page is becoming increasingly unbearable to read. Even if the world would rather move on to another story.

We all have a part to play in bringing this genocide to an end soon, in our own day. How will we write ourselves into this book when it is finally recorded?

May we all play our part in bringing this book of the genocide to a finish. May it come to an end soon, in our own day. And when it does, may we come to understand it was only part of a larger story — an even greater book that will conclude with these glorious words: “Then Palestine was finally free, from the river to the sea.”