By Tamir Sorek
Thirty years ago in Israel, advocating for genocide could land you in prison.
In April 1994, an Israeli rabbi named Ido Alba published an article that read, in part, “In war, as long as the war has not been decided, it is a commandment to kill every non-Jew from the nation one is fighting against, even women and children. Even when they do not directly endanger the one killing them, there is concern that they may assist the enemy in the continuation of the war.”
An Israeli court convicted Alba for incitement to racism and encouraging violence and sentenced him to four years in prison.
Now the legal system is ignoring similar rhetoric.
In December 2023, following the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which resulted in the killing of approximately 1,200 Israeli civilians, soldiers and migrant workers, Rabbi Moshe Ratt, who’s seen as a public intellectual among Israeli West Bank settlers, composed a long post on Facebook.
In it, he noted that in the past, some people may have struggled with the morality of destroying an entire people, including women and children. Now they don’t. Obliquely referring to the Palestinians, he added, “Some nations have descended into such depths of evil and corruption that the only solution is to eradicate them completely, leaving no trace.”
More recently, on Feb. 24, 2025, Nissim Vaturi, one of the deputy speakers in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, called for killing all Palestinian adults in Gaza.
Ratt’s and Vaturi’s words went unpunished. In fact, genocidal rhetoric like theirs – in which the entire destruction of a people is proposed – has become more common in Israel.
As a scholar of Israeli society, I’ve written about how calls for the eradication of Palestinians didn’t simply emerge out of the violence on Oct. 7, 2023.
They date back to the 1930s, and have gained steam – and more public acceptance – as prospects for peace fell apart in the 1990s, existential anxiety among Israelis has grown, and religious Zionists have gained more political power in the 21st century.
Colonial anxieties
Calls to eliminate the Palestinian presence date to before Israel’s official founding in 1948. When Zionist immigration to the region began at the end of the 19th century, less than 10% of the population was Jewish. The native, largely Muslim population represented a fundamental obstacle to establishing a Jewish state.
The founding fathers of Zionism openly discussed ideas for relocating Palestinians, which were usually envisioned as voluntary. These notions are not entirely unlike U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposal to transfer Palestinians from Gaza to other countries.
Attempts to dispossess majority indigenous populations are usually violent themselves, however, and almost always run up against resistance. For example, clashes took place between British colonists and Native Americans in the 17th century, between Dutch colonists and South African tribes in the 17th century, and between Han Chinese and Tibetans in the 20th century. In that same vein, conflict between Zionist settlers and Palestinians has existed from the outset.
Repeated violence and attacks can fuel existential anxiety among settlers, along with fantasies of achieving “permanent security” or absolute safety against future threats. Among Jewish Israelis, the collective memory of persecution – culminating in the genocide of European Jews during the Holocaust – has added another important layer to the longing for permanent security.
Biblical genocidal stories
In Israel, there’s also a history of biblical justifications for violence and genocide. This sort of rhetoric has waxed and waned over time; it’ll often exist on the margins in times of relative peace, but move into the mainstream during periods of violence and existential anxiety.
Most of the forerunners of modern Zionism saw themselves as secular. Nonetheless, they adopted major Jewish symbols and treated Jewish tradition and religious texts as a source of inspiration, even as they didn’t ascribe them legal authority.
This created an opening for political leaders to use biblical texts to promote political goals.
The Bible contains some explicit narratives of annihilation. The most well known is the story of Amalek, a nomadic people identified in the Book of Deuteronomy as the archenemy of the Israelites. In Chapter 25, Moses commanded the Israelites to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.” A related commandment involves the annihilation of the Seven Nations of Canaan, which inhabited the “promised land” when the Israelites conquered it. In Chapter 20, the Israelites are commanded: “You shall not leave a single soul alive. Completely destroy.”
Heritage Images/Hulton Fine Art Collection via Getty Images
Throughout Jewish history, these edicts and stories have generally been interpreted as historical accounts or as metaphors, not commands to commit genocide.
However, settlers of lands occupied by indigenous peoples – not just in Israel, but in other countries, too – have deployed these texts to condone mass violence. For example, in colonial America, Puritan settlers justified massacres of Native Americans by comparing them with Amalek.
During the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, Israeli army education officers distributed texts to soldiers that read, “In biblical times, Saul exterminated all of Amalek, men and women, youth and elderly, and even sheep and cattle.” The materials also noted that “biblical Joshua was commanded to annihilate the nations of the land and was forbidden to make any treaties with them.”
During that war, Israel uprooted an estimated 750,000 Palestinians. Israeli forces and civilians killed thousands who attempted to return over the ensuing years.
History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Messianistic forces unleashed
After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, this sort of religious justification for wiping out the Palestinians returned to the margins.
But another development would fuel genocidal rhetoric.
Decisive military victories during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, also known as the Six-Day War, involved the Israeli conquest of holy sites in the West Bank. Many religious Zionists perceived the military victories as miraculous.
For religious Zionists, the state of Israel is a sacred endeavor. They’ve generally been less interested than secular Zionists in adhering to international norms and taking geopolitical considerations into account when pushing for the settlement of contested territories.
After 1967, religious settler movements were emboldened. Groups such as Gush Emunim pushed the government to settle the newly occupied territories, which included the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. For these religious Zionists, the settlement project is not simply a land grab: Settlers are taking land that the Bible has promised to them.
In 1980, Israel Hess, who then held the official position as rabbi of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, wrote in the student bulletin, “In a war between Israel and Amalek, it is a commandment to kill and annihilate infants and babies. And who is Amalek? Anyone who launches a war against the Jews.” These words triggered public backlash and prompted protests from several secular Zionist politicians.
Existential fears grow
In the 1990s, calls for widespread violence were largely marginalized, since there was hope for a political compromise with the Palestinians.
After these talks failed, however, the rhetoric and ideas of religious Zionists continued to migrate to the political center, particularly during and after the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada. Taking place from 2000 to 2005, the uprising involving a series of suicide attacks in Israeli cities profoundly shocked the Jewish Israeli public, spurring the reemergence of deep existential anxiety.
Getty Images
With no peaceful solution for the conflict on the horizon, Israeli and Palestinian figures who viewed politics through a theological framework kept accumulating power.
In 2014, Ayelet Shaked, then a member of the Knesset and later the minister of justice, shared an article on social media that read, “The Palestinian people declared war on us, and we have to fight back … and in wars the enemy is usually an entire people, with its old men and women, its cities and villages, its property and infrastructure.”
Meanwhile, the dean of Quranic studies at the Islamic University of Gaza said in a 2015 television interview, “All Jews in Palestine today are fair game – even the women.”
As each side retaliated against the other, annihilation started to sound like a reasonable solution – a process that historian Yoav Di-Capua has termed “genocidal mirroring.”
The perfect storm
This mirroring does not imply a symmetry. Israel, with its superior military capabilities, has a significantly greater capacity to inflict harm on Palestinians.
The government formed in Israel following the 2022 election was unprecedented. For the first time in the nation’s history, the government depended upon ultranationalist religious factions, such as one called Jewish Power. The party has three official rabbis who advise its politicians. One of them, Dov Lior, is a prominent advocate of the idea that Palestinians are Amalek. Another, Yisrael Ariel, has written that the Torah’s commandment “Thou shalt not kill” does not apply to non-Jews.
When the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks reignited Israelis’ deep-seated fears of annihilation, calls for indiscriminate revenge grew louder.
As Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, the head of a military program for religious students in Jaffa, said in March 2024:
“If you don’t kill them first, they will kill you. The terrorists of today are the children of the previous operation whom you kept alive, and the women are those who produce the terrorists … Do not try to outsmart the Torah. The Torah tells you: ‘Do not keep alive any soul,’ so you should not keep alive any soul.”
Some secular Israelis joined in. Danny Neuman, a former football star and television commentator, said on TV in December 2023, “I am telling you, in Gaza, without exception, they are all terrorists, sons of dogs. They must be exterminated, all of them killed.”
Kinneret Barashi, a lawyer and a television host, tweeted in February 2025, “Every trace of the murderous mutations in Gaza must be erased, from the delivery rooms to the last elderly person in Gaza.”
These statements coincide with a grim reality on the ground. Since the Oct. 7 attacks, Israeli retaliation in Gaza has cost the lives of more than 64,000 Palestinians. Public health experts estimate that the obliteration of infrastructure and corresponding starvation, lack of access to medical care and spread of infectious diseases, could bring the death toll to the hundreds of thousands.
Meanwhile, large swaths of the Israeli public appear to support the mass expulsion of Palestinians and condone the concept of genocide in the abstract, according to I commissioned through the Israeli polling firm Geocartography.
In the representative sample of Jewish Israelis who were polled from March 10-11, 2025, 82% supported the forced expulsion of Gaza’s population to other countries, while 56% endorsed the expulsion of Israel’s Arab citizens. By comparison, according to a 2003 poll, only 46% supported the “transfer of Palestinian residents of the occupied territories,” and just 31% supported the “transfer of Israel’s Arab citizens.”
Moreover, in my poll I relayed a story from the Book of Joshua, in which the ancient Israelites conquered the city of Jericho and killed all of its inhabitants.
When I asked respondents whether the Israeli army, when conquering an enemy city, should act similarly to the Israelites when they conquered Jericho, 47% of respondents said they should.
Tamir Sorek is a Liberal Arts Professor of Middle East History at Penn State.
Christi D. says
Thank you for not only the historical accuracy but for sharing information that people can search for themselves and verify. Our silence is complicity. Sharing opinion OR facts that reveal Israel and the U.S.’s war crimes gets people disappeared off the street with no due process! Freedom of speech is in jeopardy- don’t believe me? Speak up for Palestine!! Get AIPAC out of our Congress and CUFI out of our churches!! Free Palestine! 🇵🇸 ✊🏻
Pogo says
@trump will save the day
… and the whole world too.
How’s it going?
The full monty
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/
Pogo says
@As stated
The Conversation:
In Israel, calls for genocide have migrated from the margins to the mainstream
Published: April 2, 2025 8:47am EDT
https://theconversation.com/in-israel-calls-for-genocide-have-migrated-from-the-margins-to-the-mainstream-250010
FlaglerLive:
Israelis Are Calling for Genocide of Palestinians with Impunity
April 7, 2025
https://flaglerlive.com/israelis-are-calling-for-genocide-of-palestinians-with-impunity/?unapproved=3555054&moderation-hash=b8979f47c6a917e85bd11ed6dea05efc#comment-3555054
Why?
Fernando Melendez says
Calling for genocide from anyone or any nationality towards any other nationality is totally unacceptable including coming from Palestinians towards the Jewish state. Starting with the so called peaceful protest on our universities campuses here in the US. To sensetionalize it in the media as all of sudden coming from the Israelis is totally misleading or deceptive. I expected more accuracy and truth in your reporting.
Kennan says
Well here we are. No surprises in regards to how Israel would administer this very public genocide.
For the last 18 months I have been writing about this as well as weighing in on social media. I predicted this from the time Israel turned electricity and water off in the days following October 7, 2023. A war crime according to Geneva Convention. A act with the very real purpose of starving civilians in a territory they already occupy. Again…. A war crime on week one.
Hindsight is 20/20. October 7 was a war crime by any rubric and was condemned by the vast majority of the world, but for some reason instead of meeting a terrorist act with a pinpointed counter attack with special forces, Israeli or American, they chose to collectively punish every Arab in sight. Drop 1000 pound, 2000 pound bombs all over Gaza because they say Hamas is everywhere. Israel used a very crude CGI rendering of a tunnel system at Al Shifa hospital. No evidence of this was found, not by Israel’s Heretz newspaper, Al Jazeerah, as well as Palestinian press corps. It should be noted that Al Jazeerah was rated about six months later and closed so that reporting could be stifled. Keep in mind 206 press officials have been systematically, targeted, shot and bombed because.” no news is good news” if your Israel. At the beginning of the conflict reports from Israel were coming out that babies were beheaded, babies torn out of wombs. A tactic used for atrocity purposes to somehow justify the genocide to come. Those claims were debunked for lack of evidence. Claims that were initially endorsed by former president Joe Biden, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as western media outlets to try to shape the consensus in favor of war on the Gaza Strip.
Honestly, I could continue to bury everyone in statistics and facts on the very real and undebatable genocide we see today. Why bother? The stunning paradox we have to confront is that US foreign policy is being run by Israel. Israel showed the world that this whole thing could’ve been handled differently when they pinpoint killed Ismael Haneyah. A Hamas negotiator blown up in a guest house in Iran. This highlighted two things.: Obviously Israel is military lazy, and will kill civilians within purity and hope they get Hamas in the process. This has been the tactic from the beginning. To add insult to injury, the US supplies them with billions in weapons,(our tax dollars) tell the world they wanna cease-fire while voting against it at the UN? Six times?
Israel has walked away from negotiations. Move the goal post and is now in phase 2 of a cease-fire that never had a phase one. They are blocking all humanitarian aid in Gaza while they continue to bomb Schools, hospitals, and even first responders and ambulances with lights on. After all that there are confirmed reports of IDF soldiers burying those bodies in the sand.
What are we doing? There is no phase one or phase 2 of anything resembling a cease-fire. Ever! Phase one was the genocide the Biden administration fully funded while dishonest saying they wanna cease-fire…… all the wild voting no to it at the United Nations.
Phase 2:
The Biden administration hands over the genocide baton to Trump so he can complete the project with full-blown”Ethnic Cleansing”. Oh, let’s not forget the.”Club Med” in Gaza he wants to build on the dead bodies of over 100,000 dead civilians. A vacation land for billionaires. Nobody will remember what happened here while they are renting boogie boards and sipping on Arak. Cmon, they were just Arabs?
This snake has many heads. The Trump administration has taken an already grossly mismanaged, Middle East, and not only double down in terms of genocide, but have let Israel continue to run our foreign policy and begin a “Greater Israel” regional war with Gaza as it’s launchpad.
A year and a half ago I knew exactly what Israel and Netanyahu were going to do. Given my historical understanding of everything from the “Nakba” of 1948, to the occupation by Israel in 1967, the subjugation of Palestinians throughout the decades, and now the crescendo of the most documented, live streamed
“Arab Holocaust “ of the 21st century.
Our leaders get further and further away from the American public. They don’t work for us anymore. If we confront it. We are arrested.
What have we become?
Former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, a Zionist I have a little reverence for said something telling:
“To be an enemy of America is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal”.
Pierre Tristam says
How’s this for accuracy and truth: Reuters reports a Palestinian death toll of more than 50,000, with nearly a third of them children. Just for you, let’s knock off 15,000 of those as exaggerations, since you’re up for knocking off anything. 35,000 dead. A third of them children. At Israel’s hand. Deceptive? Misleading? I call it genocide. Israelis want more of it. Clearly, you’re OK with genocidal excuses.
BillC says
“If you don’t kill them first, they will kill you.” — Rabbi Eliyahu Mali
That’s the credo of drug cartels and the Mafia.
Jake from state farm says
The Palestinians, along with Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and various other radical anti-Israel groups, openly call for the genocide of all Israelis. Where is the international outcry, the condemnation, or the widespread media coverage condemning this? Why is there no global disdain for this explicit call for mass murder? It’s appalling to witness such silence while these groups—who demonstrate a complete disregard for human life—are left unchecked. Beyond these groups, countries like Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and even the loving Lebanese people do not give two shits about Palestinians. They want the Palestinians to be an Israeli issue and provides then with an opportunity to condemn Israel. Stop trying to pretend that you care about them. If you did you would speak out about Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran with the same gusto that you do Israel. What is the point being made here? Why is there no universal outrage against the violence and hatred being stoked by these groups, who clearly care nothing for the lives of the Palestinians or anyone else? Why is the world so quick to condemn one side, yet turns a blind eye to this unchecked and ongoing call for destruction?
Kennan says
I’m ashamed to say that I realize when I watch Amy Goodman and democracy now that I will throw up in my mouth at least three times. Amy Goodman is one of the most honest, decorated journalists in the world, but I know, as I watch her accurate, vetted reporting on Gaza. I will be sad
I will say with complete confidence and conviction that Gaza exposes the underbelly of the very soul of our country. Yes. Our country. 7000 miles away we witness an unapologetic execution of men, women, and children, that the United States and its most
“PRIZED PROXY “ Israel, have decided Palestinians don’t matter. they are brown, Arab, and of course, terrorists, and if we don’t kill them, they will have terrorist babies. Now this thought rot does not apply to most Americans and the vast majority of the world.
Our political leaders are our custodians, our reps,our Achilles,our shit stain, and ultimately our downfall.
Trump trade wars have absolutely no economic value whatsoever, or benefit to the country. A systematic dismantling dismantling of our checks and balances that does nothing but drop shoes in every direction. Now we think less and less about the public “HOLOCAUST “ that is Gaza.
Trump voters are going to realize that the satellite issues they cling to like Trans,(less than 1% of pop) whitewashing of American history that you find inconvenient,(fascism) among so many other TRIBAL HITS “ pale in comparison to what is happening when Donald Trump is finished wiping his ass with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Donald Trump sat in the White House with Benjamin Hitler and members of the “Hitler Youth” like: JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete “Yager Bomb” Hegseth. In the meeting Trump mentioned what a valuable piece of REAL ESTATE Gaza is. In front of the press!!! Very carefully he cradles Netanyahu’s genitals in his little hands and says: “ We will move Palestinians around the Middle East”.
“All I hear is Hamas and killing, Hamas and killing “.
ALL THE WORLD SEES IS ISRAEL KILLING EVERYONE….. WITH IMPUNITY.
The tattered values of an empire in decline. An empire that gave up on representing its people which makes its achievements a distant memory. A myth.
Oh, by the way. Ask yourself this: What makes us the most responsible superpower? What makes us a beacon of Democracy?
I will not do what Benjamin Netanyahu would do…. Which is collectively punish. I would him that being Jewish isn’t a crime, but being a ZIONIST should be. A hate filled ideology that platforms one people above all others.
The American/Israeli flag pins some of you proudly don will not age well.
Kennan says
Honestly,this will be one of the last, if not the last time I weigh in on Gaza. A Genocide I know much about given my background, exposure, and association with my father who was a Middle East expert. What troubles me the most is you don’t have to be any of those things to be
“Witness to the obvious”.
In the last year and a half I have heard some of the most racist Israeli apologists try to justify the worst mass murder of Palestinians in modern history.
The events of October 7, 2023, which were condemned by the whole world, but to see people literally act like nobody was killed after that, highlights the depravity of some in society as well as media. Media that has been propagandized and manipulated by incredibly powerful Jewish lobbies that desperately bury the truth and defend the indefensible.
People have had 18 months to marinate in the blood of a Genocide. To feel one way in October or November of 2023 is one thing, but to peddle the same ignorant one sided hate now…. Shows the lack of humility, humanity, and wanted separation from the obvious. The isolation and insulation against what the whole world and International Courts call Genocide.
The fact that a world leader has to alter flight plans through Hungary to avoid arrest for what he knows are “WAR CRIMES”. He is given sanctuary in the
“White House “to further broker deals to destroy Gaza, ethically cleanse people and further de- stabilize the Middle East.
How dare we say we have handled Middle East policy with humanity! Not today or in the last 60 years. How dare we!
I will continue to fight and inform, but I have lost my faith in humanity!
For those of you idiots out there that say other Middle Eastern countries like Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon don’t care about Palestinians for not letting them in their countries? You are wrong. They would, but scattering Palestinians around the Middle East, which complete the ethnic cleansing. Two of those countries….. Syria and Lebanon are being bombed anyway. The only people that hate Palestinians are Israel and you.