Hebrew Newspaper: If we do not come to our senses quickly, we will find ourselves without US support

By Yossi Melman

The word that dominated the lecture hall was genocide. Alongside it are complementary descriptions, such as “random killing of children.” The atmosphere was tense, and what should have been a short intervention with questions and answers turned into a conversation of deafness, ending with a third of the attendees leaving in a provocative manner.

Several days ago, I was invited to lecture on Israel's war in Gaza at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia. The sponsor was the Jewish student organization “Hillel.” The lecture was open to the audience, which numbered more than 50 students and teachers, a third of whom were members of radical student organizations.

From the beginning, I made it clear that I am a journalist and writer, and I am not a spokesman for anyone, and that I do not support the Israeli government or the war in Gaza, and that since the beginning of the war I have written articles in which I criticized the government and the army’s behavior in Gaza. I asked the audience, as an educated audience that aspires to enrich its information, to show openness and not be carried away by false news and theories.

I described what happened on October 7 as best I could: the “brutal” attack by more than 3,000 Hamas militants on civilian settlements close to the Green Line recognized by international law, and not on settlements built on occupied Palestinian land. It recounted how more than 800 civilians, men, women and children, Israelis and foreigners, Jews, Muslims and Christians, were killed “in cold blood”, more than 230 male and female soldiers fell in battle, and 259 people were kidnapped to Gaza, including bodies...

But I also did not hide that 30,000 Gazans, including 12,000 children, were killed as a result of the Israeli army’s bombing, and that about 70% of the homes were damaged, and more than a million people were displaced from their homes and turned into displaced persons living in tent cities, the majority of whom are on the brink of hunger. They suffer from shortages of food, water and electricity.

I tried to explain that there is a difference between the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, and that I am a supporter of the idea of two states, and “Hamas,” the movement that does not recognize the State of Israel and its right to exist, and the right of the Jews to self-determination, and seeks to establish a “Sharia state” on the entire land of Palestine. “It is run by clerics in accordance with Sharia laws.” Then, a student identified himself as a gay Jew and said that Israel was committing a mass crime against the people of Gaza. When I told him that if he had been in the Hamas state, he “would have been sentenced to death because of his sexual orientation,” he got up and left the hall angrily.

A student who said that her family were survivors of the mass crime in Rwanda 30 years ago, read to me the definition of genocide: “the premeditated killing of a large group of people from a specific people, or from a specific race, with the aim of destroying this people, or this group.” I replied that her definition was accurate, and I drew her attention to the phrase “pre-design,” and I told her that pre-design is what distinguishes mass crime against innocent people, and genocide. She continued that the Turks committed genocide during World War I, and the Nazis did this to the Jews in World War II, and this is what happened in the ethnic war in Rwanda. I added that Israel does not kill Palestinians with premeditated design, despite the presence of voices on the extreme right, and even in the government, calling for such random killing. It seemed that I said too much, so a third of those present left the hall angrily.

Oglethorpe University is a small university known for its good reputation and as one of the most prestigious liberal universities in this state that decades ago was mired in racism and discrimination. What happened in the lecture is just a simple glimpse of the hostility and hatred towards Israel on university campuses and among the younger generation, the future generation.

30 years ago, I wrote with American journalist Dan Raviv the book “Partners in Business,” in which we tried to explain the unintuitive partnership between the United States and Israel. At that time, there were those who said that the further we moved away from the memory of the Holocaust, and because of demographic changes in the United States, the weaker Israel’s position would be. The white population of European descent, who in 2000 constituted about 71% of the total population, decreased to 57%. Israeli leaders should have taken notice of these changes since then, but they have been resting on the laurels of close relations, especially the strategic, military, and political partnership between the United States and Israel.

Hatred against Israel because of its war on Gaza is only the tip of the iceberg that Israel is approaching, which refuses to be convinced that the world, and even the United States, is changing. If we do not come to our senses quickly, Israel will find itself an isolated state, infected with leprosy, and will lose the support of its most important supporting state, without which, the essence of its existence cannot be guaranteed.