Israeli public figures accuse judiciary of ignoring incitement to genocide in Gaza

A group of prominent Israelis has accused the country’s judicial authorities of ignoring “extensive and blatant” incitement to genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza by influential public figures.

In a letter to the attorney general and state prosecutors, they demand action to stop the normalisation of language that breaks both Israeli and international law.

“For the first time that we can remember, the explicit calls to commit atrocious crimes, as stated, against millions of civilians have turned into a legitimate and regular part of Israeli discourse,” they write. “Today, calls of these types are an everyday matter in Israel.”

Signatories include one of Israel’s top scientists, the Royal Society member Prof David Harel, alongside other academics, former diplomats, former members of the Knesset, journalists and activists.

Represented by the human rights lawyer Michael Sfard, their 11-page letter contains multiple examples of “the discourse of annihilation, expulsion and revenge”.

The list of elite Israelis who have incited war crimes includes cabinet ministers and Knesset members, former top military officials, academics, media figures, social media influencers and celebrities, the letter says.

Comments quoted in the letter include several made by MPs. One, Yitzhak Kroizer, said in a radio interview: “The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death.”

Tally Gotliv, from Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, demanded the prime minister use a nuclear bomb on Gaza for “strategic deterrence”, the letter says, quoting her as saying: “Before we consider inserting ground troops, doomsday weapon.”

Another Likud MP, Boaz Bismuth, is quoted as evoking the biblical massacre of the Amalek nation, enemies of ancient Israel. “It is forbidden to take mercy on the cruel, there’s no place for any humanitarian gestures,” he said with reference to Gaza, then added the biblical reference: “The memory of Amalek must be erased.”

Among other commenters cited is the journalist Zvi Yehezkeli, who said on Channel 13: “[We] should have killed many times 20,000 people, [we] should have begun with a blow of 100,000.”

Sfard said he was stunned by the speed with which incitement to genocide and other extreme speech had been normalised in Israel. “I never could have imagined that I would need to write such a letter,” he said. “The fact that this type of talk has completely left the far, unimportant fringes and came into the mainstream in such a massive way, for me it’s incomprehensible.

“The first danger is that people will act in accordance with that speech, then you have the question of what kind of society we are going to be when this is the speech that governs our treatment of Palestinians. There are 2.3 million Gazans, most of them minors.”

The letter contrasts the lack of action on even “the gravest and most dangerous instances of incitement against residents of Gaza” with an intense campaign against incitement “whose potential victims are Israeli Jews”. Huge resources have been devoted to tracking down people, mostly anonymous and with little reach, over speech that authorities interpreted as supporting Hamas, the letter notes. By late November, 269 investigations had been opened and 86 indictments filed.

“It is quite amazing the number of criminal investigations, when it comes to Palestinian citizens of Israel, most of them completely anonymous, many of them almost with no audience,” Sfard said. “The gap between that and the freedom and impunity for those who advocate all kinds of things – ethnic cleansing, killing civilians, bombarding civilian areas, and even genocide – doesn’t square up, and that’s something for the authorities to explain.”

The language of genocide risks influencing how Israel wages war, the letter says. “Normalised discourse which calls for annihilation, erasure, devastation and the like is liable to impact the manner by which soldiers conduct themselves.”

It highlights the November killing of Yuval Doron Kestelman, who stopped a terrorist attack at a Jerusalem bus stop by shooting two gunmen but was then shot himself by soldiers who arrived at the scene minutes later and assumed he was a terrorist.

“We had years of incitement that dealt with not leaving terrorists alive at the scene of the crime, and there were people including myself that warned that it is immoral and illegal to kill a terrorist who is neutralised,” Sfard said. “Then came this tragic event with this Israeli who in a heroic action neutralised two Palestinian militants. He himself was then targeted, even though he threw away his weapons, took off his coat [to show he didn’t have a suicide vest], put up his hands.”

The letter was sent before South Africa filed a case at the international court of justice accusing Israel of genocide and of failing to stop incitement to genocide. “We filed this letter last week, before South Africa lodged their complaint, and without knowing they were going to do that,” Sfard said.

The group Sfard represents does not accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza; their letter is about incitement to genocide inside Israel. However, the charges of incitement levelled by South Africa includes language cited in the letter and notes authorities’ failure to take judicial action in response.

It was the role of the attorney general to make clear that comments inciting genocide were unacceptable, amount to incitement and had become normalised, Sfard said. “We want to flag this and allow the authorities an opportunity to do something about it.”

An official response is particularly important as Israel grapples with the legacy of grief and rage created by the “inconceivable and unforgivable war crimes and crimes against humanity” carried out by Hamas on 7 October, the letter says. “Israeli society is embroiled in trauma which will take years to heal. This is precisely the substrate on which immoral monsters are liable to grow, and are growing.”

Letter to Israel’s senior legal officers

December 28, 2023

Attorney General Adv. Gali Baharav-Miara
State Prosecutor Adv. Amit Eisman
Deputy State Prosecutor Adv. Alon Altman

In the matter of: Extensive and blatant incitement to genocide, expulsion, and ethnic cleansing in Gaza by public figures, and the absolute silence of the judicial system.

On behalf of the clients:

Amb. (ret.) Ilan Baruch, Amb. (ret.) Dr. Alon Liel; Amb. (ret.) Eli Barnavi; Prof. David Harel, Prof. Dan Jacobson, Prof. Itzhak Schnell, Mr. Akiva Eldar, Ms. Susie Becher; Mr. Nadav Tamir, Prof. Dmitry Shumsky, Mr. Bradley Burston, Former MK Mossi Raz, Former MK Michal Rozin, Former MK Ksenia Svetlova, Former MK Emilie Moatti

Greetings,

1. Our clients, former senior members of Israel’s diplomatic corps, academics, journalists, former members of Knesset, and social activists, have granted us power of attorney to approach you in this matter.
2. On November 5, Heritage Minister MK Amichay Eliyahu was interviewed on Kol HaRamah Radio, and stated: “We would not have sent in humanitarian aid to the Nazis. There’s no such thing as uninvolved people in Gaza.” Asked if an atomic bomb should be dropped on all of Gaza, he replied, “That’s one of the possibilities.”
3. In the wake of Minister Eliyahu’s remarks, his fellow member of the Otzma Yehudit party Knesset faction, MK Yitzhak Kroizer, was interviewed on Galei Yisrael Radio, and said (underlined emphasis ours):

”The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death. I think that Minister Amichay Eliyahu sent a very clear message: The Gaza Strip should be wiped off the map in order to send a message to our other enemies, along with this goal we should also bring back our hostages. There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip, not every person who came in to rape and massacre us was armed with Hamas headbands, some of them were civilians. They are Nazis, and there’s one sentence for Nazis: Death.”

4. For his part, MK Ariel Kallner (Likud) issued a call for a massive expulsion of the population of Gaza, and sowing disaster on more than two million residents:

”A Nakba [Catastrophe, the term denoting the masses of Palestinians who fled or were expelled in the 1948 war] for the enemy now! Today is our Pearl Harbor. We will yet learn the lessons. At the moment, one goal: Nakba!A Nakba that will topple [in stature] the Nakba of  ‘48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares join [the attacks]. Their Nakba, because it’s like ‘48.”

5. And like them, many more elected figures issued calls to exterminate, to expel, to flatten, and to wipe out Gaza and the Gazans (underlined emphasis ours):

– Mk Tally Gotliv demanded that the prime minister: “Take down buildings!! Bomb indiscriminately!!Stop with all this impotence. You have the capability. There’s global legitimacy! Flatten Gaza. Mercilessly!‘ (Oct.7th), and two days later demanded Israel would make use of  “Jericho missile! Jericho missile! Strategic deterrence! Before we consider inserting ground troops, doomsday weapon!”

– MK Nissim Vaturi tweeted on Oct. 19, “Nakba?! Expel them all.”

– MK Boaz Bismuth declared on Oct. 16: “It is forbidden to take mercy on the cruel, there’s no place for any humanitarian gestures —The memory of Amalek must be erased [a reference to the biblical tribe referred to as arch-enemies who should be wholly exterminated].”

6. These remarks and many more by elected officials are a part of a wave of statements which began already on the evening of that horrible Sabbath of Oct. 7, and which spawned an unprecedented public discourse in which leaders, media figures, ex-military personnel, and influencers of various kinds publicly call for committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and even carrying out genocide in Gaza.
7. Already by seven in the evening on Oct. 7, internet influencer and [strongly
   right-wing] Channel 14 program anchor Shimon Riklin tweeted: “Gaza needs to be wiped off the face of the earth.” The tweet was viewed by 70,000 people, of whom 2,000 marked it with a Like.
8. An hour later, at 8pm, a colleague of Riklin’s, Yinon Magal, an internet influencer and the host of Channel 14’s ”The Patriots‘ program, tweeted, ”It’s time for Nakba 2.”
9. More than 280,000 people were exposed to Magal’s call to carry out a Nakba, that is, to expel all the millions of Palestinians from Gaza. More than 3,000 put a Like on the tweet.
10. That same evening, Kahanist extreme right activist Meir Ettinger publicly urged that two Palestinian prisoners be executed every 15 minutes as pressure for the release of the Israeli hostages.
11. Some hours later, shortly after midnight, Shimon Riklin tweeted again, making it clear to those who had not understood his call to erase Gaza from the face of the earth: ”Tell me,‘ he wrote, ”why, in fact, do we have an atomic bomb?”
12. On Oct. 7 the Hamas terror organization committed inconceivable and unforgivable war crimes and crimes against humanity. The systematic slaughter of civilians, children, women, the elderly, and men, the taking hostage of civilians, the sexual violence, the abuse of people and of corpses, enveloped Israeli society in heavy mourning, in profound sadness, and in understandably smouldering rage. Israeli society is embroiled in trauma which will take years to heal. This is precisely the substrate on which immoral monsters are liable to grow, and are growing.
13. As soon as three stars shone and the Sabbath ended, the four tweets quoted above, those of Riklin, Magal, and Ettinger, were published, and others as well. And from that moment, and in the weeks which have passed since, Israeli discourse has been imprinted by open, flagrant, and unbridled outright incitement to the gravest of crimes imaginable against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.
14. In fact, for the first time that we can remember, the explicit calls to commit atrocious crimes, as stated, against millions of civilians have turned into a legitimate and regular part of Israeli discourse. Calls for the extermination of millions of civilians; for ethnic cleansing; for mass expulsion; for execution of the uninvolved as revenge for what was done to us; to raze to their foundations cities which are the homes of children, women, and the elderly, and of entire civilian communities; to strike Gaza with an atomic bomb; to carry out a ”Nakba”, an expression of ethnic cleansing and mass expulsion; for depriving of water and starving residents of Gaza to death; for creating an intentional humanitarian crisis and for using as a military pressure tactic epidemics which are liable to develop.
15. One of the important properties of this phenomenon is that a substantial portion of those who incite to annihilation, ethnic cleansing and attacking innocents are not ”talk-backers‘ [who post response comments on articles and social media] who carry no weight, nor individuals on the margins of Israeli society. Rather, they are media figures, celebrities, former very senior military brass, central internet influencers, researchers, academics, Knesset members, and even cabinet ministers.
16. To illustrate, here are a number of additional remarks which were made publicly, and to which large numbers of people were exposed (underlined emphasis ours):

(1) Yehuda Shlezinger (political correspondent, Israel Hayom): There are no innocent people in Gaza. There are no regular civilians in Gaza. Every adult has educated [others] to kill. Every woman is a monster. Every youth aspires to be a shahid [in this sense, a martyr-militant, as in suicide terrorist], every baby will grow up to be a terrorist. Wipe [them] out, kill, destroy, annihilate.

(2) [Safed Chief Rabbi] Shmuel Eliyahu (father of Cabinet Minister Amichay Eliyahu): ”An atom [bomb] on Gaza is indeed an option! Me, they’re not going to fire, they wanted to [fire] my son, but me they’re not going to fire.”

(3) Eliyahu Yossian (researcher and commentator in right-wing institutions, an in interview with ToV Jewish News): On the first night, we should have taken down 50,000 Gazans, blood vengeance. Cabinet discussions, later on, humanitarian [aid], later on, prisoners and hostages, later on. The first check —blood vengeance.”

(4) Eliyahu Yossian (in an interview with the N12 news website): ”To fight with the utmost cruelty, no God, no morality, zero. You go into Gaza with the goal of revenge, there must be maximum corpses.”

(5) Aryeh King (Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem): ”If Prime Minister @netanyahu and his ministers in the cabinet cared at all, there would already be 150,000 killed in the Gaza Strip, and not a single building in the Strip would be left standing.”

(6) Yehuda Shlezinger (Israel Hayom): ”Another video clip, another low point, another abyss, another atrocity, more terrible sadism, more Nazism. Wipe out the Gaza Strip. All of them deserve to die. All of them. Revenge.”

(7) MK Avigdor Lieberman (Yisrael Beiteinu): ”There are no innocent people in Gaza.”

(8) Zvi Yehezkeli, Commentator, Channel 13: ”[We] should have killed many times 20,000 people, [we] should have begun with a blow of 100,000; In my opinion the IDF could have landed a more painful opening blow, with 100,000 killed.”

17. As stated, these are only examples. Attached to this letter is a table with more than 50 similar utterances, with links to sources. Even this list is not comprehensive, and we estimate that since Oct. 7 there have been hundreds of similar public statements made by public figures.
18. These calls, for mass murder, for expulsion, and for flattening and erasing entire cities, may exemplify medieval justice and vengeance in the style of ”Game of Thrones,‘ but in our modern world they all appear to be incitement to commit grave crimes, both of the law of nations and of Israeli law.
19. Among these calls can also be found statements which appear to be incitement to commit the gravest crime in international criminal law. What, after all, is a call to wipe out Gaza, a call for annihilation, to drop an atomic bomb on it, and the like? The matter at hand is, in fact, a call for genocide.
20. We would note that which is well known to you, that not only did Israel sign and ratify the International Convention on the Prevention and punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948, came into force on 12 January 1951), but in view of its obligations as set down in the convention, it enacted the Law on Prevention and Punishment the Crime of Genocide, 5710 —1950. Both the convention (Paragraph 3(c)) and the law (Paragraph 3 (a) (2)) define incitement to genocide as a crime, and obligate prosecution of those who commit it.
21. In addition, doing harm to innocent people as an act of vengeance, certainly harm committed by means of extreme emotional and physical violence and damage to property, meets the definition of an ”Act of Terror‘ as defined in the Counter Terrorism Act (2016), as the violence is carried out by ”political, religious, nationalistic or ideological motive‘ with intention of ”provoking fear or panic in the public‘ and/or with intention of ”compelling a …governmental authority …to do or to abstain from doing any act.”
22. As the law enforcement system which you lead has made clear to the public in recent weeks with intensive and manifold efforts (to which we will return) —calls to commit acts of terror as mentioned above are serious criminal violations (Article 24(b)(1) of the Counter Terrorism Act).
23. It will also be stated that ascribing negative traits to all residents of Gaza (”There are no innocent people in Gaza‘) is racist, and publicizing such attributions raised the suspicion of committing the offence of ”Incitement to Racism‘ (Article 144B of the Criminal Code, 5737-1977).
24. It should be emphasized that the three incitement offences mentioned — Incitement to Racism, Incitement to Terrorism, and Incitement to genocide, do not include a probability element, in contrast to the crime of Incitement to Violence (Article 144D(2) of the Criminal Code). The matter expresses the extra gravity of these violations, which the legislature chose to criminalize whether or not there exists a high level of probability that they will lead to committing the full crime.
25. Having said that we are speaking of violations which do not require probability of committing the complete violation, it must be remembered that the compelling interest by the complete violations has certainly been damaged. Normalized discourse which calls for annihilation, erasure, devastation and the like is liable to impact the manner by which soldiers conduct themselves. Of late we received a chilling example of the dangers of this discourse of incitement, when Yuval Doron Kestelman, of blessed memory, who had killed the terrorists who carried out a terror attack on a bus stop at the entrance to Jerusalem, was himself shot dead by a soldier who said in an interview with Channel 14 television that he had performed ”confirming kill” [shooting an already wounded and prone enemy at close range] and that ”every soldier wants to mark an X [on his rifle].”The interviewer, Yinon Magal, had in the past urged ”confirming kill” of attackers already neutralized at the site: “It’s important to make an effort at a terrorist who carried out a terror attack not remain alive.‘ He was a member of Knesset when he said that. There were many others like him, and it is reasonable that the discourse which incites to shooting contrary to the law, enabled, or at least lent support, to an approach that led to Kestelman’s tragic and infuriating killing.

26. In the end, the obvious will be stated: Calls of the sort we have presented prepare the ground for ideas, grant support and effectively advance carrying out war crimes and crimes against humanity (and, as stated, even the crime of genocide), and it is the duty of the state of Israel, anchored both in humanitarian law (see paragraph 146 of the Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, 1949) and in human rights law (see paragraph 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), to prohibit incitement to commit them, by means of law, and to investigate and prosecute the inciters.
27. Despite all the foregoing, this discourse of incitement to annihilation, erasure, expulsion, revenge and murder of innocents —has not encountered, to the best of our knowledge, any response from the law enforcement system.
28. Not only has the law enforcement system not acted on the matter, it has fallen silent. The attorney general, the state prosecutor, and the entire senior level of the state prosecution has to this day chosen to avoid speaking on this issue. To the best of our knowledge, not a single statement to the news media has been issued by the addressees to this letter, condemning remarks by senior public figures, even when these remarks are made by members of Knesset, cabinet ministers, or former senior military officers, calling for committing war crimes.
29. Moreover, the absolute silence and inaction in the face of the discourse of annihilation, stands in polar opposition and cries out to the heavens in view of the intensive activity of the state prosecution along with the Israel Police in all matters relating to speech you have interpreted as supporting Hamas terrorism.
30. Hundreds of talk-backers and social media posters, most of them anonymous to the public, nearly all of them Palestinian citizens of Israel, have in recent weeks been summoned for questioning, arrested and prosecuted for comments —some of them trivial, lacking any audience and subject to interpretation —on social media. They have been charged with support for or identification with Hamas, or with support for the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7. According to statistics made public by the Israel Police, as of Nov. 26, 269 investigations have been opened and 86 indictments have been filed in speeded-up procedures —all of them on incitement or identification with the Hamas organization. In many cases, this activity is carried out on their initiative by law enforcement officials and the cyber apparatus which actively monitors comments of this type, and not necessarily because complaints have been filed.
31. This requires investment in time and enormous resources of the law enforcement system – which sends police to the homes of anonymous Twitter users whose comments were interpreted as hailing the attack – and which investigates, arrests, issues statements to the press, and whose spokespersons distribute photos of those arrested, handcuffed and with the Israeli flag in the background.
32. To our understanding, the damage to the rule of law and to protected values by incitement violations in public calls to annihilate Gaza, to expel millions, or to execute prisoners, is no less serious than that which is caused by the comments in response to which the law enforcement system acts, as stated, intensely and effectively.
33. It is difficult to free oneself of the impression that until now, except for the desire to battle incitement, the state prosecution and the enforcement policy it leads have been serving an interest to root out only one type of incitement, whose potential victims are Israeli Jews. And even if that is incorrect (and we would be glad for you to put us right on this matter), it is clear that this is the feeling of hundreds of thousands of Israelis who see the determined activity regarding everything connected with incitement against Israelis, as well as the complete inactivity regarding the gravest and most dangerous instances of incitement against residents of Gaza.
34. The result is serious: The combination of the complete absence of enforcement response to the statements which are the subject of this letter, coupled with the public prominence of the inciters and the broad stage they have, both with the traditional news media and the social networks, have brought about a situation in which the discourse of annihilation, expulsion and revenge has been normalized, legitimized, and expanded. Today, calls of these types are an everyday matter in Israel.
35. It may be that the necessary treatment for the phenomenon described in our letter needs to be in the public sphere, and the Ministry of Justice in its public information apparatus knows how to issue statements in your names, condemning the expressions which are damaging fundamental values, whose defense is a duty of the addressees of this letter.
36. One way or another, if you do not take a legal and/or a public step of any sort on this issue, if you continue to grant absolute immunity to the inciters, the responsibility for the results of the ferocious and unbridled incitement described in this letter will also lie at your entrance.
37. We ask that you consider the aforementioned in our letter with the seriousness it deserves, taking into account the gravity of the statements, and we expect to receive your reply, without delay, and with your comments, as the grave discourse described is mounting by the moment.

With great respect,