"Genocide: A Deliberate Policy." Cover of a report by B'Tselem, with title over a destroyed urban landscape.

Israel 2025: Some acknowledge “Our Genocide,” while most endorse escalation

December 27, 2025 Carwil Bjork-JamesLeave a comment

If you’ve taken a step back from the endless stream of video-documented destruction in Gaza, something even Israel-aligned political voices have been compelled to describe as “a wall of carnage,” perhaps it is time to re-engage with the political realities of the society that has waged war (at high and lower intensity) on the occupied territories of the Gaza Strip and West Bank for the last twenty-seven months. If so, let me recommend four videos and one podcast episode to catch up with Israeli politics, seventy-thousand violent deaths into the current period.

Israeli human rights groups: “Our Genocide”

In July, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem issued a report concluding that Israeli policy had taken a decisive turn from a destructive military occupation to “coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.” Checking each of the elements of the crime of genocide, they enumerate actions including:

“an intensive military campaign in the Gaza Strip that includes mass killing, both in direct attacks and through creating catastrophic conditions that increase the massive death toll; serious bodily or mental harm; large-scale destruction of infrastructure and living environments; destruction of the social fabric, including Palestinian educational institutions and cultural sites; mass arrests and abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, which have effectively become torture camps; mass forced displacement, and making the ethnic cleansing of Gaza one of the official war goals; and an assault on Palestinian identity through the deliberate destruction of refugee camps and attempts to undermine the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA)”

B’Tselem was joined by Physicians for Human Rights Israel in denouncing the genocide in Gaza. Their conclusions came after many similar conclusions by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, United Nations human rights experts, and genocide, scholars, but they represent a crucial bridgehead in to Israeli Jewish society. (B’Tselem is a non-sectarian institution that includes Jewish Israelis, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Palestinians from the Occupied Territories.) Their perspective very much remains a minority position in Israel, where a June 2025 poll found that 87% of the ruling coalition supporters, 67% of moderate voters, and even 30% of supporters of the left-wing opposition all agreed that there are “no innocents” in Gaza. (More recent polling confirms this.) Political supporters of equality between Palestinians and Israelis continue to navigate difficult strategic questions about how to represent themselves and enlarge their numbers.

In Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Denial of Palestinian suffering

Guardian reporter Matthew Cassel’s three-part series “Along the Green Line” serves to illustrate the hardening line in Israeli society. Partisans of Israeli victory increasingly see the notion of Palestinian territory itself as a thing of the past. The first episode show such Israelis’ point of view including their ambitions to expel Palestinians and replace the Al-Aqsa mosque. Meanwhile Palestinians continue to narrate their historical presence.

In a separate video, Cassel meets with Israelis on the streets of Tel Aviv and asks them about the understanding of the war, in light of the reports of genocide. After meeting with B’Tselem, he finds many Israelis who hold tight to the notion that mass casualties in Gaza are a staged deception, a product of “Gazawood” film-making rather than grim reality. Even at an anti-Netanyahu demonstration, Cassel asks “why there is little mention of the Palestinian victims of this war in Gaza?” and manages to find just one person willing to prioritize Palestinian suffering.

Fifty miles south in the Israeli communities of the so-called ”Gaza envelope” there is little more sympathy for Gazans, but far less denial. A resident of a border town shows Cassel the remaining destruction from the three-day invasion of his town of Kfar Aza by Hamas in October 2023, leading to the deaths of 80 Israelis (including 19 taken hostage and 24 members of the security forces). A resident who leads tours of the wreckage for visiting Israelis speaks frankly about 50,000 Palestinian deaths as a possible recompense for the 1,200 Israelis killed in the attacks, and acceptable measure to deter future Palestinian violence. He narrates the violence as an almost clinical measure: “Clean it out and then bring in something good.” Meanwhile across the Green Line, Malak, a young Gazan woman fears that her journalism could lead to the deaths of her already-displaced family.

The West Bank: “The threshold of despair”

NPR radio show This American Life devoted an August 2025 episode to “The Other Territory,” the West Bank. In its opening it quotes from a plan drawn up by Bezalel Smotrich, now overseer of the occupied territory as Minister of Finance and a defense official. In this document from before his appointment, Smotrich wrote, “The point will come when [Palestinian] frustration will cross the threshold of despair and will lead to acceptance and understanding that their cause stands no chance. It simply isn’t going to happen.” The episode is in essence a chronicle of the forms that despair takes, both outside and inside Israeli prisons. This, of course, continues regardless of the partial ceasefire in Gaza. For those of us whose governments back this process, it is essential listening.

Suwalki, 1937/2002

February 27, 2024 Carwil Bjork-JamesLeave a comment

In the summer of 2002, I went on a winding journey from Berlin northwest to Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania in Germany, then east through Gdańsk and Białystok in Poland, to ultimately reach the town of Suwałki in northeast Poland. This route had been charted by my mother to follow our family tree, seeking out each place named among her Christian German ancestors (via her father Carl) and her Polish Jewish ancestors (via her mother Ruth). My fascination with the Polish labor-uprising-turned-democracy-movement Solidarity had added Gdańsk to the itinerary.

My mother’s genealogical travelogue for the journey is fabulously detailed, naming each place we visited, meal we had, and fruit we tasted. After sharing a dinner of bread, cheese, and fruit in a park, we took a late night train from Gdańsk at 12:50am. It being the Corpus Christi holiday, the train car was crowded with late-night revelers and we had to step off the train at another stop to find our sectioned-off sleeper car. Traveling no more than 35 miles per hour, and changing trains in Bialystok we made it Suwałki by midday.

My grandmother Ruth, her five sisters and one brother, were born in Cleveland to Kalmos Rubenstein and Minnie Gottlieb Rubenstein, from 1901 to 194. Their parents, in turn, had been born in the late 1870s in the Suwałki governorate, both Jewish subjects of the Russian Empire. The records my mom compiled indicate they married in Russia in 1900 before embarking on the journey across the Atlantic. A history of the Jews of Suwalki suggests many ups and downs as Jews surged into the area fleeing pogroms deeper in Russia, played a major role in the economy, and built dozens if not scores of community institutions in the town. South of Suwałki, the Russian Empire helped organize the vicious Białystok Pogrom of 1906. But the great looming disaster of the region was of course the Nazi invasion of 1939 and the extermination campaign against Jews that followed.

In Vorpommern, near the Baltic Sea, my mother and I had stopped in the churchyards of a handwritten list of towns. In their cemeteries, often small plots that were used again and again over the centuries, we scanned the gravestones for familiar surnames. Often we found these most by the low stone walls on the edge of the cemetery, where the oldest headstones were moved and stacked up once they were on the verge of being forgotten. In Suwałki, however, this was a different experience. As my mom recorded (all text is purple is hers),

We returned to Suwalki and went to the Jewish cemetery. There are a few grave markers left in this very large field. However, since the Nazis destroyed most of the cemetery and used the stones for roads and walkways, there were few stones left. The people of Suwalki did take the remaining ones and created a wall of the stones to honor the Jewish people. The only other Jewish structure remaining in Suwalki was the Yeshiva.

This cemetery stood as a metaphor for just how close we had come, and just how far we stood from her family, to her second cousins (she was born in 1936) and relatives beyond murdered in the Shoah. So did the presumably Catholic Poles who shared the weekend sunshine with us that late May day:

This is a very beautiful area of Poland. There are many lakes and it is now a great recreation and camping area. We arrived there on Corpus Christi Day and the train was very crowded with people coming to vacation and many to camp. Our guide […] met us at the train and drove us around the area. We went first to Kaletnik where the Gottlieb family resided. We went through beautiful forests with mostly fir trees and then farmland. Kaletnik is a small town with a Catholic Church and cemetery. The graves were all decorated with flowers. The town overlooks a lake. We were very close to the Lithuanian border, but could not cross it because we did not have a visa. Since this was a holiday, the people were walking on the roads, riding their bicycles, or picnicking with their families. We were not able to talk with them.

In Kaletnik’s graveyard, all the graves we found were marked by crosses. The faces, their “blue eyes and blond hair” did not read as Jewish and seemed, as she wrote, confirmation that “Hitler achieved what he set out to do.” The rural lives we saw being lived didn’t match her expectations.

Even though I was not able to find any new information on our family (I did not expect to), I felt close to them. I was able to picture the area they came from. However, I cannot picture them as farmers. Maybe they were shopkeepers or something else in town.

Four years earlier, we had sought out the town of Suwalki in a book of survivors’ names in Washington’s Holocaust Museum; there had been no entries beneath it.

At the furthest point of our travels, then, we reached the abyss, still craving some recognizable way to envision the lives we could never reach.

Until a few weeks ago, in my living room.

Five formally dressed lawyers sit at a long brown wood table at the International Court of Justice. They are South Africa's delegation, each dressed in black suits: three men have dark African skin, one lighter skin woman in the middle, and one European-descent man on the left. Two of them, and many people seated behind them wear long cloths with the colors of the post-Apartheid South African flag. A South African Broadcast Corporation news chyron at the bottom reads: "South Africa presents its case against Israel at the ICJ"

Gratitude for South Africans at the ICJ

February 22, 2024 Carwil Bjork-JamesLeave a comment

South Africa’s existence as the country it is now is the result of a remarkable global collective struggle that many US residents played a part in. This struggle was only in small measure a legal one, but it built on the ways democracy, anti-racism, and equality of all nations were built into the global legal architecture since 1945. Apartheid was overcome in part by UN institutions deeming apartheid itself a crime.

Perhaps some day, decades from now, Palestinians and Israelis will sit side-by-side and advocate for the rights of others (whether as representatives of two states or one), and will remember their own troubled history and how they overcame it by ending violence and ensuring equal rights for all. If so, it too will be in part because voices worldwide could not abide the violent present, and used every means they could, including courts and diplomacy, boycotts and arms embargoes to chart another path..