On August 7, the London Initiative published “A letter from World Jewry,” which is addressed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was ostensibly written to critique his government for its actions in Gaza. 

The open letter from the pro-Israel charity, which currently has more than 5,000 signatures, began receiving widespread Canadian media coverage on August 13 after the Canadian Press published an article noting it was signed by former MP, Cabinet member and antisemitism envoy, Irwin Cotler.

Rather than being a brave or useful intervention into political discourse, however, the open letter should be regarded as a sinister attempt at whitewashing Israel with little care given to Palestinian genocide victims.

I’ve gone through the letter in its entirety, quoting it in bold below and responding to each segment to outline what my problem is with it as a whole.  

“Dear Prime Minister, We are members of Jewish communities around the world who passionately support the State of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people. Our solidarity is always with Israel and Israel’s citizens, never more so than since Hamas unleashed its barbaric attack of October 7.”

The letter begins by admitting that its signatories are Zionists, or, in other words, proponents of the ideology motivating the actions the letter purports to be critiquing. If that’s not enough, the signatories admit that they will always support Israel, and that they’ve actually felt more solidarity with it since it began its genocide in Gaza than ever before.

“We are under no illusions about the actions and intentions of Hamas, other extremist forces and the states that support them, and we acknowledge the painful dilemmas any Israeli government would face in addressing these threats. Yet we also cannot escape the fact that the policies and rhetoric of the government you lead are doing lasting damage to Israel, its standing in the world and the prospects of secure peace for all Israelis and Palestinians. This has severe consequences for Israel but also for the wellbeing, security and unity of Jewish communities around the world.”

The signatories outline three issues they have with Israel’s actions since Oct. 7, 2023, and none of them are the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Instead, two (“doing lasting damage to Israel, its standing in the world”) are simply concerns about PR for the state committing the genocide. And when they point to who has suffered the “severe consequences” of these actions, they don’t identify the Palestinians that have been killed en masse, starved, tortured, terrorized, ethnically cleansed, and had the place they called home razed to the ground. Instead, they name Israel and Jews outside of it. This is like if a supposedly anti-Hitler German in the diaspora during the Second World War slightly critiqued the Holocaust because they saw it as bad for Nazi Germany and Germans abroad.

“We therefore call on you to: 1. Permanently restore and enable the provision of food and humanitarian aid to the Gazan population. Impeding aid when you took the decision to resume fighting in March was a moral and strategic disaster. It is not protesting that policy and its outcomes that hands a propaganda victory to Hamas but the policy itself. We do not deny the despicable role of Hamas in stealing aid and preventing its distribution, but nor can we reject the evidence of our eyes and ears as to the extent of the human suffering and the role of your government’s policies in it. As President Trump recently said about starvation in Gaza, ‘you can’t fake that.’”

Israel has been starving Gaza for decades. In 2006, a senior advisor to Israel’s prime minister told him, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” In 2022, reports estimated that more than 64 per cent of Gaza’s population was moderately or severely food insecure. That heightened significantly and intentionally from Oct. 7, 2023, onward. And yet, the signatories point to the impediment of aid as only being an issue as of March 2025. 

Moreover, their primary concern about the blockade of aid is not that Gazans are starving and that those who are still alive have already suffered permanent damage, but that it allegedly hands Hamas a “propaganda victory.” This gives me the sense that many of the signatories would ultimately be fine with the starvation of Gaza if the rest of the world wasn’t paying attention to it. 

The signatories do acknowledge that the starvation is the result of Israel’s policies as opposed to using the sort of natural disaster framing media has often adopted. And yet, this doesn’t go far enough. Israel does not just have a “role” in creating the starvation: it is fully responsible for it, and could make the worst of it stop today. There is no one else to blame, and there is no evidence of widespread ‘theft’ of aid by Hamas.

“2. End the war. Bring the hostages home in a single deal and prioritize their release. Given the inhuman conditions facing the hostages and the cruelty of their Hamas captors the urgency cannot be overstated. The process of negotiating with a depraved terrorist organization is of course complex and fraught. But any opportunity to release all the hostages must be seized, and prioritized above appeasing extremist members of your coalition. Provide assurances also that Israel will not seek to resettle Gaza or pursue or advocate any policy of expulsion of Palestinian civilians under any guise.”

The signatories’ call for ending what they refer to as a “war” is framed around the “hostages,” a group of about 20 to 30 living people at this point, as opposed to the millions of Palestinians who are the true victims of the genocide. For example, the signatories point to “inhuman conditions” the “hostages” face, but don’t acknowledge that those conditions are largely caused by Israel itself. Israel is bombing and starving Gaza, and the “hostages” are in Gaza.

The signatories also try to paint a picture of the Likud-led government as being held hostage by “extremist members” of its coalition. They fail to note that despite any political differences among the coalition, the Likud party is fully committed to the genocide, and is acting in what it believes to be its own interests. It is more accurate to say that if there ever was an extreme fringe in Israel (more on that later), it subsumed the mainstream a long time ago. 

Blame for the genocide does not rest solely with the edges of the coalition government.

“3. Enforce the law in the West Bank, where the frequency and intensity of deadly violence by Jewish extremists is unprecedented. If Israel’s military, when given the bold order by you, can send a missile through a window in Tehran to take out an Iranian general with unerring accuracy it surely has the ability to maintain order in the West Bank, prevent Jewish extremist violence, protect Palestinian civilians and apply the law. That it does not suggests a lack of will. We therefore urge you to prevent attacks by settlers and their supporters and ensure arrests and prosecutions of those responsible.”

The fact that the signatories contrast what they perceive as the bad with Israel’s illegal actions in Iran, calling the latter “bold,” is a sign many have no issue with what Israel is doing beyond optics.

The signatories claim to want the enforcement of “the law” in the West Bank. And yet, they do not call for Israel to abide by international law and withdraw from what is classified as occupied territory. They also do not call on the government to force settlers to leave the West Bank. Instead, they ostensibly want the law of the occupier more forcefully applied on both the occupied and settlers. 

Moreover, the signatories position settler violence as being separate from the state, and claim Israel is showing a “lack of will” by allowing settlers to run wild in the West Bank. In fact, Israel is demonstrating a great deal of will: Jewish settlers are utilized, protected and enabled by the state, which sees them as a way to change ‘the facts on the ground’ and swallow up more illegally occupied land under Jewish control. Jewish settlers may be ‘extreme,’ but only in the sense that they’re a distillation of what Israel really is — they’re a vanguard, not an aberration.

“4. Commit that neither you nor any member of your government will again advocate policies of starvation or expulsion as weapons of war. Members of your government have used language of racism, hatred and incitement without censure. For example, Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu, recently boasted that ‘the government is racing toward erasing Gaza…Thank God we are erasing this evil…All of Gaza will be Jewish.’ Such statements are a moral abomination and a chilul hashem – a desecration of Jewish values and Israel’s founding principles.”

Israel was a state founded with the intent of taking over all of Palestine and ethnically cleansing it of non-Jews. The Jewish settlers who came to Palestine started working on this the moment they got there, and it’s not a coincidence that the state’s official birth coincides with the Nakba, in which more than 750,000 Palestinians were pushed out of their homeland. What Israel is doing now is what it has always done, to one degree or another.

The minister’s statement, then, while undoubtedly vile, is an accurate summation of Israel. This is what many of the signatories have defended in their lifetimes of advocacy for Israel, and what they’ve always known they’ve been supporting and upholding as the pinnacle of Jewish life.

“In addition, it hemorrhages international support for Israel at a time when it is most needed. As a result, Israel now faces a diplomatic tsunami, including from democratic allies who stood with it in the aftermath of October 7 and in facing down the Iranian threat.  Members of your government who use the language of incitement are eroding the standing of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people and undermining Jewish communities as we face a surge in antisemitic, antizionist hate. They undermine all our efforts to strengthen the connection to Israel of future generations of Jews. Yet they seemingly do so with impunity.”

Once again, the expressed problem for the signatories is not that Palestinians are being killed en masse, but that Israel is losing support. They don’t acknowledge the reality that this genocide should cause Israel to lose the undeserved support it already had, and that states guilty of genocide should lose their standing, and ultimately, their existence. This was true of Nazi Germany, and it’s true of Israel. 

The signatories once again name Israel and Jews worldwide as the victims of government members “who use the language of incitement,” with no reference to the real victims: Palestinians. The fact that the signatories complain about facing “antizionist hate” illustrates that they also misunderstand what the problem is here. It’s not just Netanyahu, or “extremists” in his government, or his government as a whole, or even just Israel itself, but rather Zionism at its core. This is what Zionism has always been. 

“As past, present and future leaders of Jewish communities we do not remain silent in the face of Israel’s external threats, but nor will we remain silent when we believe the policies of Israel’s own government are wrong, and endangering the resilience, security and sustainability of both Israel and world Jewry.”

Let’s take these signatories at their word and accept that they wouldn’t remain silent if they believed Israel was doing something wrong. Given how this is likely the first time many of them have publicly spoken out against Israel since Oct. 7, 2023, in this manner, their past silence means they’ve supported what Israel has done up until now. In fact, for some on the list, we know this is the case because they’ve said so. If anything has changed, it’s that they now believe Israel is harming Jews. It doesn’t seem like they’ve really cared about Palestinians. 

“We will increasingly speak out and urge others in our communities, including the leaders of major organizations, to do the same. This will include urging the communities and agencies with which we are associated to treat members and coalition parties who use language like that cited above as persona non grata within our communities. We reject actions and language that are an affront to our history, values and traditions, to Israel’s own Declaration of Independence and to the rule of law.”

The racist and genocidal statements from members of the Israeli government are, in fact, reflective of the history, values, and traditions of Israel and its supporters, which they themselves have framed as the essence of Judaism. As such, it makes no sense to treat these ministers as ‘persona non grata’ while still professing to love the society they accurately represent.

“We will continue to stand in solidarity with the citizens of Israel, who overwhelmingly wish to see an end to this war and the return of the 50 hostages, living and dead, still held by Hamas. Recent data also suggest that a majority of Israelis are willing to pursue secure peace with the Palestinians as part of a regional normalization process and we are ready to support any Israeli efforts to that effect.”

This is perhaps the most offensive portion of the letter as a whole. It’s absolutely bizarre to wilfully ignore the many polls released since Oct. 7, 2023, which show Israelis — as a people — support the genocide en masse and want it to continue. I don’t think there has ever been a society in modern history with so little internal resistance to the genocide it’s committing (not even Nazi Germany). 

The signatories ignore this data because it reveals the truth: Israel is and always has been a sick genocidal society from top to the bottom, and they’ve spent their lives serving it, defending it, and funding it. 

We should not let them off the hook.