Image from Jewish Voice for Peace Facebook page

With this issue of E-News, UCC PIN is releasing our statement, "It's Past Time: Naming Israel's Genocide in Gaza," through which we call for religious and political leaders, and all people of faith, to use the word ‘genocide,’ to describe Israel’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza. While the International Court of Justice has yet to issue their final ruling, they declared that, even as early as January, there was “plausible” evidence of Israeli genocide and, at that time, they issued binding provisional measures for Israel to cease their hostilities and violence. Since then, Israel has brashly defied that ICJ order, and subsequent ones, engaging in ongoing aerial bombardments, ground invasions, and obstruction of the delivery of humanitarian assistance, creating conditions of full-blown famine and forced starvation. The evidence of genocide is in plain sight, visible for all to see. It is even visible, as the JVP graphic above depicts, from space.

It is indeed past time to name Israel’s genocide. As Nidžara Ahmetašević writes in her article, “It’s not ‘ethnic cleansing’; it’s genocide,” (see Breaking the Stories) “using proper terminology and calling things as they are” matters. Holocaust survivor and co-founder of Human Rights Watch Aryeh Neier is now using the terminology of genocide. In a recent interview, he went public about the reasons for his determination that Israel is carrying out a genocide. When we are seeing horrific images of killing, burning, starvation, as Aryeh Neier has seen and as we, and the world, are seeing daily, it is incumbent on us all – it is our moral and ethical responsibility – to call things as they are and to say, “this is genocide.”

With this statement, shared in its entirety below, the United Church of Christ Palestine Israel Network publicly recognizes, acknowledges, and names Israel’s war on Gaza as genocide. We urge all members of the UCC – congregants, clergy, conference ministers, national staff – to use this terminology. And we encourage you to share this statement widely, from the pulpit, at conference annual meetings, and in newsletters. You can access PDF versions of the statement as a letter sized two-sided document here and as a bulletin-insert sized booklet here. You can also find these formats on our UCC PIN website. For some liturgical resources and reflections on genocide, see Ken Sehested's article included at the end of Breaking the Stories.


This is a section of the UCCPIN June 2024 E-Newsletter. To read the entire newsletter, follow this link.