Last Sunday (March 30), a UN rescue team arrived to locate the bodies of 15 Palestinian paramedics and aid workers in Gaza, after they disappeared for the Tel A-Sultan neighborhood in Rafah a week earlier. According to reports, they arrived at the site in coordination with the Israeli military, and a military official told them to “come with digging tools”. And indeed, they dug. Inside the piles of send the found the 15 dead, some of them still wearing gloves, some of them with their hands or feet bound, some of them were shot dozens of times in their upper body. They were found dead in a killing pit, together with an ambulance and a UN vehicle that were also found buried in the sand.

When weighing future threats that would be a result of releasing terrorists in a negotiation against the immediate, confirmed danger that the hostages faced, the rabbis wrote that we are commanded to prioritize the release of those in immediate danger, even at high cost. 

Professor Rashid Khalidi spoke to a room full of Jews on the Upper West Sids of NY. Smol Emuni roganzied the event, Esther Sperber said a Dvar Torah and Adi Mahalel interviewed and moderated the event.

David N. Myers is Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA and served as president of the New Israel Fund from 2018-2023. He also directs the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute, the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, and the UCLA Dialogue across Difference Initiative. He is the author or editor of many books in the field of Jewish history, including, with Nomi Stolzenberg, American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York (Princeton, 2022), which was awarded the 2022 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish studies.

We rabbis must condemn all immoral behavior: Legitimate anger against Hamas does not justify attacking imprisoned alleged terrorists