HAN | RE: On Rhetoric and Responsibility

Dear Sam Friedman,

I appreciate your correction of the mistakenly hyphenated spelling of “antisemitic” in my quotation of a Cornellians Only post. This is an embarrassing mistake for an editor, and I apologize. A correction has been issued on our website. 

I still hope to address your many other concerns with my op-ed. For one, you raise issue with my argument against Kassam’s actions as representing Israel to be “wholesale equivalent” to Nazi Germany. I make the distinction here between two possible senses of equivalence, the first one being less likely. In the same paragraph, I write against “disparaging Kassam for ‘equating’ in the second sense of the word, to imply mere similarity — if we cannot say that a government which calls one ethnic group ‘animals’ is similar to Nazi Germany in this way, then we are forever bound to intellectual dishonesty with regard to genocide.” I do not see how my argument being “semantic” undermines its relevance — as you indicate, rhetoric should be handled responsibly, and I am thus cautious against censoring opinions which credibly compare the genocidal actions of one historical government with those of a contemporary one.  

You are correct that my op-ed does not directly quote any Israeli official in describing Palestinians as animals, instead alluding to Kassam’s own column. Still, Kassam’s source and I both cite an interview with Dan Gillerman, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, asked about the collective punishment of the Palestinian people: “I’m very puzzled for the constant concern which the world and also Britain is showing for the Palestinian people and is actually showing for these horrible, inhuman animals, who have done the worst atrocities that this century has seen.” 

Gillerman is not alone among Israeli officials. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant says, “We are fighting against human animals.” Former Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Ben Dahan says, “To me, they are like animals, they aren’t human.” The government’s language is reflected in the persistent dehumanization of the Palestinians in facets of Israeli life: in 1985, Israeli author Adir Cohen had already found of 1,700 Israeli children’s books published after 1967 that “520 of the books contained humiliating, negative descriptions of Palestinians.” In a sample of 86 books, Cohen found 17 instances of Palestinians described as “vicious animals,” not to mention other derogatory characterizations. 

Our dispute may boil down to my allegation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. You appeal to various U.S. and U.K. officials to deny the charge, but the majority of their U.S. and U.K. constituents disagree with them. Predictably, both states benefit directly from arms sales to Israel. While you raise concerns with the UN report that Israel is committing a genocide, it is difficult to account for the depth of recognition on the issue. The International Association of Genocide Scholars recognized the genocide on Aug. 31. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch recognized it in December 2024. If we are not to trust international courts, genocide scholars or third-party human rights organizations, who are we to trust on the issue of genocide? Perhaps our own eyes. 

My intention is certainly not to accuse all Jews of perpetrating genocide. My own op-ed explicitly challenges “the undue association of the whole Jewish people with Israel’s genocide, an association that Zionists insist to preserve.” If we are truly witnessing a genocide as the experts declare, then we must make every effort to distinguish the Jewish people from the Israeli perpetrators. 

Thank you kindly for your response. 

— Eric Han

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