An Open Letter to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed

I am writing you to ask that you cease associating the state of Israel with the word “genocide,” as though it were an obvious throwaway.  If you disagree with any of my assertions or my logic, I challenge you to respond.

You are a Muslim and I am a Jew, so it is natural for us to be biased in favor of our own tribes.  But my bias does not mean that I will lie.  Your heritage is Egyptian, not Palestinian, and Egypt is on better terms with Israel than with the Palestinians.  Why aren’t you?

Onward!

• The root definition of genocide is the killing (-cide) of a people (geno-).  Deliberate, of course.  Muslims are a people.  Palestinians are a (very recent) people.  Hamas is a military-political arm of the Palestinian people (many of whom do not approve of Hamas’s actions) but Hamas is not a people.  Israel has made it clear that its target is Hamas, not the Palestinian people among whom Hamas’s soldiers hide.
• The word genocide was invented in 1944, in response to Germany’s rounding up and murdering 2/3 of Europe’s Jews.  From the Holocaust to the war in Gaza, there have been at least ten genocides with casualties far greater than Gaza’s casualties.  How many can you name?
• Genocides typically involve a government targeting a minority group within territory under its control.  Is Gaza under Israeli control?  
• Genocide is never an act of war, aggressive or defensive.  No serious commentator has ever accused America or the Allies of genocide for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki (ca. 170,000 deaths) or fire-bombing Dresden (ca. 25,000 deaths).  Or for our excessive response to 9/11.  All acts of defensive war, not genocides.  The Holocaust was not part of – nor the cause of – World War II; it had its own Aryan logic, and it began in 1933 whereas World War II began in 1939.  The casualties in Gaza are the result of a war that Hamas started, not a genocide.  And Hamas, not Israel, is responsible for the casualties of the war that Hamas started.
• Assemblyman (not yet Mayor) Zohran Mamdani accused Israel of genocide on October 13th (casualty count 1900), less than a week after October 7th.  Formal accusations of Israeli genocide dropped on October 15th (casualty count ca. 3000).  You accused Israel of genocide on October 21st (casualty count 4285), two weeks after Hamas declared war on Israel, and before Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza on October 27th.  Wouldn’t you agree that these early charges were a rush to judgment?  As of 10/31/2026, Palestinians claim a casualty count of 74,594, a horrific number of deaths to be sure, but as 3% of Gaza’s population, perhaps not a genocide (Palestinian casualty counts).  How many casualties might there have been had Israel intended to commit a genocide on Gaza’s population?  3%?  In three years?
• Hamas and Hezbollah have explicitly called for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews.  Nowhere is there comparable language in any official Israeli document.  If genocide requires intent, Israel has none, but Palestinian leadership surely does. 

Here are some factoids unrelated directly to the war in Gaza, but telling nevertheless.

• There have been countless summit meetings to solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and Palestine has walked away from them all, without proposing their own plan for peace.  The Palestinian “Right of Return” is a non-starter for any peace process.  The “pro-Palestinian side” (not all Gaza residents are part of that group) does not want peace or a two-state solution, it wants a “Free Palestine, from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea,” a “one state solution” with no Jews.
• The Nakba – the catastrophe – was the “displacement” of some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes in Mandatory Palestine during the 1948 war.  Many left because they were urged to do so by their military leadership in order to avoid the bloodshed that was to come, and to return to their homes after Israel was defeated.  These men, women and children never returned, but they and their progeny have enjoyed refugee status for four generations, a singularity among refugee peoples in world history.  In addition, these generations of refugees – once 750,000 now 5,900,000 – have been treated rather well, as UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) has existed as welfare for the Palestinian “refugees” since 1950, the United States having contributed $7.3 billion.  150,000 Arab Muslims stayed in Israel and enjoy better lives (citizenship rights, income, life expectancy, educational attainment, etc.) than their brothers and sisters in the Muslim Middle East.
• For those who argue that Israel has no legal or moral claim to the land, Israel has the same legal claim as every other nation on Earth, where national boundaries have always been determined by war, and a moral claim based on three thousand years of continuous residence in the land (if most often a minority, that is the history of the Jewish people, always a minority in someone else’s land, and Israel (“never again”) was the response to the atrocities that Jews have had to deal with for millennia).  There may have been a Muslim majority in the land, but Jews who emigrated there (often from Arab states that did not want them) did not steal the land, they bought it – sometimes, quite legally – from absentee landlords.  Muslims have had a hate on Jews since Muhammad.
• In the next few weeks, you will receive tens of thousands of votes from Michigan’s Jews; I pray that you treat them with the same respect that they will have paid you.
• There have been 41 Jewish senators in American history, now there are ten; as I expect that you will prevail, you will be the first Muslim senator in American history; I congratulate you in advance.

Sincerely,

Ben Paine