I invite members of the Jewish Community of Bermuda to read the recent New York Times opinion piece by professor Omer Bartov, titled “I am a genocide scholar: I know it when I see it”.

Bartov is the Dean’s Professor of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the highly regarded Brown University, and is globally respected. Born in Israel in 1953, he served as a company commander in the Israeli Defence Forces during the Yom Kippur War of 1973 before completing a doctorate at Oxford University.

In recent interviews, Bartov has revealed that he has been heartbroken regarding the “moral failure” of his country’s actions in Gaza for almost two years. He also expresses his grave disappointment that former US president Joe Biden did not withhold war supplies to the Israeli Government when it quickly became obvious that the IDF was carrying out atrocities/war crimes.

Bartov contends that this is not a “war”, but a “public atrocity” — on the premise that “war” requires two sides.

Let me clarify to the JCB that my remarks at the media conference of July 29, were based on a joint statement — a consensus including Bermuda Is Love, Bermuda Islamic Cultural Centre, Chewstick Foundation, Citizens Uprooting Racism in Bermuda, the Human Rights Commission, Imagine Bermuda, Peace Collective and Social Justice Bermuda.

Our eight local non-governmental organisations recognise that the system of slavery was foundational for the British Empire. Maximising profits, thus optimising its military power and the capacity to bully. On that basis, Britain and other European empires took over most of the globe four centuries ago through settler colonialism. They occupied lands and violently displaced other peoples, pushing them into the margins.

Imperialists justified slavery and settler colonialism through the ideologies of White supremacy and racism, as well as religious and ethnic bigotry. Weaponised religious interpretations were essential to various settler colonial projects.

Another Israeli-born academic, professor Ilan Pappé from Exeter University, has conducted in-depth research into the link between the waning British Empire and the creation of Israel. The strategy of religious justification was in play in 1948 when Judaism was conflated with Zionism, resulting in the former British territory of Palestine experiencing the Zionist Stern Gang’s campaign of terrorism, which leveraged the establishment of the state of Israel through the catastrophe.

The Gaza tragedy continues to be played out via livestream. Blockading food, water and medicine, targeting children, after cancelling the United Nations’ efficient humanitarian system. It is a circumstance described by a former Israeli prime minister as “target practice by the IDF” on those starving people awaiting paltry supplies. This shameful level of inhumanity can be carried out only by those who see the people of Gaza as animals.

Of course, that was the same ethos that sustained the system of slavery.

Let me invite the Jewish Community of Bermuda and others to engage in a fulsome community dialogue based on the decades of research on the part of these two Israeli-born scholars regarding this seminal matter. We are at a global crossroads at a time when our international systems are obviously most fragile. The Israeli president is under warrant for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, but is acting with arrogant impunity.

We know that this glaringly inhumane boastfulness has negative implications for resolving our own internal challenges with those who consider themselves to be beyond the law.

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr reminded us that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.

A cross-community dialogue aimed at fostering a deeper understanding of the complexities of this pivotal matter could leverage Bermuda in how we may build a sense of solidarity.

• Glenn Fubler represents Imagine Bermuda