More than 5,000 people, including a collection of prominent Jewish and pro-Israel voices, this week signed a letter rejecting the charge that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, according to the group organizing the initiative.
Signatories included former British premier Boris Johnson, former US antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt, media mogul Haim Saban, actress Debra Messing and dozens of other authors, entertainment figures, Jewish organizational leaders and activists, including the Anti-Defamation League’s director Jonathan Greenblatt and its former leader Abe Foxman, who signed the letter before he died earlier this year.
The letter was a project of the Creative Community for Peace, which opposes antisemitism and anti-Israel boycotts in the entertainment industry.
It came amid ongoing controversy over remarks by actor Mark Ruffalo, a harsh detractor of Israel, who recently criticized the Oracle software company’s work with the Israeli military, and the Ellison family’s expanding media interests, and accused Israel of genocide and apartheid.
Those accusations are frequently leveled by Israel’s staunchest critics, who cite the tens of thousands of civilians killed in the Gaza war, launched with Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught against Israel, in which terrorists killed 1,200 and took 251 hostage.
