After 57 years of occupation marked by humiliation, expulsions from their homes and lands, arbitrary imprisonment, multiple murders, settlement building and the failure of various peaceful actions, it is understandable that many Palestinians refuse to condemn the Hamas action on October 7, considering it to be a legitimate act of resistance to Israel's colonization and state terrorism.

It is also understandable that after the 1,200 murders, rapes, sexual violence and the kidnapping of almost 200 hostages, the majority of them civilians, many Israelis support the army's murderous actions as a legitimate response to Hamas' actions. Yet, we condemn all of those terrorist acts.

It is not because we are Jews that we condemn the terrorist acts and war crimes of murder, rape, sexual violence and kidnapping of civilians perpetrated by Hamas commandos. It is not despite being Jews, that we condemn the terrorist acts and war crimes of the massive bombings, destruction and massacres, the vast majority of them of women and children, committed by the Israeli army and settlers in Gaza and the West Bank over the past three months.

It is because we are attached to the dignity of every human being that we condemn them, without considering that Palestinians or Israelis are criminals or terrorists by nature.

This condemnation is not without its links to our Jewishness, one component among others of our multiple identities, a family heritage that links some of the signatories to the history of the genocide of European Jewry. A large number of the families of those of us with origins in Central and Eastern Europe were murdered by the Nazis and their local collaborators during the Holocaust.

Some among us, our parents and grandparents, survived the hunt for Jews by the Gestapo and Vichy police. Refusing to obey orders to declare themselves Jewish and wear the yellow star, they chose to resist, to hide and to hide their children. Many of them were saved from death thanks to the solidarity and civil disobedience of non-Jewish French people who hid them at the risk of their own lives, without asking who they were or where they came from.

It is also in the name of that past that we claim that it is illegitimate and despicable to justify the massacre of tens of thousands of Gazan and West Bank civilians in the name of the genocide of European Jews, in which the Palestinian people played no part whatsoever. Along with many Jews throughout the world, including in Israel, we deny the Netanyahu government and its supporters the right to act in Gaza and the West Bank in our name and that of our ancestors, using the Holocaust as a pretext.

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