To My Brother Peter Noel: Calling Israel’s War a Genocide Is a Blood Libel

My dear brother Peter Noel,

You know I love you. Nothing—no difference of opinion, no political divide—can ever undo that. You have been my friend for decades. Are two families are one. As you said many times on our daily four-hour-a-day morning show on New York City Legacy Black radio station, WWRL 1600 AM, where the greatest American of the twentieth century Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, broadcast before us, “I am a big black man, SHMULEY is a small Jew-man, and we are blood brothers. Inseparable.” Now and forever.

You once saved the life of a Hasidic Jew during a mob attack in Brooklyn in 1991, when tensions between the Black and Jewish communities were at a boiling point¹. You are a great man of courage, a warrior for your people, and a truth-teller even when truth costs dearly. You have done much more than most to help purge America of its original and disgusting sin of racism, making us a much more Godly and moral nation. You are my soul-friend, and I will always cherish you.

So when you published your recent words about Israel, Gaza, and journalists—words that cut deeply into the heart of the Jewish people—I could not remain silent. I write not to offend you, but to answer you, point by point, because you deserve the truth. And because the world deserves it too.

THE PHOTO WITH ARAFAT

You write of standing with Yasser Arafat in Gaza years ago, and you fear that Israel might one day target you for that association.

Brother, you know that’s not true. I was there with you in Gaza City when that photograph was taken. I refused to shake his hand—not out of disrespect for your choice to cover him as a journalist, but because I could not bring myself to grasp the blood-stained palm of a man whose hands were behind the murder of so many innocent Israelis², especially children.

Arafat is lionized in some circles, but history is unambiguous about his corruption. His daughter’s net worth is estimated to be $5 billion, amassed through funds siphoned from the Palestinian Authority³. Even Palestinian insiders have acknowledged the theft. This was the “great leader” who promised his people liberation but left them impoverished, siphoning aid into Swiss accounts while keeping them in perpetual misery.

Surely his daughter can contribute just ten percent of her ill/gotten theft – $500m, to the alleged “starvation” in Gaza, a lie that is slowly crumbling, with even notable outlets, like The New York Times admitting that they lied about pictures of children starving, revealing they had earlier diseases like muscular dystrophy and other neural-muscular diseases.

Peter, you’ve been to Israel multiple times as a journalist. You’ve walked the streets with me. You’ve seen the courtesy and respect afforded you at every turn. You’ve also seen that one out of every five Israel’s is a Black Jew, accorded absolutely equal rights in every manner imaginable. You also know that Israel risked its military and lives of its citizens and soldiers, to go to Ethiopia and rescue these black Jews from certain and real starvation and death.
In Israel, you, even as a journalist who is regularly critical of Israel, has never been harassed, never been threatened, never been treated as anything but an honored guest. No one in Israel cares that you took a photo with Arafat. Many Israeli prime ministers shook his hand—Rabin, Peres, even Netanyahu—not because they respected his deeds, but because they hoped against hope for peace⁴. But Anas Sharif was different. He was a killer and a terrorist masquerading as a journalist.

ANAS AL-SHARIF WAS NOT A JOURNALIST—HE WAS A HAMAS OPERATIVE

You speak of the late Anas al-Sharif as if he were an innocent reporter killed for doing his job. But Israel did not target him for journalism. They targeted him because he was a Hamas terrorist dressing up Halloween-style as a journalist—a man who used his press credentials as cover to coordinate attacks.

The Israel Defense Forces have published extensive, verified documentation showing that Hamas paid al-Sharif large sums for operational work⁵. These were not rumors; they were files captured during the war. Not a single Hamas official has even attempted to dispute the authenticity of those documents—because they can’t.

You, Peter, are a man of peace. You have never hurt a fly. You have stared down racists and stood up to violence your whole life. Anas al-Sharif embraced a genocidal ideology: the Hamas Charter, which explicitly calls for the murder of every Jew on earth⁶. There is no moral equivalence between a journalist who bears witness and a militant who bears arms.

FREE SPEECH IN ISRAEL VS. REALITY IN GAZA

You ask if Israel would come for you next. Let me be clear: every day, thousands of journalists—many of them deeply critical of Israel—work freely within its borders⁷. Some accuse my Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of being of being a war criminal, or worse, Hitler. Some hurl grotesque Nazi comparisons at the Jewish state. And you know what happens to them? Absolutely nothing. They walk the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa in safety.

We have both seen, with our own eyes, in our trips to Israel together with the Rev. Al Sharpton, Israeli Muslim Arabs living as equal citizens of the state⁸. They sit in the Knesset. They serve on the Supreme Court. They run hospitals, universities, and businesses. They are protected by the same IDF that protects Jewish citizens.
You and I even met the doctors at Hadassah hospital outside Jerusalem, who treated actual suicide bombers who murdered tens of Jews blowing up buses, but whom the Jewish doctors, under the Hippocratic Oath, were trying to save their lives.

Gaza is different. And here is where the facts matter.

ISRAEL LEFT GAZA—COMPLETELY

In 2005, Israel did something almost no nation in history has ever done: it uprooted its own citizens from their homes—not Arab homes, Jewish homes—and withdrew entirely from Gaza⁹.

The hope was that Gaza could become a flourishing Mediterranean hub, a place of trade, tourism, and prosperity. Billions in international aid flowed in—aid that dwarfed the Marshall Plan given to rebuild Europe after World War II on a per capita basis¹⁰.

Instead, Hamas—elected by the people of Gaza in 2006—used the windfall to build rockets, tunnels, and bunkers¹¹. They turned neighborhoods into launchpads, hospitals into command centers, schools into armories¹². And then their leaders stole some $30 billion, with six Has leaders, including Ismail Haniyeh, becoming billionaires worth at least least $5 billion or more, just like Arafat’s daughter. They did not invest in life; they invested in death. And always, their target was the Jews—our children, our elderly, our everyday civilians.

THE MYTH OF GENOCIDE

You accuse Israel of a “Final Solution” against Gaza. Peter, that charge is not just false—it is obscene.

No army in history has taken more care to minimize civilian casualties than the IDF¹³. In Gaza, the combatant-to-civilian death ratio by the IDF is roughly one to one, or at worst one to 1.5¹⁴.

Compare that to the Allies in World War II: in Germany and Japan, Churchill and Roosevelt’s bombing campaigns killed civilians at ratios of one to four or higher¹⁵. In Iraq, the U.S. military ratio was one to three; in Fallujah, it was one to four¹⁶. By those historical standards, Israel’s conduct is not only restrained—it is unprecedented.

This is not genocide. Genocide is the deliberate extermination of a people. If Israel wanted to “wipe out” Gaza, it could do so in hours. Instead, it warns civilians to evacuate before strikes, drops leaflets, makes phone calls, and pauses operations to allow humanitarian aid¹⁷. Hamas, by contrast, hides behind civilians and celebrates their deaths as propaganda victories¹⁸.

The blood libel that Israel is committing genocide is the latest in a long, dark tradition of antisemitic slanders—the medieval accusation that Jews poisoned wells, the 20th-century lie that Jews control the world—now dressed up in the language of human rights.

THE MORAL CONTEXT

Brother, you and I both come from peoples who have known oppression. The Jewish story and the Black story are not the same, but they rhyme. We have both been enslaved. We have both been slaughtered. We have both been stripped of dignity and told we have no place in this world.

That’s why I am so pained when I hear you equate Israel—the refuge my people built from the ashes of the Holocaust—with the very forces that sought our annihilation. It is not just historically wrong; it is morally wrong.

You know the difference between a state that oppresses and a state that defends itself. You have stared down apartheid in South Africa; you know what it looks like when people are segregated and silenced. That is not Israel. That is Hamas’s Gaza¹⁹.

WHY I WILL NEVER LET GO OF OUR BROTHERHOOD

Peter, I have disagreed with you before, and no doubt we will disagree again. But I will never stop loving you. I will never forget the example you have set as a man who has righteously and courageously protected the Black community from brutality and vomitous racism, and who has exposed the hardest truths of America’s racial wounds.

You have helped America confront its original sin of racism and pushed it toward becoming a more moral nation under God. You have inspired me more than you know.

That is why I cannot let your words about Israel stand unanswered. Not because I want to win an argument, but because truth matters. And because you, my brother, deserve to hear it straight.

Israel is not perfect. No country is. It makes mistakes. We Jews argue endlessly—perhaps more than any other people on earth. But we do not wage genocidal wars, God forbid. We do not target journalists for taking photos. We do not fear truth. We live by it.

And like it or not, you are stuck with me—your brother from another mother, till the end of our days.

With all my love,
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

—

Endnotes
1. New York Times, Aug. 1991 – coverage of Crown Heights unrest and mob attack intervention.
2. Associated Press, Dec. 2004 – Arafat’s legacy and links to terror attacks.
3. The Guardian, Nov. 2004; Forbes Middle East, 2015 – Arafat family wealth.
4. BBC Archives, 1993 Oslo Accords footage.
5. IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Jan. 2024; Times of Israel, Jan. 5, 2024 – Hamas payment documents to Anas al-Sharif.
6. Hamas Charter, Aug. 18, 1988, Article 7.
7. Reporters Without Borders, 2023 – Israel press freedom profile.
8. Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2022 – Arab citizens in government and judiciary.
9. BBC News, Aug. 15, 2005 – Israel disengagement from Gaza.
10. World Bank, 2015 – Gaza aid flows per capita compared to Marshall Plan.
11. U.S. State Department, 2022; Amnesty International, 2015 – Hamas diversion of aid.
12. UNRWA, 2019 – Documentation of Hamas military use of civilian infrastructure.
13. BBC Newsnight, Nov. 2023 – Col. Richard Kemp on IDF’s civilian protection efforts.
14. Alma Research & Education Center, 2024 – combatant-to-civilian death ratios.
15. U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 1946 – WWII civilian casualty ratios.
16. Iraq Body Count Project, 2004 – Civilian casualty ratios in Iraq War.
17. IDF Humanitarian Coordination Unit, Dec. 2023 – Evacuation warnings.
18. Human Rights Watch, 2014 – Hamas use of human shields.
19. Freedom House, 2023 – Gaza civil liberties rating.