By Mike Coté
Thursday, October 26, 2023
The war between Israel and the terror group Hamas,
which began after the latter’s barbaric atrocities against Israeli civilians on
October 7, is also an information battle. Media of all types have been
spreading propaganda meant to craft a false equivalence between the State of
Israel and the terrorists who run Gaza. One of the more galling tactics used by
pro-Palestinian activists, including many in the mainstream progressive movement,
is to claim that Israel is conducting a genocide against the Palestinian
people. This spurious allegation has been repeated by everyone from members of Congress
to congressional staffers to Ivy League professors and students to foreign ministers and heads of state. But not only do these claims misapply the
label of genocide, they have the situation exactly reversed: History shows that
it is Israel’s enemies who harbor genocidal intent.
The term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer (and ardent
Zionist), in direct reference to Nazi mass killings then being carried out. In
his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin described the
concept:
Generally speaking, genocide does
not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when
accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather
to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of
essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of
annihilating the groups themselves… Genocide is directed against the national
group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals,
not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.
Only a few years later, Lemkin’s term was adopted by the
United Nations in its Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In Article II of
that Convention, the U.N. defined genocide more specifically to mean
any of the following acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group, as such: a. Killing members of the group; b. Causing
serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c. Deliberately inflicting
on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part; d. Imposing measures intended to prevent
births within the group; e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to
another group.
This understanding of the word applies to the
Israeli–Palestinian issue, but not in the way the pro-Palestinian activists
claim.
The Jews of the Levant were targets of genocidal pogroms
decades before Israeli independence in 1948. With the growth of the population
of the Yishuv — the Jewish community in Palestine when it was under Ottoman and
then British control — came a rise in Arab antipathy. A series of violent
attacks were carried out against Jewish communities in the first part of the
20th century. Infamously, the Hebron massacre of 1929 killed nearly 10 percent of
the Jewish denizens of that city, while the survivors were forcibly relocated
to Jerusalem. During the Second World War, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj
Amin al-Husseini, the leader of the Arabs in Palestine under the British
Mandate, directly aligned himself with the Nazis. In a meeting with Hitler in Germany in November 1941,
al-Husseini agreed with Hitler on their shared goal of “the annihilation of
Jewry living in Arab space.”
The 1947 U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine, which
proposed dividing the land into a Jewish and an Arab state, sparked another
round of attacks on the Jewish community. Jewish leaders accepted the terms of the partition, despite its requiring
the abandonment of many Jewish villages and the internationalization of
Jerusalem. Their Arab counterparts, however, refused to countenance the idea of
a Jewish state and set out to prevent it. Intercommunal violence in Mandatory Palestine
escalated, primarily driven by Arab attacks on Jewish communities in what was
to become Israel. Some Arabs, especially elites with financial means, began to
flee to the areas of the Mandate that the U.N. set aside for an Arab state and
to other Arab nations. In the countries of the Middle East, Jews were being persecuted,
with legal discrimination purposely modeled on that of the Third Reich.
After Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948,
dozens of Arab nations invaded in an explicitly genocidal campaign against the
newborn Jewish state. Those aims are clear from the historical record, as
recounted by Israeli scholars Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf in The War of
Return (2020): Ahmed Shukeiry, the founding chairman of the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO), stated that the war was intended for “the elimination of the Jewish state”; the secretary-general
of the Arab League stated that “this will be a war of extermination and
momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the
Crusades”; the lead coordinator of the Arab forces, Ismail Safwat, claimed the
war’s objective was “to eliminate the Jews of Palestine, and to completely
cleanse the country of them”; al-Husseini, still the leader of the Palestinian
Arabs, said the war would continue “until the Zionists are eliminated, and the
whole of Palestine is a purely Arab state.”
The nature of the fighting in this existential war, Palestinian-Arab leadership’s calls to evacuate, and the
Arab exaggeration of Jewish “atrocities” like that at Deir Yassin all played a role in the flood of
refugees to Arab lands. Over the course of the war, about 750,000 Arabs
previously living in British Mandate Palestine were displaced. This is the
origin of the term nakba, or “catastrophe,” which pro-Palestinian
activists use to refer to Israel’s founding and to cast it as a uniquely evil
act. Today’s Palestinians have granted themselves a special status as permanent
refugees, but this misrepresents the history.
The early post-war period was replete with border
changes, population transfers, and partitions of former colonial holdings.
Indeed, the magnitude of the issue was far greater elsewhere. After the Nazi
regime was defeated, ethnic Germans were expelled from much of Central and
Eastern Europe; the ensuing refugee crisis encompassed nearly 12 million people. The partition of India and
Pakistan, which also took place in 1947, forced more than 15 million people to relocate and killed
almost 2 million more in the process. Yet those refugees, who dwarfed the
population of the Arabs of Palestine, were successfully integrated into their
new homelands.
Despite the claims of the obliteration of the Palestinian
Arab community, over 150,000 remained in Israel and became citizens with full
voting and civil rights — unlike their brethren abroad, who remain segregated
and disenfranchised by Arab states to this day. In Israel today, the Muslim
Arab population has increased to 1.66 million, a full 16 percent of Israel’s
population; Christians, also mostly Arab, number 177,000, or about 2 percent of the population.
Compare this picture with the eviction of millennia-old Jewish communities from
nations throughout the Middle East and North Africa: The expulsion of Jews
during and after the 1948 war displaced 850,000 people, creating just as many Jewish
refugees as Arab refugees from Palestine. Israel accepted these refugees,
whereas the Arab states made a political decision to keep Palestinian Arabs in
“temporary” camps, a situation that has lasted for 75 years.
In the aftermath of Israel’s founding, its enemies
continued to be driven by genocidal intent, even as Israeli politicians
remained accepting of a Palestinian state. The original 1964 charter of the PLO claims all of Mandate
Palestine as an indivisible Arab state which must be liberated from “the forces
of International Zionism,” necessitating the total destruction of Israel. In
the buildup to the 1967 Six-Day War, Arab leaders reiterated their genocidal
intent. As Michael Oren notes in Six Days of War (2002), the
PLO’s Shukeiry predicted Israel’s “complete destruction,” Egypt’s ministry of
religious affairs declared a “holy war to liberate Palestine,” and Syrian
dictator Hafez al-Assad stated that it was time “to take the initiative in
destroying the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland.”
A pivotal moment — leading to today’s crisis — occurred
in 1988, with the founding of Hamas. The group’s founding
document is virulently antisemitic, directly echoes Nazi propaganda,
and repeatedly calls for the genocide of Jews. A few choice lines: “Israel will
exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it
obliterated others before it”; “There is no solution for the Palestinian
question except through Jihad”; “In face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine,
it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised”; “The Zionist plan is
limitless. . . . Their plan is embodied in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of
Zion,’ and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.”
Suffice it to say, Hamas is dedicated to the extermination of the Jews of
Israel.
The Palestinians have turned down every offer of a state
in deals brokered by the U.S. and agreed to by Israel, often following up their
rejection with terror waves; Israel withdrew entirely from Gaza in 2005, evicting thousands of
Israeli citizens in the process. Israel’s participation in the “peace process,”
willingness to make sacrifices for a two-state solution, and handing control of
Gaza to the Palestinians do not suggest genocidal intent. Nor does the fact
that, in Jerusalem, Israel has sovereignty over but allows Muslim control of the Temple Mount, Judaism’s
holiest site and the third-holiest in Islam as the site of al-Aqsa Mosque, and
forbids open Jewish prayer there. Since the “nakba,” the Palestinian population
has dramatically increased, and comparisons of the growth rates of Israeli and Palestinian populations show
very little difference; this certainly would not be the case if Israel were
acting genocidally.
On the other hand, the genocidal intent of Palestinian
leadership and many of their followers has remained. Palestinian children are
taught to despise Jews and Israel by textbooks that incite violence. Demonstrators at
pro-Palestinian rallies are often heard chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” an
eliminationist slogan that extols the idea of cleansing the region of Jews.
Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007, has launched countless
indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians; since October 7 alone, it
has fired 7,000. It has kidnapped vulnerable Israelis of all races; as of today,
the number of people kidnapped from Israel on October 7, from babies to the
elderly, is believed to be 222. It engages in brutality rivaled only by ISIS;
the atrocities committed on October 7 are unheard of in the modern world.
The Palestinian Authority, which oversees portions of the
West Bank, is often referred to as the saner Palestinian movement, but it is
nearly as antisemitic and violent. Its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is an avid Holocaust denier and wrote his doctoral
dissertation on the “connections” between Zionism and Nazism. The PA, less than
two weeks after Hamas’s mass murder of Israeli civilians, issued religious guidance to imams that called on them
to use their prayers to incite further violence against Jews.
Though some quarters have accused Israel of genocide — a
deliberate reversal of the concept aimed at a nation that arose from the ashes
of the Holocaust — the charge is a baseless slander. Israel is not the
perpetrator of a genocide but the target of one. The definition of the term
makes that eminently obvious. Now, after the worst antisemitic atrocity since
the Holocaust, the reality is even clearer. Those who argue otherwise are
woefully ignorant or willfully deluded — or perhaps something worse: sympathetic
to these genocidal aims.
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