Genocide

The reality of Israel’s war on the Palestinians can no longer be avoided.

As a Jew and someone who has lived in Israel, I find it extremely difficult to say that Israel is guilty of genocide. But to be silent or to pretend that what is happening is not happening is infinitely more dishonest.

I have been in a state of denial, reluctant to accept the previously unimaginable idea the Jewish state could be responsible for genocide because Israel is a nation that was founded in the wake of a genocide and not a single Jewish person can be unaware of this means.

But now there is inescapable evidence that this crime is being perpetrated by the Jewish state. The evidence is not even hard to find, it flashes across the television news on a daily basis as cowering people are obliterated in Gaza. As if this were not enough, the atrocity is compounded by the use of starvation and denial of medical aid as a weapon of war. Meanwhile in the occupied territories of the West Bank messianic Jewish settlers are doing their best replicate the horrors of Gaza.

Israel’s extremist leadership, no longer even pretends that its call for the eradication of Hamas is not in fact a call for the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their land.

Genocide has a specific meaning to encapsulate the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race. It was applied first to the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust but has universal application as a specific crime under international law. Although accusations of genocide are freely banded about, but the bar is set high for the legal definition of genocide; lamentably Israel has now surpassed that bar

With mounting paranoia Israel’s defenders simply dismiss this focus on the Palestinian genocide as reflecting Jew hatred in a world where the Jewish people have suffered enormous tragedy. They indignantly ask, how can Israel be responsible for such an act when from the very day of its establishment it came under attack from its neighbors?

Moreover, they challenge naysayers to explain how can Israel be in the wrong after the deadly Hamas attack on the South of the country and the taking of hostages who were tortured and raped. If the defense for the carnage in Gaza rests on some obnoxious idea of two wrongs making a right, it is based on a primitive morality that ensures an endless cycle of violence. More importantly the scale of horror in Gaza is way out of proportion to the suffering of Israelis. To pretend otherwise is not simply unconvincing, it is offensive.

Logically, I suppose, I should therefore be taking part in pro-Palestinian rallies where people proudly sport the keffiyeh and issue blood curdling calls for death and destruction to be rained down on the Jewish state. I cannot do this although if I were in Israel I hope I would be brave enough to be standing alongside the people who insist that the Netanyahu government’s acts of barbarity are not be carried out in their name. Some are refusing to be called up for army service, others have headed to the West Bank in a somewhat forlorn attempt to block the attacks on Palestinian villages by Jewish settlers, usually with official complicity.

And what about the Palestinians who dare to speak out against Hamas, and the Palestinian journalists who are being killed as they record the impact of the carnage around them?

So, there is complexity on all sides, not made any less complex by the ignorance of those who have embraced the Palestinian cause, many of whom actually believe that the authoritarian and murderous Hamas is somehow on the side of angels even though its social intolerance would threaten the lives of many of those most stridently embracing this so called liberation movement.

Sometimes their ignorance is comical. For example, how many of the people shouting ‘From the River to the Sea – Palestine Will be Free’, know that the origin of the slogan - from-the-river-to-the-sea comes from the rightwing Zionist Herut movement, precursor to Netanyahu’s Likud party?

The ignorance is hardly one-sided because many passionate defenders of Israel, convinced of the unshakable hostility of the Palestinians, do not know that the Israeli government is implacably opposed to the release from jail of Marwan Barghouti, precisely because he is the only Palestinian leader of stature who has argued for a two state solution?

This is not to be dismissive of the genuine passion of communities overseas who are most closely tied to this conflict.

Many Jews, who are witnessing a rise of antisemitism in places such as Britain, see opposition to the State of Israel as nothing less than echoes of the Holocaust.

The much bigger Muslim community, also experiencing a wave of Islamophobia, looks upon what is happening as an attack on their co-religionists and thus an attack on Islam itself

This is a mighty and dangerous mess that will not be resolved on the streets of New York or London. It’s a mess that ultimately can only be solved by the combatants themselves

If military strength were the be all and end all, Israel can be said to have won but as Jewish people know from history stretching back to the expulsion of the Jews from Egypt, to the determination of the Nazis to rid the world of the Jewish people, sheer might does not have last word.

Israel’s leaders dream of a land without Palestinians but they simply will not go away. This means that a solution will have to be found which recognizes this reality and the reality of a Jewish state. Who knows what horrors are to come before a way of accommodating these two realities is found.