Stop Using the Term Genocide
Inflammatory rhetoric only makes things worse
Watching social media posts of the angry mob attacking Jewish students at Cooper Union in New York City yesterday brought to mind the white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville in August 2017. Hate is hate, after all. It knows no political party or social movement. And yesterday’s attack on Jewish students by pro-Palestinian protestors was one such example. Campus security and NYPD intervened to prevent the protesting group — whose members ignored security swipes and literally stormed the school library — from directly assaulting the Jewish students. But what if they had not? And what exactly were the Jewish students attacked for? The answer is plain as day: for being Jewish. The students, after all, were recognizable as such, according to the New York Times, “by their skullcaps.”
Good grief.
We are going to see more of this mob mentality antisemitism as Israel’s war with Gaza goes on and as the destruction continues. The war has resulted in the triggering of global antisemitism and Islamophobia at an alarming rate. Since the October 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis and then Israel’s predictable, fierce and unrelenting bombing campaign of Gaza which has triggered a horrific humanitarian crisis for Palestinians, widespread violence, death threats, and vile language and imagery have abounded. Look at the projection of images on the George Washington University Library earlier this week. Messages such as “Glory To Our Martyrs,” “Divest from Zionist Genocide Now,” and “Free Palestine From the River to the Sea,” are all vile in their content.
Glorifying the “martyrs” who “resisted” Israel’s military control of Gaza is to posit that those who raped, burned, and massacred innocent Israelis — dozens of whom worked tirelessly for peace with Palestinians — died in service to God. It’s an abomination of all things religious to make a claim. “Zionist Genocide” is unproven and intellectually irresponsible (see below). “Palestine from the River to the Sea,” a popular chant since the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, would, without an idea of where Israel’s 7.1 million Jews should go, be a declaration of intent for genocide, no?
The claim of Israeli genocide is another popular term being tossed around with utter carelessness and a purposeful misreading of the U.N. Convention of Genocide. The Israeli historian Raz Segal is having his moment, writing articles and touting his theory that the Israelis are on their way to committing genocide. Such claims are wildly false, misleading, deeply irresponsible, and contribute to fanning the flames of an already agonizing, impassioned conflict.
I listened to Professor Segal’s interview on Chicago Public Radio yesterday and read his argument in Jewish Currents under the specious title A Textbook Case for Genocide. The key for a genocide claim is proving “intent.” The U.N. Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect makes very clear that proving intent is necessary to file a claim of genocide. There is no master plan; there is no document calling for a final solution or concentration camps or killing centers or even permanent mass expulsion. Hot rhetoric in wartime — spoken by both sides — is not intent.
As a scholar, Segal never proves this point. But as a polemicist, he doesn’t have to. He simply pieces together the rhetoric of war coming from Israel and the United States (while never even pretending to examine Palestinian rhetoric from Hamas or Iranian backed Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah or Turkey) and argues that rhetoric is intent. He says nothing of the well-known and universally understood Hamas tactic of purposely planting its weaponry among citizens; using its own people as human shields; grafting more than a half-million liters of fuel from U.N. delivery while claiming Gaza has no fuel: it’s all rather flimsy research and results in being used by antisemites posing as anti-Zionists to carry out attacks on Jews.
Darfur: 500,000 dead; Massacre of Hutus: 232,000; Rwanda: 800,000; Bosnia: 156,000; Cambodia and Bangladesh: 3,000,000 each. Armenia: 1,500,000. The Holocaust of Jews, Homosexuals and Romani: 7,000,000. These are genocides. Even the Nakba, the “catastrophe” of 700,000 Palestinians losing, fleeing from or being expelled from their homes in the 1948 war for Israeli independence, is not described by most scholars as a genocide.
But facts don’t matter when a mob is on the loose. Whether that mob is pro-white, pro-Black, pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian. Mobs will do what mobs will do.
Segal is justifiably upset by his own government. I would be too. The corrupt and criminally indicted Benjamin Netanyahu, in a desperate and pathetic attempt to cling to power, has formed the most right wing, racist government in Israeli history. Its formation represents a deep mark of shame on the three thousand year record of Jewish morality and spirituality. The protection his government has offered to Jewish racist mobs carrying out pogroms and murders in the West Bank by “skullcap” wearing Hilltop Settlers is a desecration of God’s name.
Yesh Din, an Israeli NGO which tracks settler violence, has a deeply disturbing update on Settler violence since October 7. These actions are shameful, immoral and wrong.
But they don’t constitute genocide — in the West Bank or in Gaza. They are manifestations of the hard, cold fact that Israelis and Palestinians do not have the leaders they need and deserve to create the most favorable conditions for peace and coexistence. Until both nations rid their corridors of power of corruption, racism and antisemitism, we will be stuck here in this terrible, tragic, bloody battle.
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For those of you looking for an interesting perspective, I recommend Lucian Truscott Newsletter on Substack. His piece entitled “It’s a Trap” is devastating. I am partial to his point of view.
Thank you for the incredible balancing act here. So much of this needs to be said and heard.
The inflammatory language is part of the playbook for those seeking destruction. Many of the pro-Hamas rallies call for the elimination of the only Jewish majority country in the world, while an ocean of Arab states long ago refused to truly aid their Palestinian cousins with anything but decades of war. They will call it ‘hasbara.’ I call it the facts of history they choose to throw into the Orwellian memory tube. None of the actual humans intersecting in times and places should be reduced to ideological binary abstractions. The people who yell loudest that Israel is “settler colonial” haven’t yet given their own homes and plots back to the indigenous peoples in their states. For them land acknowledgment, words without due action, is quite enough. But it is demanded of Israel, with its long regional history (City of David, Solomon, etc) and TINY country, to give back what the ‘virtuous ones’ would never consider returning to the ‘rightful heirs’ in their territory. That was plain as day at UVM’s 2023 graduation. A 30 second land acknowledgment by the university president, dressed in his European medieval robe and floppy scholar’s beret, as all the professors were costumed. No invitation to a local Native American to enact a ritual of life passage. No offer to give the property over to Vermont tribes, who could make good use of housing, pools, gyms, libraries, medical facilities, kitchens, etc etc. It’s what professors and students at UVM insist upon for Israel, but will not act upon the principle themselves. There’s a word for that kind of contradiction. No, not antisemitism (okay, yes it is)…hypocrisy. Yeah, that’s it!