A New Chapter in the Assault on Israel

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

I’m sure you didn’t know that a mere three years after six million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany in the Holocaust, the remnants of our people were themselves guilty of genocide!

That’s because you probably haven’t read some of the recent scholarly literature on the subject.

The Journal of Genocide Research promotes an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the study of mass murder. In its September-December 2010 issue, two academics debate this question: should the word ‘genocide’ be applied to the expulsion and killing of Arabs in Palestine during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence?

Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund distinguished professor of European history and professor of history and professor of German studies at Brown University in Providence. Martin Shaw is a professorial fellow in international relations and human rights at Roehampton University in London.

Both agree that some form of what is now called “ethnic cleansing” did occur in Palestine in 1948. But whereas Bartov is unwilling to regard these events as genocide, Shaw appeals to the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to arrive at a different conclusion.

According to the UN Convention, adopted at the end of 1948, genocide is legally defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Shaw believes that ethnic cleansing, even when it stops short of outright murder, falls within this definition. He also maintains that pre-war Zionism “included the development of an incipiently genocidal mentality towards Arab society.”

In contrast, Bartov argues that to regard ethnic cleansing and communal violence as genocide is to empty the term of historical meaning.

The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was indeed, as everyone knows, accompanied by a mass exodus of Palestinian Arabs. Most fled during the war itself, after neighbouring Arab states invaded and tried to strangle the fledgling country, which was fighting for its very survival.

As is the case in war, many Arabs were killed – as were many Jews. Those Arabs who remained in the new state became the nucleus of today’s large and growing Israeli Arab population, who have full civil and political rights within Israel.

Israel Charny, professor of psychology and family therapy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has also weighed in on the Bartov-Shaw dispute. Charny, who directs the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem and has edited the Encyclopedia of Genocide, rejects Shaw’s thesis. A field of study that had its start as “a civilizational response to the horror of the Holocaust” has been turned against the Jewish state, Charny told the New York Forward newspaper.

He is right. If Shaw’s analysis is accepted, the state that emerged as a refuge for European Holocaust survivors and Jews expelled from Arab countries, is itself a genocidal nation, and what Palestinians call the naqba (catastrophe) can be compared to the Holocaust.

Shaw’s argument sets up a moral equivalence between Nazis and Zionists and, since genocide is the ultimate political crime, provides cover for those who wish to liquidate the “criminal” state of Israel. Shaw’s attack on the Jews is more insidious, and thus more effective, than the denial of the Holocaust by antisemitic crackpots.

An aside: never ignore what at first may appear to be merely the ravings of marginal radicals. Fully four decades ago, left-wing and Communist groups were already referring to Israel as an “apartheid settler state” engaged in “genocide.” Few people paid them any heed. But these ideas have now entered mainstream discourse. Mind you, when Milosevic’s Serbia was accused of genocide during the 1999 Kosovo war, I predicted that a similar fate awaited Israel.

So it’s now come to this: the Jewish state is the product of genocide, genocide perpetrated by Jews. Perhaps this inversion of history was inevitable, though, because it fits into today's zeitgeist. After all, the prevailing ideology of the age informs the type of antisemitism expressed.

Such paradigm shifts are nothing new. In religious periods, Jews were deicides who perversely refused to accept “the true faith,” Christianity; in racist and fascist decades, they were an “inferior” or “demonic race” spreading “Bolshevism”; in Communist countries, they were suspect as “capitalists and Zionists.”

We in the Western world now live in what might be described as the era of “human rights.” The emphasis is on crimes against humanity, especially those committed in the ‘Third World.’ It follows, therefore, that today those who hate the Jews and their state will charge Israel with the most extreme crime against humanity: genocide.

The specific accusations may differ, but the hatred remains the same.