Dehumanization and Genocide

Israel did not commit genocide and is not committing genocide in Gaza.

There is no government policy to exterminate the Palestinian people, though a few cabinet ministers have referred to “Amalek,” the tribe or people the Bible marked for destruction, but there is no government policy, no plan, no intention, no activation of a plan to kill the Palestinian people. Genocide is a top-down affair, a national project, decided by a government or ruling party. Small massacres in wartime are routinely bottom-up affairs, with sergeants, lieutenants, captains ordering killings, as in Mai Lai in Vietnam. But genocides are organized, national projects.

Prosecutors in the Hague or historians like Brown University’s Omer Bartov may assert “genocide” in Gaza – but Bartov and his ilk should know better. We – and he - know what genocide looks like, what it looked like in the Holocaust, what it looked like when the Turks killed off the Armenians during World War One and the Asia Minor Greeks after that war. Millions died, systematically, carried out in line with a policy and plan.

Yes, there have been, probably many, Israeli war crimes during the 19 months of the Gaza War – but there has been no effort to wipe out the Palestinians – and genocide means the murder of a people or religious or ethnic group or the effort to do so. This has not happened in Gaza and this is not what is happening – though tens of thousands of Gazans have been killed over the past 19 months, many of them non-combatants.

But genocide may yet occur, as this war between Israel and the Islamists who assailed it, starting on October 7, 2023, continues, or at some future date, because Israelis, psychologically, are in a loop that could end in mass murder. Hearts and minds, certainly among a good portion of the Israeli public, are being conditioned to genocide. Many of Israel’s growingly religious public reference “Amalek” – and many speak, still in whispers, of uprooting “the Palestinians” from Palestine, and not just from the Gaza Strip.

President Trump was actually the first national leader to have publicly advocated the removal of the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, and, since then, Prime Minister Netanyahu has endorsed the idea, albeit speaking of “voluntary transfer” rather than (coerced) expulsion. But, of course, in the circumstances prevailing in the Gaza Strip, with most of the population living in ramshackle tent cities, with no infrastructure and other constant threat of starvation and bombing, there is no such creature as “voluntary” transfer; evacuation and flight would be compelled and coerced.

And, Gaza aside, and without such public pronouncements, there is ethnic cleansing happening today in parts of the West Bank, engineered by settlers and in various ways backed by the state, in the Jordan Valley, in the southern Hebron Hills, etc.

Occasionally, genocide has been preceded by ethnic cleansing or transfer. It may be worth recalling that the Nazis, during 1939-1940, talked of expelling and exiling the Jews – forced organized emigration - from Europe, to Madacascar or elsewhere, before expulsion was rendered impossible and the doors to emigration from Europe slammed shut and the Nazis switched to the “final solution” via mass murder.

In the past months, various religious Israeli leaders have periodically spoken of the need or desirability of flattening the West Bank towns of Nablus and Jenin and of specific West Bank villages following Palestinian terrorist attacks on Jews, inside Israel or in the West Bank, or to flatten or erase Gaza. And it’s not only settler or right-wing politicians. Indeed, two months ago, when two women from the West Bank settlement of Kedumim were murdered by Palestinian terrorists, speakers at their funeral called for flattening nearby Palestinian towns.

Over the decades, Israelis have been conditioned not to see Palestinians as human beings. Palestinian terrorism, the reality of occupying another people, in which occupiers routinely treat the occupied as less than human, and the Hamas atrocities on 7 October – mass murder, mas rape, killing children in front of parents and parents in front of children - and, most recently, the appearance of Israeli hostages returning home, emaciated, psychologically damaged, with stories of maltreatment and torture at the hands of their captors, all have fed into dehumanizing the Palestinians, into blanket demonization of the “other” in Israeli minds. The fact that the Hamas appears, in most opinion polls, in Gaza and the West Bank, to still enjoy popular support no doubt reinforces the Israelis’ view of “the Palestinians.”

A few years ago, an Israeli cabinet minister, Rafael Eitan (a former IDF chief of the general staff) - talked of the occupied Palestinians as “cockroaches in a bottle”. He was reprimanded at the time by many Israelis. Such talk today passes almost without notice or dissent.

Indeed, the Israeli public in the course of the current war, framed as existential, has become inured to Palestinian suffering and mass death. According to Hamas Health Ministry figures, which are endorsed by Western agencies, some 30,000 Gazan civilians, most of them women and children, have so far been killed in Gaza, alongside some 20,000 Hamas fighters. Talk of starving out the Palestinians to achieve Hammas’s defeat is now common coin (though food trucks are now going into the Strip again). But for some two months, starting in mid-March, the Israeli government stopped deliveries to the Gaza Strip; no food trucks, water or electricity entered the Strip. Some Israelis protested, but not many. And the violence and harassment of Palestinians in the West Bank – where there is no war and, frankly, little terrorism (largely because the IDF has blanketed the territory with troops) – has continued without interruption for many months and few Israelis seem bothered.

The ongoing process of dehumanization is apparent and evident from IDF soldiers’ testimonies, published in social media, in the daily Haaretz, and occasionally on TV channels. Similarly, the brutality by soldiers, police and prison wardens toward Palestinian prisoners in jails and detention centers – where beatings, and the occasional torture, of detainees – has been common, especially during this war’s first months, has elicited only occasional criticism, with almost no interference by Israel’s judiciary. The Israeli media has been largely silent and has devoted little space to these matters. And the Israeli government is busy punishing Haaretz (no government advertising) and trying to shut down the critical TV channels – 11, 12 and 13.

Without doubt, this process of dehumanization of the Arab derives in part from the parallel process of dehumanization of Jews in the minds of our Palestinian neighbors.

The foundation for this dehumanization of the Jews was laid in the early days of Islam, in the stories in the Quran of the early encounter between Muhammad and his followers and the Jewish tribes of Hijaz in the Arabian Peninsula. In the Quran, the Jews are depicted as a base people, and are called “murderers of prophets” (the book alleges that the Jews tried repeatedly to poison Muhammad and, in the background, is the shadow of the killing of the “prophet” Jesus) and are described as descendants of “pigs and apes”. In that 7^th century encounter during the rise of Islam, the Jewish tribes were eventually wiped out by Muhammad and his followers, killed or expelled, raped, enslaved and murdered. So the Quran tells us – the Quran on whose Suras Muslims are brought up.

These postulates are echoed in the Hamas’s founding Charter from 1988, which enjoins Muslims to kill fleeing Jews hiding behind trees and rocks. Indeed, the rocks and trees actively call on the believers to come and kill the Jews hiding behind them.

The thinking in the Hamas Charter vis-a-vis the Jews is frankly antisemitic and genocidal. The Jews are the devil – the instigators of World War I and World War II, responsible for the French and Russian revolutions, and (!?) the establishment of the United Nations. The negative depiction of the UN is of course related to the 1947 UN General Assembly vote to partition Palestine and establish a Jewish state in the partitioned territory. Of course, in current circumstances this charge is ironic, given the UN General Assembly’s routine support of the Palestinians over the decades and the current Palestinian attachment to that partition resolution from 1947 as endorsing and legitimizing Palestinian statehood.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, much of the Arab media, in Palestine and outside the country, glorified the Hamas killers (while usually denying or ignoring the atrocities that accompanied the mass assault that day on southern Israel). The hatred that that massacre of 1100 or so Israelis expressed resulted in part from the Quran’s depiction of the Jews and from the Hamas charter. For two generations the young in the Gaza Strip, from kindergarten onward, have been educated by the Hamas-run education system along these lines.

But the Gaza Palestinian hatred of the Jews is not simply a child of ideology. History and actions by the Jews also played a major part. The main milestones, prominent in every Palestinian mind, in Gaza as in the West Bank, is the 1948 uprooting from their homes of some two-thirds of the Palestinians and their refugeedom and, since 1967, the oppression suffered by the West Bank and Gaza Arabs under the boot of Israeli occupation, never really enlightened, frequently brutal and always humiliating. Over the decades literally hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have done time in Israeli jails, often a long time. In Gaza the Arabs have lived under a type of siege, mainly by Israel but also by the Egyptians, for close on two decades, unable to travel in or out., and being periodically bombed and assailed from the air and ground in response to the terrorists’ rocketing of Israel. The mass killing and displacement of the Gaza Palestinians these past 19 months have only increased the dehumanization of the Israeli Jew in Arab eyes and no doubt have increased the willingness to massacre Jews again and again. To the point, I would venture, backed by Islamic holy scripture, of genocide.

For the Jews, the process of dehumanizing the Palestinian Arab is also of historical duration. It, too, starts with holy scripture, the Bible, the Palestinians being framed as but the latest in the long history of persecutors and oppressors and murderers of the Jews down the ages. Indeed, in Israel, the Hamas fighters are almost routinely referred to as “Nazis.” The hostility of the inhabitants of Canaan toward the Hebrew conquest and settlement of the land 3,000 or so years ago, with “Amalek” being the catchword, was followed, many centuries later, by the mass murder of Jews by other “goyim,” as well as by Arabs, in the decades after the Romans crushed the Jewish revolts in the first and second centuries, culminating in the Holocaust. Young Israelis are brought up on this in the Israeli school system. One often hears of the Christion slaughter of Jews during the past two millennia. But Muslims, too, periodically unleashed pogroms against their Jewish neighbors in the Arab lands since the Middle Ages. Throughout, down to the 20^th century, the Jews in the Arab lands suffered permanently from humiliation and, quite often, persecution. This history, down to the Farhoud in Baghdad in 1941, when hundreds were murdered and many hundreds raped, and the pogroms in Aden, Aleppo, Libya, Bahrain and Morocco in 1947-1948, certainly figures prominently in the minds of Israelis of Middle Eastern origin,

Since the founding of Israel during the 1948 War that was dotted by Arab massacres of Jews (as well as by Jewish massacres of Arabs, of course), the Jewish state and its citizens have been subjected to almost continuous Palestinian terrorism. This crested with October 7, priming Israel’s Jews for genocide. And the Palestinians can be counted on in the coming months and years to provide fresh atrocities against Israel’s Jews that will provide a possible spark for a genocidal reaction – such as a massacre of Israeli West Bank settlers, successful rocket attacks on Israeli population centers, the downing of an Israeli passenger aircraft, or the poisoning of Israel’s water resources.

Any of these could trigger a genocidal response by a people conditioned to regard the Palestinians as less than human. But among Jews there is a significant factor inhibiting the commission of genocide: The Holocaust. While etching deep in the Jewish psyche suspicions of genocidal intent by goyim and a desire to take revenge against the goyim (and in the 1948 War memories of the Holocaust played a part in war crimes against Palestinians), the Holocaust has also implanted among Jews an instinctive resistance to themselves going down a similar path. Nonetheless, if no compromise is reached in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which can only be based on a two-state solution, mass murder may follow. Inevitably, it will be carried out by the stronger side.