Sticks and stones…….but Words Encourage Killing

I know I have been uncharacteristically silent recently.  There are a few reasons.  First, I was worried that I was perhaps overdoing the commentary on recent Middle East events and their impact on the United States.  Now I am thinking, “fuck it,” this is important and I cannot be silent.  Second, I have spent the last week wrestling with a couple of institutions important to me – trying to get them to understand that condemning Hamas’ atrocities (war crimes) is different from taking sides.  Third, I attended the March for Israel in Washington, D.C. yesterday where almost 300,000 people came together to support Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself and to reaffirm our dedication to fight antisemitism.  Finally, it has come to my attention that there is a huge language problem – many of the words and expressions being bandied about as denunciations of Israel, with bleed over (pun intended) to Jews in general, are uttered either without knowledge or purposefully used as victim blaming.  Four examples (word definitions from dictionary.com):

Genocide –  noun – the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group.  Israel is frequently accused of genocide by the terrorist groups and their supporters.  But here is the problem:  there is no evidence whatsoever of Israel committing or wanting to commit genocide.  Quite the reverse actually – Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and Iran (among others) have frequently called for the wholesale slaughter of Jews.  It is part of the Hamas charter.  It appears in the Koran as various radical Islamic scholars cite it as a requirement of Islam, which the Palestinian Authority has reiterated and republished.  The anti-Israel/Jew haters have weaponized the term to use against Israel.  But it is a lie.  The terrorists and radical Islamists call for genocide against Jews.   Never have the Israelis called for the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians.

Ethnic Cleansing – noun – the elimination of an unwanted ethnic group or groups from a society, as by genocide or forced emigration.  Another term used to demonize Israel.  And again, not only is there no evidence of this, but there is proof of the opposite.  20% of the Israeli population are Palestinians – or, rather, would be called so if they did not live in Israel.  They are full citizens of Israel with voting rights and equal protection under the law.  That is not ethnic cleansing.  It isn’t apartheid either.  And yes, currently Israel has warned civilians in Gaza to leave pending military activity, there is no concerted effort to “eliminate” the Palestinian or permanently relocate them.  Again, this is a lie, the words are being weaponized.

Interestingly, it is the Palestinians and the Arabs that have practiced real ethnic cleansing.  Hamas and the Palestinian Authority continue to insist that their country be “Jew-free.’’  Displacement of some people during a war – as distasteful as that may be, is vastly different than what happed to Jews of the Middle East.  When East Jerusalem came under Arab/Palestinian control, all the Jews were expelled.  In Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, (countries which, by the way, were basically created by the French and English and given to the Saud family in many cases) who, along with Egypt displaced some 800,000 Mizrahi Jews from their countries — during peace time.  Let me ask, who practices real ethnic cleansing?

Settler-Colonizer – epithet (my definition) – the white oppressors who stole the land from the Palestinians.  A recent article in The Atlantic by Simon Sebag Montefiore does a better job than I can explaining the fallacy of describing Israel this way.  You need an Atlantic subscription to read the whole article (worth reading) so I will provide an excerpt here.

“I always wondered about the leftist intellectuals who supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace activists who excused Hitler.  Today’s Hamas apologists and atrocity-deniers, with their robotic denunciations of “settler-colonialism,” belong to the same tradition but worse: They have abundant evidence of the slaughter of old people, teenagers, and children, but unlike those fools of the 1930s, who slowly came around to the truth, they have not changed their views an iota.

The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity.  It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors.  (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century.  But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience.  The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism.  Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged;” although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

This leftist analysis…..has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians.  When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.”

“From the River to the Sea” – euphemism –  Eliminate Israel, wipe it off the map, and either kill all the Jews or send them someplace else.

This expression is not a statement on statehood, but rather, a statement on erasing a state.  The River is the Jordan River, and the Sea is the Mediterranean.  In case you haven’t looked at a map recently, that includes the entire State of Israel.  The expression has at its root a falsehood about history.  That falsehood is that where Israel now exists is where “Palestine” belongs.  Not true and historically inaccurate.  Palestine is from Roman times, when Jews populated both Israel and Judea, including the holy city of Jerusalem – well before Islam came about, and before Christianity arose.  Since that time, the land has continued to be fought over by the non-Jewish tribes that were ultimately conquered and ruled by the Ottoman Empire from the 14^th century until 1918 when, as German’s partners in WWI, they surrendered to the Allies.  The partition of the Ottoman empire was completed by 1922,  In that process, the English and the French divvied up the middle-east creating the Kingdom of Iraq (where they picked the King), the states that became Saudi Arabia (given to the Saud family)  Yemen, Jordan, and the Emirates, and allowing the British to hold protectorates in “Palestine”, Egypt (where they picked the King) and Sudan.  The French created Lebanon and Syria.  From the Mandatory Protectorate of Palestine, two states were created by the British, what became Israel, and what could have become the State of Palestine had the Arabs not gone to war to prevent a State of Israel.

Thus, the Palestinians have no more right to Israel than they do to Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan or any other of the states that were created following WWI and then WWII where the Arabs joined the Axis powers.  These countries, like most of the countries in Africa were divvied up by the colonizers – with little regard for history, traditional tribal boundaries, or the total catastrophe that those created borders would present in the future.  Both the Jews and the Palestinians can claim to be Indigenous.

Misusing language to purposely avoid the underlying reality is weaponizing words and expressions.  In short, “from the river to the sea” is, for those with no sense of history, a lie.  For those who know the history, it is code for a jihad against the Jews.

Those that understand the code laugh at the “useful idiots” – like the Jew chanting “from the river to the sea” who adopt that language.  It is not unlike the Nazi’s “Final Solution” – it is somewhat innocuous, a simple expression of a desire for change.  But what it hides is a monstrous desire and excuse for evil.

Most Jews outside of Israel know what the code means.  All Jews in Israel know what it means.  It means there can be no peace with while Hamas exists – and unfortunately the same is true with Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and the Palestinian Authority leadership.  Peace with Palestinians is what must happen but cannot without a wholesale change in who leads them and those who support that leadership. 

I believe those who understand the code and remain supporters of Hamas are also supportive of Hamas’ true aims of Hamas.  With that they, and their ilk, are irredeemable.  For the sake of my own mental health, I cling to the idea that there is some glimmer of hope that the “useful idiots” can be educated.  But I am not holding my breath.