‘First systematically starved, the population was denied and than than 1,200 were slaughtered like animals in an abattoir... A nation that asks the world not to forget what was done to its people by Hitler, has advocates who believe brutal ethnic cleansing is “regrettable”. How many Palestinian Anne Franks did the Israelis murder, maim or turn mad.’
That passage has it all. Some deep ideological assumptions, hyperbolic phrases and sentiment, references to Nazism, and the like. The problem is that you can read stuff like this almost every day in some quarter or other, whether that be in a student union, at a mosque, or in the Guardian office.
Only Words
The words ‘ethnic cleansing’(see above), like ‘Zionist Nazi state’, ‘Israeli apartheid’, ‘occupation’ and the rest, are not even taken literally by many of those who either overuse - or wrongly use - such terms. That phrase, ‘ethnic cleansing’, does a political job. The job of delegitimising, through demonisation and hyperbole, the very existence of the state of Israel.Robin Shepherd puts it perfectly. (Where he writes ‘racism’ and ‘apartheid’, I will add the words ‘ethnic cleansing’.) Thus:
‘I do not believe that the accusations of racism [or ethnic cleansing] and apartheid in particular as usually designed to be taken seriously in any analytic sense. Their purpose is to raise the emotional temperature, to degrade and delegitimise and also, in the case of the apartheid [or ethnic cleansing] analogy, to build a mass political movement of the kind which made apartheid South Africa a pariah and which ultimately contributed to its destruction.’
Saying that Israel ‘ethnically cleanses’ Arab Palestinians from their homes is not just a simple condemnation of Israel’s behaviour. Surely if Israel does indeed systematically ethnically cleanse the West Bank and Gaza, not to mention Israel itself, then the Israelis, or Jews, would certainly not deserve a state in the first place. As Professor Shalom Lappin puts it:
‘It is not an instrument for criticising the Israeli Government’s policy or an effort to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory beyond its 1967 borders. This movement does not seek a peace between Israelis and Palestinians within the framework of a two-state solution. It is an integral part of a rejectionist programme to dismantle Israel as a country.’
And just as we shouldn’t take the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’, or ‘Nazi Israel’, seriously in the case of Israel, neither should we take seriously some of the ‘narratives’ of the conflict which embed such phrases within them. In other words, ideology, or ‘agendas’, is at the forefront in these cases. Take the supreme anti-Zionist, Ilan Pappe. He has written:
‘I admit that my ideology influences my historical writings, but so what?... Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are?... The agenda comes before the facts.’
It is the case, of course, that only Nazis could carry out any kind of ethnic cleansing, whether on Palestinians Arabs or any other non-white ethnic group. Thus Israel had to be Nazified, as it were, before it can be accused of ethnic cleansing. S. Markovits puts it this way:
‘Nazifying Israel makes it possible to kill three birds with one stone: The first objective achieved is the delegitimation of Israel by associating it with the symbol of evil par excellence. Second, one can attack and humiliate the Jewish people by equating it with the perpetrators of the brutal genocide that nearly succeeded in exterminating the Jews completely. Finally, this malicious analogy between Israel and Nazis frees Europeans of any remorse or shame for their history of a lethal anti-Semitism that lasted a solid millennium.’
Israeli Racism
Ethnic cleansing, of course, implies racism. That is, Israel is killing Arab Muslims because they aren’t Jewish.
Take the case of the Socialist Workers Party supporter and - sometimes - spokesman, Steven Rose, who stated that he didn’t approve of the ‘ethnic assumptions underlying the claims of a Jewish republic’.
Firstly, Israel is not really a Jewish state at all. It was created as a state for Jews; not as a Jewish state. Surely a Jewish state would be come kind of theocracy, thus an equivalent of Iran or the Sudan, or of an Islamic state like Pakistan. Instead, Israel, broadly speaking, is a liberal-capitalist democracy based on a political voting system grounded by the Knesset, the Supreme Court and other open democratic institutions.
Part of the problem of Israel, as it were, is not just that Israeli Jews are deemed racist, and therefore they indulge in ethnic cleansing, but that it is also deemed to be a ‘white nation’ (e.g., Desmond Tutu’s classification). Thus if Israelis are conscious of both their Jewishness, as well as of their whiteness, then ethnic cleansing - sort of - follows naturally. As Manfred Gerstenfeld writes:
‘Humanitarian racists consider - usually without saying so explicitly - that only white people can be fully responsible for their actions; non-whites, such as the Palestinians, cannot (or can but only to a limited extent). Therefore, most misdeeds by non-whites - who by definition are “victims” - are not their fault but those of whites, who can be held accountable.’
This inverted racism also means that leftists, liberals and ‘humanitarian racists’ are programmed, ideologically, not to recognise or accept any black or Arab racism. (Not even the Arab racism towards blacks, which is very widespread and entrenched.) Thus even though there have been many cases of ethnic cleansing in the Arab and Muslim worlds, such as in the Sudan and in Palestine itself, such examples are never seen as racist. Thus they can’t be seen as examples of ethnic cleansing either. That means that the cards are stacked against ‘white’ Israelis from the very start - even though most Israelis aren’t actually white!
Other things follow from Leftist racism, or from this deeply patronising attitude towards Palestinian Arabs. If Palestinian Arabs aren’t responsible for what they do, whether their rocket attacks or suicide bombs (especially their human shields), then this is bound to - and does - result in the expectation that Israel, the white state, should behave according to much higher standards than for their non-white Arab neighbours.
This also goes along with parallel case of seeing Israel, even if you're not a Zionist or Jew, as ‘a light unto nations’. Of course anti-Zionists and anti-Semites would never explicit admit to thinking in these terms. (Indeed they would no doubt deny such a claim outright.)
Finally, if the reader wants to find real ethnic cleansing, or at least its encouragement and rationalisation, try consulting Hamas’s literature. In the Hamas charter, this extreme Islamist group encourages Palestinians, and others, to ‘kill every Jew wherever you can find him’. And note well that this genocidal imperative is just an echo of what can also be found in various parts of the Koran.
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