Language of genocide and "irrational hatred" from prominent Israelis:
Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, set the tone as he spoke about how far to assign guilt for the worst single atrocity against Jews in his country’s history.
“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime,” said Herzog.
In different ways, the sentiment that the Palestinians are collectively responsible for the actions of Hamas in killing of about 1,300 Israelis and abduction of 199 – and therefore deserve what is coming to them – has been echoed far beyond Israel’s borders.
In the US, Senator Lindsey Graham called for the wholesale destruction of Gaza.
“We are in a religious war here. I’m with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place,” he told Fox News.
In the UK, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Jake Wallis Simons, took a different tack in generalising guilt by writing that “much of Muslim culture is in the grip of a death cult that sacralises bloodshed” before deleting his tweet after a backlash.
Ariel Kallner, a member of the Israeli parliament for Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, had the answer. He demanded a repeat of the mass expulsion of Arabs in 1948 known to Palestinians as the Nakba or Catastrophe.
“Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948,” he said.
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When Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip with “no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed”, he said: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
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A prominent Israeli journalist and radio presenter, David Mizrahy Verthaim, has called for wholesale bloodletting. “We need a disproportionate response … If all the captives are not returned immediately, turn the strip into a slaughterhouse. If a hair falls from their head - execute security prisoners. Violate any norm, on the way to victory,” he wrote on X.
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For years, Israeli leaders have advocated ethnic cleansing, euphemistically called “transfer”, with a discourse that portrays Palestinians as a fake people with no history that matters. In 1989, Netanyahu lamented that Israel missed the opportunity presented by global attention on China’s repression of pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen square “to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the (occupied) territories”.
Opinion polls show that significant numbers of Israelis view Arabs as “dirty”, “primitive”, and as not valuing human life. Generations of Israeli school children have been imbued with the idea that Arabs are interlopers and merely tolerated through the beneficence of Israel.
A 2003 study of Israeli textbooks by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem showed Arabs are principally depicted “with a camel, in an Ali Baba dress”.
“They describe Arabs as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t want to develop. The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer,” the study said.
Sources:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -genocidal and
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023 ... -war-hamas
