Ilan Pappe: "There is nothing we here in Israel can do against" the genocide in Gaza Added by David Hirsh on September 06, 2006 01:42:20 PM. Ilan Pappe: Ilan Pappe, the anti-Zionist professor at Haifa University who has called on the world to exclude his colleagues there from its campuses, journals and libraries, has written a piece entitled "Genocide in Gaza" which is currently doing the rounds of the anti-Zionist websites. Sue Blackwell is pushing it around, as well, incidentally, as grandiose re-statement of every anti-Zionist idiocy.
1 To use the term "genocide" to refer to the current violence that Israel is perpetratinmg in Gaza is counter-productive. Since it isn't a genocide, Olmert can easily pronounce himself "not guilty" of Pappe's absurd charge. But Israel is responsible for the routine and often life-ending violence that it carries out in Gaza - just as those who try to murder Israelis are responsible for their own actions too. The charge of genocide gives a free pass to the Israeli government. It doesn't have to respond to nonsense. Serious, measured, reality-based criticism is much harder for it to ignore.
2 There is no genocide in Gaza so why do the anti-Zionists continue to assert that there is? it is because they want to demonize Israel. They do not want to criticize Israel (and Palestine) for their actions; rather they want to create a fiction of an evil Israel and a good Palestine. They want to simplify: Israel is the "oppressor" Palestine is the "oppressed". But the situation is not simple. And Israel is not demonic. Some of them think that it helps to invent a genocide here or there in order to help things along a little.
3 Those who falsely charge Israel with genocide are indulging in a particular kind of demonizaiton. Obviously, genocide has a special relevance to Israel, which was created only thirty six months after the ovens at Auschwitz went cold. Those who now claim there is a genocide in Gaza do so because they believe that Israel instrumentally uses the Holocaust to justify its violence. The counter charge, that Israel is like the Nazis, is intended to neutralise this alleged instrumentalization of the Holocaust. In order to neutralise the Holocaust in this way, it is necessary to normalize it and to lie about it. So anti-Zionists often push a number of myths: (a) what happens in Gaza today is, in some sense, the same as the Holocaust; (b) "Zionists" collaborated with the Holocaust and so were partly responsible for it; (c) "Zionism" is ideologically akin to nazism.
4 If there is indeed a genocide happening in Gaza at the moment then there must also be a global "Zionist" conspiracy to cover it up. Blood libels have always required conspiracy theory. If Jews kill children in order to drink their blood, then Jews also conspire to hide the crime. If "Zionists" are running a campaign to murder the residents of Gaza, then they must also be conspiring to cover it up. And it must be a very powerful conspiracy, encompassing the global media and governments - to allow Israel to get away with such a huge crime.
Pappe finishes his piece with the mother of all disproportionalities:
Nothing apart from pressure in the form of sanctions, boycott and divestment will stop the murdering of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip.
The only way to stop the genocide that is going on in Gaza is... well... don't referee a journal article by someone at an Israeli university. Disinvest in Caterpillar.
Pappe has given up on the project of building an Israeli peace movement. "There is nothing we here in Israel can do against it." Israel is comitting genocide and there is nothing that Israelis can do about it? Why not? There is a free press, freedom of association, political freedom. One would have thought that in Israel there would be a number of people who might be rather angry if they found out that a genocide was being perpetrated by their government. But no. For Pappe Israeli Jews are forever and absolutely corrupted.
Pappe finishes by exorting the world "not to allow the genocide of Gaza to continue". He precedes this exhortation with the words "in the name of the holocaust memory". Pappe should not give up on his colleagues at Haifa University, declaring that they are necessarily lost to the struggle for peace. Rather, he should find a way to write about Israeli violence in Gaza that his colleagues would not find dishonest, offensive and dangerous. But he's not writing for Israelis: he has given up on building a peace movement.
David Hirsh
John Strawson writes the following:
The Israeli political military policy towards Gaza is entirely wrong and illegal. Israel is under an obligation to withdraw from Gaza and unconditionally from all the occupied territory. Gaza's territory, coast and airspace should be respected and the military attacks should cease. There must free movement between Gaza and the West Bank via the agreed safe-passage and free movement between Gaza and Egypt. The seaport needs to be built and the international airport re-built. However, Ilan Pape, John Pliger and others who reach so easily for the term genocide are wrong, diversionary and have no knowledge of the law.
The Genocide Convention 1948 defines Genocide as:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious groups such as: (a) killing members of the Group (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to the group (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction in whole or in part (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (e)forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (article II) This definition is repeated in the Statute of the International Criminal Court 1998, article 6.
Th essential test of genocide is "intent" indiscriminate mass killing without intent is not genocide. If you read the detailed report on Darfur prepared by a team of international legal experts headed by Antonio Cassese (former President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) to the UN Security Council in January 2005 it concludes that there were not then grounds for prosecuting Sudanese officials with genocide due to the lack of "intent" see here.
The use of the term of genocide in Gaza is inappropriate but once used conveys imagery of the analogy between Israel and the Nazis and so its intention is to delegitimize Israel rather than to serve the cause of justice for the Palestinians. At the present time we need not prosecutions but negotiations. The Israelis should cease the trials they have started and release all Palestinian officials.
Activists for peace should stop tryng to be bad do-it-yourself lawyers.
John Strawson
Richard Kuper, new conservative, rebukes Strawson for being too radical:
"I think it is absurd to suggest that Ilan Pappe, for example, is not interested in serving the cause of justice for the Palestinians. If John wants to argue that Ilan is doing it badly, that's fine by me. We can hear the argument and agree or disagree (I happen to agree with John on this one)."
"John is happy to stress how deliberate intention is part of the legal definition of genocide but then, with no evidence whatsoever, he is equally happy to accuse those who use the term genocide in the Gazan context of doing so with the intention (no doubt deliberate!) of delegitimising Israel."
"It would be better to simply argue the case against using the term and not to impute malevolent motive."