Israeli 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,” Herzog said.
In different ways, the sentiment that the Palestinians are collectively responsible for the actions of Hamas in the 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, Jewish Chronicle editor Jake Wallis Simons took a different tack in generalizing 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.
Israeli MP Ariel Kallner, 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.
It remains to be seen if that is Israel’s plan after it ordered more than 1 million people to get out of northern Gaza as the military prepares further attacks in addition to the bombing and shelling that has already killed 2,700 Palestinians, including 700 children.
However, the dehumanizing language spilling out of Israel and from some of its supporters abroad is of a type heard at other times and places that helped create a climate in which terrible crimes take place.
The shocking ways in which Hamas butchered Israeli civilians, including small children, and then celebrated the slaughter reminded me of reporting the Rwandan genocide three decades ago. Hutu militiamen reveled in the killing of about 800,000 Tutsis, including neighbors and children, in unimaginably horrific ways. Even years later in prison, some were unrepentant.
The aftermath of the Hamas attack is also reminiscent of the 1994 genocide in language used not just about the murderers, but Palestinians in general, although not for the first time.
Those who led and carried out the Rwandan genocide often cast it in the language of Tutsis as outsiders and interlopers, and the killing as an act of self-defense. If we do not do it to them, they will do it to us.
Tutsis were debased as “cockroaches,” a word also invoked by a then-chief of the Israeli defense forces to describe Palestinians. Other Israeli political, military and religious leaders have at different times described Palestinians as “a cancer,” “vermin” and called for them to be “annihilated.” They are frequently portrayed as backward and a burden on the country.
It is a long way from Rwanda and any comparisons will seem outrageous to some. However, as those pressing for news organizations to call Hamas terrorists implicitly acknowledge, language matters.
David Mizrahy Verthaim, a prominent Israeli journalist and radio presenter, 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.
Others are looser in their language.
When Israeli Minister of Defense 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.”
Perhaps Gallant only meant Hamas, but he did not say so and that left a lot of leeway for those who would go further.
In an echo of the US after Sept. 11, 2001, the Israel Defense Forces posted on X: “You either stand with Israel or you stand with terrorism.”
US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X: “Anyone that is pro-Palestinian is pro-Hamas.”
That was a sentiment that led the US into wars most Americans now regret, but it was a mentality that also led US soldiers to commit war crimes.
Some of these statements might be no more than lashing out in the heat of the moment as a natural reaction to a shocking atrocity. There is certainly some of that. However, in Israel, they fall on ground made fertile by decades of discourse dehumanizing of Palestinians.
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, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin 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 schoolchildren 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. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer,” the study said.
In 2002 during the second intifada, the Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth published a letter by Israeli children titled: “Dear soldiers, please kill a lot of Arabs.” The paper said dozens of such letters were sent by schoolchildren.
Some of those same children are now enforcing the occupation in the West Bank where Israeli settlers have largely had a free hand to drive Palestinians off their land and out of their villages, and sometimes to beat and kill. And some will be headed into Gaza.
Chris McGreal writes for Guardian US and is a former Guardian correspondent in Washington, Johannesburg and Jerusalem.
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