Israeli officials were caught in a revealing lie late last month as the country celebrated the Jewish New Year. Shortly after declaring the most popular boy\u2019s name in Israel to be \u201cYosef\u201d, the interior ministry was forced to concede that the top slot was actually filled by \u201cMohammed\u201d.<\/p>\n
That small deceit coincided with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas\u2019s speech at the United Nations. He outraged Israelis by referring to Israel\u2019s slaughter of more than 2,100 Palestinians \u2013 most of them civilians \u2013 in Gaza over the summer as \u201cgenocide\u201d.<\/p>\n
Both incidents served as a reminder of the tremendous power of a single word.<\/p>\n
Most Israelis are barely able to contemplate the possibility that their Jewish state could be producing more Mohammeds than Moshes. At the same time, and paradoxically, Israel can point to the sheer number of \u201cMohammeds\u201d to demonstrate that at worst it is eradicating the visibility of a Muslim name, certainly not its bearers.<\/p>\n
As distressing as it is, hundreds of dead in Gaza is far from the industrial-scale murder of the Nazi Holocaust.<\/p>\n
But the idea that Israel is committing genocide may not be quite as hyperbolic as is assumed. Last month a \u201cjury\u201d featuring international law experts at a people\u2019s court, known as the Russell Tribunal, into Israel\u2019s recent attack on Gaza concluded that Israel was guilty of \u201cincitement to genocide\u201d. The panel argued that Israel\u2019s long-term collective punishment of Palestinians was designed to \u201cinflict conditions of life calculated to bring about the incremental destruction of the Palestinians as a group\u201d.<\/p>\n
The tribunal\u2019s language intentionally echoed that of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and lawyer who after fleeing Nazi Europe succeeded in introducing the term \u201cgenocide\u201d into international law.<\/p>\n
Lemkin and the UN convention\u2019s drafters understood that genocide did not require death camps; it could also be achieved gradually through intentional and systematic abuse and neglect. Their definition raises troubling questions about Israel\u2019s treatment of Gaza, aside from military attacks. Does, for example, forcing the enclave\u2019s two million inhabitants to depend on acquifers polluted with seawater constitute genocide?<\/p>\n
The real problem with Mr Abbas\u2019s use of the term \u2013 given that it conflicts with popular notions of genocide \u2013 is that it made him an easy target for critics. Israel\u2019s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accused the Palestinian leader of \u201cincitement\u201d. The Israeli left, meanwhile, decried his wild and unhelpful exaggeration.<\/p>\n
But the critics themselves have contributed more heat than light.<\/p>\n
Not only do experts like Richard Falk and John Dugard view Israel\u2019s actions in genocide-like terms, but notable Israeli scholars have done so too. The late Baruch Kimmerling invented a word, \u201cpoliticide\u201d, to convey more safely the idea of an Israeli genocide against Palestinians.<\/p>\n
Israel has nonetheless successfully ring-fenced itself from the critical lexicon applied to comparable situations around the globe.<\/p>\n
In conflicts where a mass expulsion of an ethnic or national group occurs, it is rightly identified as ethnic cleansing. In Israel\u2019s case, however, respectable historians still equivocate over the events of 1948, even though more than 80 per cent of Palestinians were forced out by Israel as it established a Jewish state on their homeland.<\/p>\n
Similarly with \u201capartheid\u201d. For decades anyone who used the word about Israel was dismissed as an extremist or anti-Semite. Only in the last few years \u2013 and chiefly because of former US president Jimmy Carter \u2013 has the word gained a tentative foothold.<\/p>\n
Even then, its main use is as a warning rather than a description of Israel\u2019s behaviour: diehard adherents of two states aver that Israel is in danger of becoming an apartheid state at some indefinable moment if it does not separate from the Palestinians.<\/p>\n
Instead, we are told to suffice with the label \u201coccupation\u201d. But that implies a temporary state of affairs, a transition before normality is restored \u2013 precisely the opposite of what is happening in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, where the occupation is entrenching, morphing and metastasising.<\/p>\n
Those guarding the critical lexicon strip us of a terminology to convey the appalling reality faced by Palestinians, not just as individuals but as a national group. In truth, Israel\u2019s strategy incorporates variants of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide.<\/p>\n
Observers, including the European Union, concede that Israel continues with incremental ethnic cleansing \u2013 though they prefer the more obscure \u201cforcible transfer\u201d \u2013 of Palestinians from so-called Area C, nearly two-thirds of the West Bank.<\/p>\n
Israel has mastered, too, a sophisticated apartheid \u2013 partly veiled by its avoidance of the more visual aspects of segregation associated with South Africa \u2013 that grabs resources, just like its famous cousin, for one ethnic-national group, Jews, at the expense of another, Palestinians.<\/p>\n
But unlike South African apartheid, whose fixed legal and institutional systems of separation gradually became torpid and unwieldy, Israel\u2019s remains dynamic and responsive. Few observers know, for example, that almost all residential land in Israel is off-limits to Palestinian citizens, enforced through vetting committees recently given sanction by the Israeli courts.<\/p>\n
And what to make of a plan just disclosed by the Israeli media indicating that Mr Netanyahu and his allies have been secretly plotting to force many Palestinians into Sinai, with the US arm-twisting the Egyptians into agreement? If true, the bombing campaigns of the past six years may be better understood as softening-up operations before a mass expulsion from Gaza.<\/p>\n
Such a policy would certainly satisfy Lemkin\u2019s definition of genocide.<\/p>\n
One day doubtless, a historian will coin a word to describe Israel\u2019s unique strategy of incrementally destroying the Palestinian people. Sadly, by then it may be too late to help the Palestinians.<\/p>\n
___________________________<\/p>\n
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. He is the author of: <\/em>Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006); <\/em>Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008); and <\/em>Disappearing Palestine: Israel\u2019s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011 he was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize<\/a> for Journalism.<\/em> The same year, Project Censored<\/a> voted one of Jonathan\u2019s reports, \u201cIsrael brings Gaza entry restrictions to West Bank\u201d, the ninth most important story censored in 2009-10.<\/em><\/p>\n