It's 403'd for me. Anyone else?
Here's some of the text of it; it's too long to post.
For me, as a historian, it is important to put the current events in the correct historical context and to diagnose as best we can their deeper causes. A misdiagnosis of such causes, or a denial of them altogether, will only make things worse. It would appear that precisely because of this misdiagnosis or denial, Israel is currently balanced over a precipice, as an increasing number of well-informed commentators are warning (see for instance Thomas Friedman’s
op-ed in the NYT). The potential for a regional, if not world-wide conflict, is growing. Making things worse is Israel’s forced displacement of over a million civilians—the majority of whom are Palestinian refugees of the 1948 Nakba and their descendants—from their homes in the northern part of Gaza to the southern part, even as the IDF is now reducing much of that northern part to rubble. By most accounts it has already killed ten times as many Palestinians, including numerous children (who make up 50% of the overall population there), as those murdered by Hamas. Most recently, displaced Gazans in the eastern part of the southern Strip have been ordered to move to its western part, adding even more to the congestion. This military policy is creating an untenable humanitarian crisis, which will only worsen over time. The population of Gaza has nowhere to go, and its infrastructure is being demolished.
In justifying these actions, Israeli leaders and generals have made terrifying pronouncements. On October 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Gazans would pay a “
huge price” for the attack by Hamas, and that the IDF would turn parts of Gaza’s densely populated urban centers “into rubble.” On Oct. 28,
he added, citing Deuteronomy, “You must remember what Amalek did to you.” As many Israelis know, in revenge for the attack by Amalek, the Bible calls to “kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings.” Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog condemned all Palestinians in Gaza: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.” Israeli Minister of Energy and Infrastructure
Israel Katz similarly
stated: “No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter, until the abductees return home.” Member of Knesset Ariel Kallner wrote on social media on October 7: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ‘48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!” No one in the government denounced that statement. Instead, on November 11, security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter
reiterated: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”
Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant,
stated on October 9, “we are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly,” a statement indicating a dehumanization of people that has genocidal echoes. He later announced that he had “removed every restriction” on Israeli forces, and that “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” On October 10, the head of the Israeli army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Major General Ghassan Alian, addressed the population of Gaza in Arabic,
stating: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” The same day, Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari announced that in the bombing campaign in Gaza, “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” Also on October 10, Major General Giora Eiland
wrote in the mass circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth: “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in,” adding that “Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieving the goal,” and
that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”
In another article in the same newspaper, on November 19, Eiland
wrote: “Israel is not fighting against a terrorist organization but against the state of Gaza.” Hamas, he argued, “managed to mobilize… the support of most of its state’s inhabitants… with full support of its ideology. In this sense, Gaza is very similar to Nazi Germany.” This led him to conclude that “the fighting should be conducted accordingly.” To his mind, “the way to win this war faster and at a lower cost to us necessitates the collapse of the systems on the other side, not the killing of more Hamas fighters. The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not be deterred by that.” Indeed, “severe epidemics in the southern Strip will bring victory closer and diminish the number of IDF casualties.” Eiland insisted that “when senior Israeli officials say to the media ‘it’s either us or them,’ we should clarify who ‘they’ are. ‘They’ are not only the armed Hamas fighters but… all the Gazan population that enthusiastically supported Hamas and cheered the atrocities that occurred on October 7.”
Again, no army spokesperson or politician has denounced these genocidal statements. I could quote many more. When asked by Sky News “What about those Palestinians in hospital who are on life support and babies in incubators whose life support and incubator will have to be turned off because the Israelis have cut the power to Gaza?” former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett shouted back: “Are you seriously… asking me about Palestinian civilians? What’s wrong with you? Have you not seen what happened? We’re fighting Nazis.”
In brief, Israeli rhetoric and actions are preparing the ground for what may well become mass killing, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, followed by annexation and settlement of the territory. In that spirit, the Kohelet Policy Forum, an arch-conservative think-tank with deep roots in the United States, which was closely engaged in the judicial overhaul plans launched by Netanyahu’s government in February 2023, is now
refashioning itself as part of a supposedly
humanitarian effort to “relocate” Palestinian refugees from Gaza to other countries around the world where they will, it suggests, live much better lives, thereby leaving the Gaza Strip to Jewish settlers. In the same spirit, one IDF Captain was
filmed on November 9 on a beach in Gaza proclaiming to young officers: “We returned, we were expelled from here almost 20 years ago [when Israel unilaterally evacuated its settlements in the Gaza Strip]. We started this battle divided and ended it united. We are fighting for the Land of Israel. This is our land! And that is the victory, to return to our lands.”
There are many other members of the government, the Knesset, and the military who would like to see the Palestinian people, as such, disappear from the map and from consciousness. This has not happened yet and can be prevented. The United States is still pushing for a two-state solution. But under the circumstances, it is crucial to keep warning against the potential for genocide before it happens, rather than belatedly condemning it after it has already taken place.
Since the full-scale invasion of Gaza by the IDF, losses among the civilian population have constantly risen. And while the military has initially made faster progress than anticipated, the likelihood of it becoming bogged down in Gaza remains considerable, and Hizballah is using this as an opportunity to intensify its attacks in the north. This may mean that Israel will face not only a military but also a growing economic crisis with hundreds of thousand of men and women in reserve service rather than at their work places, and international support rapidly eroding.
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Yet such a policy course by Israel appears highly unlikely now, especially under the current political leadership, which is just as extreme as it is incompetent. At this point, not least because of the heated rhetoric in Israel, even from quite a few left-wing commentators appalled by the massacre of October 7, it is crucial for moral pressure to be brought to bear on Israeli policymakers and the public to desist from ever more actions that are bound to result in war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide.
In the decades after World War II and the defeat of Nazism and fascism, historians and other intellectuals often berated their predecessors for having lacked the courage to stand up to their governments and popular sentiments and to have failed to warn against what they clearly saw was about to happen. As a historian of the Holocaust, I have called upon the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, to stand in the forefront of those warning against Israeli breaches of human rights and international law, currently being legitimized by Israeli political and military leaders, talking heads on television, and social media. I have urged those who dedicate themselves to researching and commemorating the Holocaust to warn against the dehumanizing rhetoric in Israel directed at the population of Gaza that literally calls for its extinction. I have also called upon them to condemn the escalating violence on the West Bank, perpetrated by incited settlers and IDF troops, which is similarly inclining toward ethnic cleansing under the cover of the war in Gaza. But for now, all we hear from these scholars is silence.
