It would be appropriate, we believe at this point, to reflect carefully on the meaning of the words. Literal and intrinsic meaning. The word “genocide” has now entered common parlance to describe what is happening in Gaza, and the genocidal force, that is, the one carrying out the genocide, is precisely Israel. An certainly evocative use of the termuseful perhaps to move the spirits of those who attend, but decidedly misleading.
During the Yugoslav wars the Serbian army was guilty of atrocious crimes against the religious minority of Bosniaksnamely the Bosnian Muslims, massacred in the infamous Srebrenica massacre. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge used genocidal methods, summarily killing the Cambodian bourgeois population; one recalls men killed simply because they wore glasses, a hated symbol of the bourgeois class. Now, after such a list of atrocities, to consider the events in Gaza as part of an ongoing genocide is decidedly hyperbolic, if not indecent. Palestinians are not killed because they are Palestinians; Israel does not seem to have any particular ethnic hatred towards its inconvenient neighbor (1.5 million Palestinians live in Israel). The population of Gaza is the victim of a war started by those who controlled that city, namely Hamas.
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