WHY JEW-BASHERS WORK SO HARD TO STICK ISRAEL WITH THE CHARGE OF GENOCIDE
The word and the notion of "genocide" were created by academic law expert Rafael Lemkin, a Jew, under the impact of the Nazi attempted extermination of Jews. Lemkin, who was originally from Lviv in what is now Ukraine, did not mean the term to apply only to his people, and in fact used it for other similar acts of national, ethnic or religious extermination, such as the Holodmor. The story is told in a magnificent book by Philippe Sand, EAST WEST STREET, which I recommend. Nonetheless, this concept, that haunts the Western imagination from the Californian valleys where red men once lived, to the killing fields of Cambodia and the green hills of Ireland, was brought into life by a Jew reacting to the slaughter of Jews.
You can therefore understand the desperate subconscious drive of Jew-haters and Jew-bashers to find a way to stick the charge of genocide to Jews. And even its popularity. In any rational sense, it simply does not fit the facts: far from being destroyed in their millions, Palestinians are growing into millions, each year that they live under Israeli occupation. This is simply a fact, and it makes nonsense of the charge of genocide. And let us notice that if the Israelis ever wanted to mass murder the Palestinians, they could do it easily, and nobody could stop them. Millions of Palestinians could be carpet-bombed into oblivion, and the rest simply forced out of the land to starve in Jordan or Egypt. They could have done all of those things since 1967, and nobody could have done anything about it. They could be doing it now. And in spite of a steady stream of Hamas-inspired lies, they still aren't doing it now.
Not that the continuos lies by Hamas and their ragtag and bobtail in the Western media are without meaning. They testify to the desperate importance that this lie has to this generation of Jew-bashers. It obscures the parallel, equally mendacious, claim that Israel is an apartheid state. It rouses pro-Palestian mobs to a frenzy. It serves as the literal call to unreason, delirium, violence. Its complete lack of contact with reality is probably a part of this: in order to uphold it in the face of facts that are visible to ANYONE, including the most vicious Jew-bashers, one has to be in a froth of hostile unreason, to shut themselves completely to the claims of simple brute fact - the continued existence of millions of Palestinians inside Israeli borders - armouring their mind against it by literally unthinking and unreasoning rage.
The fact is that the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials are defining, iconic moments, in our culture. Everyone, even our spectacularly ignorant younger generation, has heard about them; even if they know nothing of the details, the idea is still there in the background, a hidden terror and a hidden shame. And this, in my view, is at the core of the drive to invent a charge of genocide against Jews. And bear in mind that it is all about Jews. Not all Israelis are Jews - just ask those Druze a dozen of whose children have just been murdered by a Hezbollah rocket - and certainly not all Jews are Israeli, but it is always, inevitably, against Jews as such that the charge is raised. Mobs of ignorant "students" yell it at local Jews who may not even support Israel, at children in strollers, at women with their shopping bag. In their imagination, all Jews are guilty of genocide. Nothing more should be needed to prove the irrational, pathological, diseased nature of this charge, rooted in the need to make the victim become the culprit, like a brute man blames his woman victim for the violence he inflicts upon her.