This observation doesn’t include things like science, technology or farming. Even a committed Israel-hater must agree that the Israelis are rather good at those things – especially as compared to their neighbours.
For example, tiny Israel boasts three times as many scientists as the world’s Muslim population of 1.6 billion combined. She also has state-of-the art industry and the kind of agriculture that makes Israel look like an oasis in the surrounding desert.
Yet none of this is what Israel is mainly known for to the readers of our ‘liberal’ press. She’s mostly mentioned in the context of the country’s ceaseless genocide of Palestinians.
Now the word genocide tends to be misused, as pointed out by the late Prof. Rummel in his excellent books Lethal Politics and Murder by Government.
Used correctly, it describes the mass murder of people who have the misfortune of belonging to an offensive ethnic or racial group. Hence, though every genocide is mass murder, not every mass murder is genocide.
For example, the extermination of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks was genocide because being Armenian was the sole qualification for the mass grave.
Conversely, the systematic slaughter of the Soviet population by Lenin and Stalin didn’t always qualify as genocide because the Bolsheviks laudably eschewed discrimination: they wiped out whole classes and professions strictly for political gain and regardless of race or ethnicity.
Prof. Rummel introduced a useful term, democide, to describe mass murder for political reasons. However, this term is useless for my purposes here for, unwilling to argue with our press, I’m prepared to accept for the sake of argument that Israel is conducting a genocide of Palestinian Arabs solely because they are indeed Palestinian Arabs.
This brings us back to the title above. For, as a reader of mine has pointed out (thank you, Mr Thompson), if the Israelis are indeed trying to annihilate Palestinians as a group, they are grossly incompetent at it.
For example, the Burundian Tutsis armed with most rudimentary weapons managed to murder somewhere between 80,000 and 200,000 Hutus in one month, April, 1972.
The Hutus got their own back with interest in Rwanda. In just three months of 1994 they murdered about 800,000 Tutsis. Most of them were hacked to death with low-technology machetes, which testifies to the Hutus’ fitness and conditioning.
Three months. 800,000. Mostly with machetes. Do you get what I’m driving at?
The current population of the West Bank is 2.72 million. Add to this the 1.7 Arabs living in Israel, and we arrive at the overall number of 4.42 million slated for Israeli genocide. That’s only six times the number of Rwandan Tutsis hacked to death in three months.
And Israel, as The Guardian never ceases to remind us, is an aggressive nuclear power, armed to the teeth with the most advanced weaponry in His creation and single-mindedly devoted to the genocide of Palestinians.
Yet despite all that, in the 67 years (more than 800 months) that the State of Israel has been in existence, the inept Israelis haven’t been able to complete the genocide of the peace-loving, practically unarmed Palestinians. If that’s not incompetence, I don’t know what is.
An alternative, and more likely, explanation is that our press simply uses Israel as a pretext for venting its anti-Semitism.
That sort of stratagem was pioneered in the Soviet Union, where anti-Semitism was both state policy and the passion of much of the population. However, the word zhid (kike) that the people heard in their hearts couldn’t be used in the press for fear of a loan-jeopardising reaction from the West.
Hence it was replaced with sionist (almost the same word as in English), which offered endless opportunities for Pravda cartoonists to draw caricatures of swarthy hook-nosed villains with blood dripping from their fingers. Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer looked positively amateurish by comparison. Worryingly, similar cartoons have now appeared in The Times.
This isn’t to say that anyone who criticises Israel is an anti-Semite. Far from it.
Israel is neither God who’s above criticism nor Caesar’s wife who’s beyond suspicion. But when the criticism is as stupid and irrational as accusing Israel of genocide, much, if not most, of it must indeed be motivated by rank anti-Semitism.Hardly a commendable sentiment, that.