Ilan Pappe wrote a book called The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine in which he goes through the creation of the state of Israel, one bloody step at a time. When people talked about the theft of Palestine, I never really understood the metaphor until I read this book--then realised that "theft" isn't even an adequate word. The OED defines "pillage" as "The action of plundering or taking as spoil; spoliation, plunder: chiefly that practised in war; but also in extended sense, extensive or wholesale robbery or extortion", and that's exactly what happened in Palestine. The fact that Israel continues this brutal campaign of violence against Palestine today makes what happened fifty years ago all the more reprehensible. In '48 the UN clearly defined Genocide according to UN Resolution 260: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. And yet, even though what's happening in Palestine is clearly genocide, by the UN's own definition, what is being done about it? Cumol, this Canadian stands in solidarity with you and your Palestinian brothers and sisters. If I could help, I would.In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
The thing is, neither the U.N. nor anyone else could do anything against Israel because it is too well supported. No U.S. President will dare to abandon Israel because he/she will know what consequences it will have on his support etc. The U.N. already deecribed Protective Edge as genocide. Funnily, in Israel people are calling the U.N. an anti-Semitic organization. Which is the main argument and last argument every supporter of the government uses. So what can we do? Boycott? Vote for the right leaders? Even Obama, the bit hope of the Palestinians was a failure...
I genuinely feel like the tide is turning, that people are less and less afraid of being labeled anti-semitic for saying that what Israel is doing is wrong. My father, a staunch conservative, says that it goes against God's wishes to criticise what Israel is doing. Now, he's on the verge of retirement, and I think that this attitude jives with what other Christians his age believe, but those of us who are younger don't necessarily hold to that party line any longer. I don't know what to do either, and I'm frustrated about it. So I teach my students about the conflict, and equate what Israel is doing now with what Germany did during WWII. We look at Pappe's book and compare that with a section of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. I then let the students draw their own conclusions, and they often come to the same conclusion that I have. There's hope. WIthin Israel and Palestine, I don't know, but certainly in the rest of the world the shadow of the Holocaust isn't so long that it's able to obscure what's happening in Palestine for much longer.