Israel Committing 'Textbook Case of Genocide,' Holocaust Historian Says
"We're seeing the combination of genocidal acts with special intent," said Raz Segal, an Israeli historian.
Newsweek
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I'm really impressed that Newsweek would publish thi.
They only could publish it because the Holocaust scholar is Jewish. In the current media zeitgeist the only people who can criticize the Israeli government are Jews. Nobody else can say anything. Which is part of the current problem, nobody's able to critique or criticize the actions of the Israeli government without being labeled as anti-Semitic in the West.
I think a lot of people are going to wake up to this hypocrisy. I've seen more open criticism of Israel during this conflict than at any time before, which is quite surprising.
Turns out that in the 24/7 media ecosystem we now live in, it has become much more difficult to frame yourself as a permanent victim class while also commiting heinous atrocities in an asymmetrical fashion.
Plus after the "War on Terror" the appetite for another Middle Eastern quagmire is quite limited. The backlash from the general public if the United States were to be dragged into this conflict, beyond throwing money at it as a show of diplomatic support, would be swift and severe.
It went a similar way with South African apartheid. It took decades of things getting worse before the rest of the world even took notice - the first segregation laws were passed in 1908. It was first 40 years later the official Apartheid laws came into force. In the 1960's, more than half a century after segregation started, the ANC gave up being peaceful. In the late 70's they went from sabotage to starting to kill people. In the 1980's ANC was consider a terrorist organization by the US and UK governments, and in 1987 Mandela was explicitly called a terrorist by Thatcher.
In 1990 the regime gave in.
Because the pressure had finally built to an unsustainable level, despite the fact that just a few years prior some of the most powerful countries in the world were still calling their main opponents terrorists.
This, by the way, is not intended to compare Hamas with ANC; ANC did also carry out terror, but not at nearly that scale, and of what they did carry out it's unclear which parts of the leadership approved what
The point is the timescale. How long it took before people started giving more than lip service to turning their back to an Apartheid regime that had gotten worse for their entire lives while they ignored the oppression, and how rapidly it snowballed once it first became accepted to turn your back on the regime, and then expected, and then a necessity to prevent people from turning their backs on you.
I agree with you there's more open criticism of Israel this time. In part, I think because there's been a slow drip of increasingly prominent organisations applying the Apartheid label in recent years from sources that are harder and harder to dismiss, and particularly the slowly growing acceptance that Gaza and the West Bank functions as bantustans. It makes it harder to just shout down critics.
And this can, and likely will, turn really fast once things truly starts to accelerate. A couple of big PR missteps and Israel will risk the opposition to BDS crumbling as well, and then the regime will be well and truly fucked.
Fantastic breakdown, and history refresher. Thanks for taking the time!
It will certainly be interesting to see how closely these two situations will ultimately parallel one another as time goes on.
Actually much easier and Israelis have been very successful in this.
It's just that they got complacent. Why - because they are possibly the first state to abuse that media ecosystem on strategic levels, so they considered themselves invincible.
Or maybe they didn't get complacent, just the world is changing and they no longer see value in that old architecture of propaganda.
Say, they also really honestly know a lot of modern warfare and contributed a lot to it. And what's being used against them by Hamas and Hezbollah is in many things their own science. They simply forgot that others can improve on what they've been taught and not just blindly copy stuff.
Or maybe they see value in having Hamas and Hezbollah existent and with such military architecture. Better the devil you know and all that.
