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Alleged Palestinian genocide of Israelis

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See also: Genocide against Palestinians

Palestinian genocide of Israelis is a characterization of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict which argues that Palestinians are guilty of genocide against Jews and/or the Israeli population. These allegations have been made in the context of "mutual accusations of genocide" between the two sides of the conflict.[1][2]

A 2009 law journal article by Israeli-American human rights lawyer Justus Weiner and Israeli-American law professor Avi Bell argued that Hamas attacks against Israelis met the definition of the crime of genocide in the Genocide Convention.[3] In 2023, a letter signed by over 100 international law experts argued that the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel "most probably constitute[s] an international crime of genocide, proscribed by the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court".[4][5] Its signatories included Irwin Cotler, former Attorney-General of Canada; the organiser of the letter was Dan Eldad, former acting State Attorney of Israel.[4] The same argument was made by Jens David Ohlin, dean of Cornell Law School, in a post on the Opinio Juris group blog.[6]

In his 2009 book on genocide, Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity, Harvard professor Daniel Goldhagen argues that Palestinian suicide attacks should be called "genocide bombings", and their perpetrators "genocide bombers".[7][8] The coining of the label "genocide bombing" is sometimes attributed to Irwin Cotler, in remarks he made in the Canadian Parliament in 2002;[9][10] however, the phrase was used by the UK's ambassador, Stephen Gommersall, during an April 1996 meeting of the UN Security Council.[11] Other supporters of the use of the "genocide bombing" phrase have included the American political scientist R. J. Rummel,[12] and Arnold Beichman.[13]

Allegations of Palestinian responsibility for the Holocaust

See also: Relations between Nazi Germany and the Arab world

In a 2015 speech to the World Zionist Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the Palestinian statesman Amin al-Husseini, who was Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and later President of the All-Palestine Government, of personal responsibility for the Holocaust.[14] The vast majority of historians condemned Netanyahu's claims as historically false, and Netanyahu later made a post on Facebook partially retracting them.[15] However, a handful of historians defended them, including the German-American historian Wolfgang G. Schwanitz in an op-ed for The Jerusalem Post,[16] and the Bar-Ilan University historians Yosef Sharvit and Edy Cohen.[17][18]

Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin [fr], professor of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University argues that in Israel there are increasing "...efforts to identify the Palestinians with the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The problematic (but marginal) ties between the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and Adolf Hitler are presented as a central contributing factor to the destruction of the Jews, and the Palestinian struggle for liberation from the British is cast as the continuation of the Holocaust. This approach received glaring expression in the (carefully weighed) words of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in October 2015, asserting that Hitler had not planned to annihilate the Jews but only to expel them, and was convinced otherwise by Haj Amin al-Husseini".[19] Raz-Krakotzkin also summarises Schwanitz's op-ed as "The Israeli attempt to blame Palestinians for the Holocaust is thus accompanied by a German desire to transfer responsibility for the crime".[19]

Michael Sells traces Netanyahu's 2015 remarks back to his 1993 book A Place Among the Nations, in which Netanyahu "portray[s] Arafat and the PLO as willing heirs of Husayni’s alleged exterminationist Nazism".[20]

In a 2009 blog post on The Jerusalem Post website, then-Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz argued that:[21]

Not only did the Grand Mufti play a significant role in the murder of European Jewry, he sought to replicate the genocide against the Jews in Israel during the war that produced a so-called Nakba. The war started by the Palestinians against the Jews in 1947, and the war started by the Arab states in 1948 against the new state of Israel, were both genocidal wars. Their goal was not merely the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from the area but their total annihilation. The leaders said so and the actions of their subordinates reflected this genocidal goal. They were aided in their efforts by Nazi soldiers - former SS and Gestapo members - who had been given asylum from war crime prosecution in Egypt and who had been recruited by the grand mufti to complete Hitler's work.

Dershowitz made similar arguments in his 2003 book The Case for Israel, in which he claimed that "Israel was fighting against a ‘genocidal war of extermination’ in 1948".[22]

Similar arguments were also made in a 2014 article by Joseph Spoerl, a philosophy professor at Saint Anselm College who is affiliated with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, an Israeli think tank:[23]

However, the claim that Palestinians and Arabs had nothing to do with the Holocaust is false. In fact, Arab and Palestinian leaders played a significant role in aiding and abetting the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews in Europe and they hoped to implement the genocide in the Middle East... A careful examination of this history shows that it is neither fair nor accurate to portray the Arab-Israel War of 1947–9 as an unprovoked war of aggression by Zionists bent on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs. In fact, it was a war of self-defense against a ruthless, pro-Nazi, and openly genocidal Palestinian leadership that enjoyed enormous popularity among the Arab and Palestinian masses.


Al-Husseini also was planning the extermination of the Jews of Palestine and met with Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann for briefings on Germany’s “solution to the European Jewish question.” They secured a promise from Himmler that an advisor from Eichmann’s Jewish Affairs department would travel with him to Jerusalem after the conquest of Palestine in order to extend the “final solution” to that country. In 1942, al-Husseini and al-Gailani encouraged their associates to attend Nazi training courses to become proficient in genocide and, therefore, three of al-Gailani’s and one of the Mufti’s associates visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in July 1942. The Nazi officer who led the tour reported that the Arabs were “extremely interested” in the treatment of Jews at Sachsenhausen.

References

  1. ^ Pensky, Maxim (2023-10-17). "What is genocide, and who is committing it now in the Middle East?". The Hill. Retrieved 2023-10-18.
  2. ^ Carlstrom, Gregg; Hatuqa, Dalia (9 Oct 2014). "PA struggles to gain foothold in Gaza". www.aljazeera.com. Retrieved 2023-10-18.
  3. ^ Weiner, Justus Reid; Bell, Avi (2009–2010). "The Gaza War of 2009: Applying International Humanitarian Law to Israel and Hamas". San Diego International Law Journal. 11 (5): 5–42.
  4. ^ a b Winer, Stuart (15 October 2023). "Hamas actions are war crimes, could constitute genocide – international law experts". Times of Israel. Retrieved 2023-10-16.
  5. ^ Sokol, Sam (Oct 16, 2023). "Deadly Hamas Rampage Constitutes 'International Crime of Genocide,' Hundreds of Legal Experts Say". Haaretz. Retrieved 2023-10-19.
  6. ^ Ohlin, Jens David (2023-10-12). "International Criminal Law Analysis of the Situation in Israel". Opinio Juris. Retrieved 2023-10-16.
  7. ^ Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah (2010-01-21). Worse Than War: Genocide, eliminationism and the ongoing assault on humanity. Little, Brown Book Group. ISBN 978-0-7481-1586-0.
  8. ^ Pindar, Ian (2010-02-06). "Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2023-10-18.
  9. ^ Radler, Melissa (2002-09-25). "STATESIDE: News from Jewish America". The Jerusalem Post. Archived from the original on 2002-09-25.
  10. ^ "Debates (Hansard) No. 208 - June 18, 2002 (37-1)". House of Commons of Canada. June 18, 2002. Retrieved 2023-10-18. ...this is not a suicide bombing as much as it is a genocidal bombing where the terrorists, by their own sacred covenant, intend the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews wherever they may be.

    This is murder for the sake of murder, terrorism for the sake of terrorism, motivated by the notion that, as the terrorists themselves have put it, "the weakness of the Jews is that they love life too much". So that the terrorists celebrate the killing as they glorify the genocidal bombing...
  11. ^ "SECURITY COUNCIL MEETS IN RESPONSE TO SECURITY MEASURES IMPOSED BY ISRAEL ON WEST BANK, GAZA". press.un.org. 15 April 1996. Retrieved 2023-10-18. [Israel] had the right to protect its citizens against Hamas genocide bombings.
  12. ^ "Judaicide". The Forward. 2005-06-10. Retrieved 2023-10-18.
  13. ^ Beichman, Arnold (April 23, 2004). "Targets". The Washington Times. Retrieved 2023-10-18.
  14. ^ "Netanyahu causes uproar by blaming Palestinians for Holocaust". The Telegraph. 2015-10-21. Retrieved 2023-10-16.
  15. ^ Litvak, Meir (2015-09-02). "Netanyahu and the Mufti: Hajj Amin al-Husseini as Prime Instigator of the Destruction of European Jewry or Eager Accessory?". Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs. 9 (3): 459–464. doi:10.1080/23739770.2015.1130401. ISSN 2373-9770. S2CID 147400602.
  16. ^ Schwanitz, Wolfgang G. (2015-11-04). "Netanyahu was right about Hitler and the Mufti". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved 2023-10-16.
  17. ^ Tucker, Benny (23 October 2015). ""נתניהו הועיל להיסטוריה, למרות אי הדיוקים"". www.inn.co.il (in Hebrew). Retrieved 2023-10-19.
  18. ^ Cohen, Shimon (Oct 26, 2015). "Historian: The Mufti planned to burn Jews". www.israelnationalnews.com. Retrieved 2023-10-19.
  19. ^ a b Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon (2018). "Benjamin, the Holocaust, and the Question of Palestine". In Bashir, Bashir; Goldberg, Amos (eds.). The Holocaust and the Nakba. Columbia University Press. pp. 79–91. doi:10.7312/bash18296-005. ISBN 978-0-231-54448-1. S2CID 165650927. Retrieved 2023-10-16.
  20. ^ Sells, Michael (November 4, 2015). "Fabricating Palestinian Responsibility for the Nazi Genocide". Tablet.
  21. ^ Dershowitz, Alan (Jul 26, 2009). "Will Hamas's new "Culture War" acknowledge its historic ties to Nazism?". The Jerusalem Post. Archived from the original on 2009-07-29.
  22. ^ Kattan, Victor (2009-07-15). From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1891-1949. Pluto Press. p. 174. ISBN 978-0-7453-2579-8. It is almost an article of faith amongst some international lawyers that Israel's conduct during the 1948 conflict was defensive. The staunchest advocate of this view is Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, who, in a recent book on the subject, defended his position that Israel was fighting against a 'genocidal war of extermination' in 1948. Other scholars have expressed similar views, although using less inflammatory language. They argue that the Arab states committed an act of aggression (as opposed to genocide) against Israel when they sent their troops into Palestine to defend its inhabitants.
  23. ^ Spoerl, Joseph S. (2014). "Palestinians, Arabs, and the Holocaust". Jewish Political Studies Review. 26 (1/2): 14–47. ISSN 0792-335X. JSTOR 44289822.
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