Beautiful progress. The Forward covers a debate over whether the Nakba was “genocide.. among the most eminent genocide scholars in the world.” Article by Gal Beckerman begins: “Did Jews commit genocide in 1948?” Note that the article never uses the word Nakba. Also, note the incredible Jewish political identity insight offered by a gentile in the second part of the excerpt. Consider: Even the Forward seems to recognize that American Jews, imprisoned by the lobby, need help from our non-Jewish friends to get out.
The question is … one more reminder of the growing divide between European scholars and their American and Israeli counterparts when it comes to how they view Israel, both historically and in the present moment.
The debate began in the pages of a scholarly publication, the Winter 2010 issue of the Journal of Genocide Research. Two specialists in genocide, Omer Bartov of Brown University and Martin Shaw of Roehampton University, in London, engaged in a back-and-forth exchange about whether the word “genocide” could be applied to the expulsion and killing of Arabs in Palestine during Israel’s War of Independence. [Nakba Not Spoken Here] During the course of the war, more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced out of their homes and were later prevented from returning, creating what would become one of the world’s most enduring refugee crises.
Both Bartov and Shaw agreed that some form of what is now called “ethnic cleansing” did occur.
….Shaw thinks [scholar Israel] Charny’s reaction [calling Shaw angry and delusional and other bon-mots] is indicative of those scholars he calls “pro-Israel,” those who he thinks are incapable of applying the same critical eye to Israel and its past that they do to other peoples’ histories.
“He’s an American Jew who’s gone to Israel, and he has invested a lot of his identity in Israel — whereas criticisms of the recent attack on Gaza don’t necessarily bring the whole existence of the state into question, this seems to him as an argument that strikes at the foundations,” Shaw said, speaking of Charny. “The other issue is that there is a problem with the language of genocide with anything having to do with Jews. For some Israeli and pro-Israeli scholars, genocide is something that happened to the Jews; it’s not something that Jews could ever really be involved in.”