It’s Getting Worse

The genocide question won’t go away. It has attached itself in the public mind to everything touching Israel and the Jews. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s like a yellow star on the streets of Europe, an identifying badge, a mark of Cain. In some awful way, it relieves an old moral burden. Yes, the nazis killed the Jews. Yes, the nations collaborated or stood by. But look what the Jews themselves have done. Given half a chance, they put the Palestinians to the sword.

I personally don’t think of Gaza as genocide, but that hardly lifts the moral shame. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have died, and the suffering of civilians continues daily. Gaza is a bleeding wound with no end to the pain, vulnerability, and humiliation. Netanyahu has refused the offer of disarmament, claiming that Hamas will never keep its promises. There is likely an element of truth in that judgment, but his stubbornness is clearly connected to political necessity. He cannot be seen to waver on matters that might revive the hope of a two-state solution or to enter into good-faith negotiations. Winter will come and double the measure of suffering. More filthy tents. More dead children

Meanwhile, we obsess on the rightness of terminology, contesting the use of words like “genocide” as a descriptor of the situation in Gaza and elsewhere. As far as I can tell, that is the most active debate in the current standoff between Jews and the world. As if it were the most consequential question. Whether Gaza fulfills the definition, whether it fully describes the policies in place, it is hardly the whole of the matter before us. While Kushner and Witkoff sip tea in Jerusalem, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians has effectively eclipsed the events of October 7. No one seems to give that slaughter much thought for e simple reason that more Palestinians have been killed. That’s the way these things play out. It may be disturbing to us, but disproportionality is a real moral category.

And to make matters worse, the provocations continue. Just this weekend, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s nightmare minister of national security, called for the killing of thirty Palestinians each night. It seems to be some fatal mix of payback for the killing of Israeli citizens and simply putting Gaza on notice. The reason is that some Palestinians are guilty of murder (true) and that some Palestinians are “not even people.”

Declarations like this one are truly dangerous. They are the place where simple authoritarian arrogance gives way to truly genocidal annihilation. Ben-Gvir is not a private citizen with crackpot, far-right maniacal ideations. He is an essential member of the Netanyahu coalitions. Days after the fact, he has not been rebuked and remains a minister of the current government. Have we actually come to a place in history where a Jewish leader of a Jewish state can speak with venomous hitlerian violence and remain in office for a single moment? Once upon a time, such a prospect was impossible.