Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Top scholars agree Jewish state guilty of ethnic cleansing, debate whether it's guilty of genocide as well

From:
Top Genocide Scholars Battle Over How To Characterize Israel’s Actions

(Forward) -- by Gal Beckerman --

Did Jews commit genocide in 1948?

The question is provocative, and the answer for most people is an unequivocal no. But a debate over this idea has formed the crux of a heated argument among the most eminent genocide scholars in the world, and led recently to the censure of an Israeli professor by the field’s leading academic association.

It’s also 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. 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. But where Bartov was not willing to think of this as genocide, Shaw confidently argued that any policies meant to destroy a group, even if not outright murder, should be seen as genocide.

With this more expansive reading, he sees genocide victims everywhere, from the Aborigines in Australia to the Albanians uprooted from Kosovo. And Shaw goes further, claiming that the entire Zionist enterprise had “an incipiently genocidal mentality” toward the Arabs. Due to what he views as Israel’s original sin, Shaw argues that the state’s policies toward Palestinians and its Arab citizens since “can be seen as a ‘slow-motion’ extension and consolidation of the genocide of 1948.”...MORE...LINK
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Palestinian refugees ethnically-cleansed by Jewry during 1948 "Nakba" or "Catastrophe"

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