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The language being used to describe Palestinians is genocidal

Chris McGreal

I covered the Rwandan genocide as a reporter. The language spilling out of Israel is eerily familiar

Mon 16 Oct 2023 12.39 BST

Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, set the tone as he spoke about how far to assign guilt for the worst single atrocity against Jews in his country’s history.

“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime,” said Herzog.

In different ways, the sentiment that the Palestinians are collectively responsible for the actions of Hamas in killing of about 1,300 Israelis and abduction of 199 – and therefore deserve what is coming to them – has been echoed far beyond Israel’s borders.

In the US, Senator Lindsey Graham called for the wholesale destruction of Gaza.

“We are in a religious war here. I’m with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place,” he told Fox News.

In the UK, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Jake Wallis Simons, took a different tack in generalising guilt by writing that “much of Muslim culture is in the grip of a death cult that sacralises bloodshed” before deleting his tweet after a backlash.

Ariel Kallner, a member of the Israeli parliament for Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, had the answer. He demanded a repeat of the mass expulsion of Arabs in 1948 known to Palestinians as the Nakba or Catastrophe.

“Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948,” he said.

It remains to be seen if that is Israel’s plan after it ordered more than one million people to get out of northern Gaza as the military prepares further attacks in addition to the bombing and shelling that has already killed 2,700 Palestinians, including 700 children.

But the dehumanising language spilling out of Israel and from some of its supporters abroad is of a type heard at other times and places that helped create a climate in which terrible crimes take place.

The shocking ways in which Hamas butchered Israeli civilians, including small children, and then celebrated the slaughter reminded me of reporting the Rwandan genocide three decades ago. Hutu militiamen revelled in the killing of around 800,000 Tutsis, including neighbours and children, in unimaginably horrific ways. Even years later in prison, some were unrepentant.

The aftermath of the Hamas attack is also reminiscent of the 1994 genocide in language used not just about the murderers but Palestinians in general, although not for the first time.

Those who led and carried out the Rwandan genocide often cast it in the language of Tutsis as outsiders and interlopers, and the killing as an act of self-defence. If we don’t do it to them, they will do it to us.

Tutsis were debased as “cockroaches”, a word also invoked by a then chief of the Israeli defence forces to describe Palestinians. Other Israeli political, military and religious leaders have at different times described Palestinians as “a cancer”, “vermin”, and called for them to be “annihilated”. They are frequently portrayed as backward and a burden on the country.

While Israel has not revealed its plans for Gaza, Palestinians naturally fear another ethnic cleansing of the kind Kallner is pushing for given their history. Palestine’s envoy to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, has accused Israel of dehumanisation and actions in Gaza in recent days that “are nothing less than genocidal”.

It’s a long way from Rwanda and any comparisons will seem outrageous to some. But as those pressing for news organisations to call Hamas terrorists implicitly acknowledge, language matters.

A prominent Israeli journalist and radio presenter, David Mizrahy Verthaim, has called for wholesale bloodletting.

“We need a disproportionate response … If all the captives are not returned immediately, turn the strip into a slaughterhouse. If a hair falls from their head - execute security prisoners. Violate any norm, on the way to victory,” he wrote on X.

Others are looser in their language.

When Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip with “no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed”, he said: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

Perhaps Gallant only meant Hamas but he didn’t say so and that left a lot of leeway for those who would go further.

In an echo of the US after 9/11, the Israel Defence Forces posted on X: “You either stand with Israel or you stand with terrorism”. Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted: “Anyone that is pro-Palestinian is pro-Hamas.”

That was a sentiment that led the US into wars most Americans now regret, but it was a mentality that also led American soldiers to commit war crimes.

Some of these statements might be no more than lashing out in the heat of the moment as a natural reaction to a shocking atrocity. There is certainly some of that. But in Israel, they fall on ground made fertile by decades of discourse dehumanising of Palestinians.

For years, Israeli leaders have advocated ethnic cleansing, euphemistically called “transfer”, with a discourse that portrays Palestinians as a fake people with no history that matters. In 1989, Netanyahu lamented that Israel missed the opportunity presented by global attention on China’s repression of pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen square “to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the (occupied) territories”.

Opinion polls show that significant numbers of Israelis view Arabs as “dirty”, “primitive”, and as not valuing human life. Generations of Israeli school children have been imbued with the idea that Arabs are interlopers and merely tolerated through the beneficence of Israel.

A 2003 study of Israeli textbooks by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem showed Arabs are principally depicted “with a camel, in an Ali Baba dress”.

“They describe Arabs as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t want to develop. The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer,” the study said.

In 2002 during the second intifada, the Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth published a letter by Israeli children titled: “Dear soldiers, please kill a lot of Arabs”. The paper said dozens of such letters were sent by schoolchildren.

Some of those same children are now enforcing the occupation in the West Bank where Israeli settlers have largely had a free hand to drive Palestinians off their land and out of their villages, and sometimes to beat and kill. And some will be headed into Gaza.

Chris McGreal writes for Guardian US and is a former Guardian correspondent in Washington, Johannesburg and Jerusalem