What Is and Is Not Genocide

In Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” it takes Professor Zinn fewer than six pages in the paperback edition I read to portray, in vivid prose, what became the extermination of the Arawak people by Chistopher Columbus and his Spanish successors. After originally landing on an island in the Bahamas, Columbus sailed to Hispaniola (today, Haiti and The Dominican Republic), arriving in December of 1492. In two years, “half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead…By 1515, there were perhaps 50,000 Indians left. By 1550, there were 500.” A report dated 1650 shows no Arawak “descendants left on the island.”

This is a genocide: The systematic elimination of a people. They were enslaved, worked, and slaughtered into extinction. Men, women, and children died in the mines. So superior did the Spanish feel, such disdain did they have for these peaceful, indigenous people, that they would amputate limbs and even heads to test the sharpness of their swords.

To make as simple and stark a comparison as possible, nothing even remotely similar – notwithstanding the horrible death and destruction of this current war – has happened in Israel, Gaza, or the West Bank, between Jews and Palestinian Arabs over the last 140 years. To say so is dangerously wrong.

The Spanish colonization of “The New World” (as with the British, Dutch and French who followed) was the product of an enormous (Columbus returned on a second voyage with 17 ships and more than 1,200 men), organized, state-sponsored and financed operation to subjugate and enslave foreign people and rape the land for mineral wealth. It continued for hundreds of years.

Not only did Jews never have a state before 1948, they had no ships, weapons, or any central, organizing body whatsoever. They had suffered repeated mass expulsion from European countries like France and England; pogroms and murderous attacks wherever they lived. The 200-year Christian frenzy known as The Crusades took the lives of tens of thousands of Jews both at the hands of Crusaders coming and going, and pogrom uprisings in European cities. In 1096, 2,000 Jews were massacred in Metz alone as part of what has come to be known as The Rhineland Massacres. You can Google it.

Drawn by a rising Zionism and a link to their own ancient story, desperate to evade two millennia of murderous attacks by both secular and religious forces, when they began migrating to Ottoman Palestine in the early 1880s, Jews already living there made up about 5% of the population. How those journeys, which were not colonialism but an attempt to save their own lives evolved over generations to the circumstances of today requires much more information that can be presented in an Op-Ed. However, it is very much worth noting that in 1948, when the Jews accepted the United Nations offer of partition and the Arabs rejected it, there were 1.4 million Palestinians living in Mandate Palestine and 650,000 Jews. Today, there are 2.1 million Israeli Arab citizens. (Palestinians if you wish, and they represent, by the way, 30% of the current graduating med school classes in Israel.) There are 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza, and 5.5 million in the West Bank. That’s 9.9 million Palestinians. There are 7.2 million Jews living in Israel.

What is happening in Gaza is a war, and war can be hard for people to wrap their heads around, particularly young people who’ve never even vicariously experienced such a thing in their lifetimes.

If, in fact, there were a genocidal plan, by any factual metric it’s the biggest failure of such an enterprise in recorded history. What is going on in Gaza right now is not genocide, an easy, grievance-laden word to fall back on when facts are inconvenient. What is happening in Gaza is a war, and war can be hard for people to wrap their heads around, particularly young people who’ve never even vicariously experienced such a thing in their lifetimes. (There is also a war in Ukraine, by the way, with more than twice the number of Ukrainians dead than Gazans, and they didn’t start it.)

Despite the best efforts of militaries, war is indiscriminately deadly, particularly against an opponent that hides amongst civilians. Nearly 60 million people died in World War II (60,000,000. That number should be seen), 15-20 million of whom were uniformed combatants. More than 40 million were civilians. This war is not a response to a Hamas incursion that was to be met with something brief and proportional or even disproportional. The goal here, for Israel, whether you accept it or not, is to reduce a (yes) genocidal terror organization masquerading as a liberation movement to a decimated fighting force and one unable to resume administrative hegemony or capability. It may or may not work.

But it is not a genocide.

Mitch Paradise is a writer and producer living in Los Angeles. He also taught for 24 years as a substitute at more than 100 schools, PreK to 12th Grade, for the Los Angeles Unified School District.