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The JTA conversation: Pogrom? Terrorism? What do we call what happened in Huwara?
(JTA) — On Sunday, after a Palestinian gunman shot and killed two Israeli brothers in the West Bank, Jewish settlers rioted in the nearby Palestinian town of Huwara, burning cars and buildings. A Palestinian was killed and dozens were injured.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the Jewish rioters for “taking the law in their own hands,” but many observers — including the top Israeli general in the West Bank and Abraham Foxman, director emeritus of the the Anti-Defamation League — used stronger language, calling the attacks a “pogrom.”
The use of the word, which most famously refers to a wave of anti-Jewish violence in the Russian empire beginning in the late 19th century, in turn became the subject of debate. Does using “pogrom” co-opt Jewish history unfairly and inaccurately by suggesting Jews are no better than their historical persecutors? Does avoiding the term mean Israel and its supporters are not taking sufficient responsibility for the actions of its Jewish citizens?
The debate is not just about language, but about controlling the narrative. Political speech can minimize or exaggerate events, put them in their proper context or distort them in ways that, per George Orwell, can “corrupt thought.”
We asked historians, linguists and activists to consider the word pogrom, and asked them what politicians, journalists and everyday people should call what happened at Huwara. Their responses are below.
Sidestepping the real issue
Dr. Jeffrey Shandler
Distinguished Professor, Department of Jewish Studies, Rutgers University
The meanings of the word “pogrom” in different languages are key here. In Russian, it means a massacre or raid, as it does in Yiddish; in neither language is it understood as specifically about violence against Jews. The Oxford English Dictionary concurs that pogrom means an “organized massacre… of any body or class,” but notes that, in the English-language press, it was first used mostly to refer to anti-Jewish attacks in Russia, citing examples from 1905-1906.
Therefore, though the association of pogrom with violence targeting Jews is widely familiar, its meaning is broader.
That said, because of English speakers’ widely familiar association of the term with Jews as victims, to use pogrom to describe violence perpetrated by Jews is provocative. As to whether it is appropriate to refer to recent attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians, it seems to me that this question sidesteps the more important question of whether the actions being called pogroms are appropriate.
Call it what it is: “settler terrorism”
Sara Yael Hirschhorn
’22-’23 Research Fellow at the Center for Antisemitism Research at the ADL, and author, “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement”
Let me say first with a loud and clear conscience: What happened in Huwara was abhorrent, immoral, and unconscionable and certainly was not committed in my name.
But to paraphrase Raymond Carver’s famous formulation: How do we talk about it when we talk about Huwara? What kind of descriptive and analytical framework can adequately and contextually interpret that horrific event?
The shorthand of choice seems to be “pogrom” — but it isn’t clear that all who deploy the term are signifying the same thing. For some, pogrom is a synonym for pillage, rampage, fire, property damage and violence in the streets — a one-word general summary of brutal acts. For others, pogrom refers to vigilante justice, an abbreviated story of the non-state or non-institutional actors and their motivations.
More specifically, however, pogrom is seemingly being mobilized as a metaphor to Jewish history, juxtaposing the Jewish victims of yesterday to the Jewish-Israeli perpetrators of today, an implicit analogy to the prelude to the Shoah, recasting Zionists as organized bands of genocidaires (with or without regime sponsorship) like the Cossacks, the Nationalist Fronts or even the Einsatzgruppen. Some would use the word to incorporate all three meanings (and more).
As a historian, I am troubled by the haphazard and harmful use of terms that are attached to a specific time and place — such as the thousand-year history of Jews in the Rhinelands and Eastern Europe, with many layers of imperial, national, local, economic and religious forces that precipitated these events — in such an ahistorical manner. Nor do I find the parallels between Zionists and Nazis to be historically careful (if deliberately offensive) — the State of Israel is committing crimes in the West Bank, but not a genocide. The equivalence also all too easily and incorrectly grafts tropes of racism and white supremacy drawn from American history into the West Bank’s soil.
So what to say about Huwara? Israel — for reasons both political and lexiconographical — has failed to consistently adopt a term for such attacks. (Often the euphemism of “errant weeds” who are “taking matters into their own hands” is the choice of Knesset politicians.) To my mind, the best term is “settler terrorism,” which puts Jewish-Israeli acts on par with Palestinian terrorism. It should also mean that these actions merit the same consequences under the occupation like trial, imprisonment, home demolition and other deterrents enforced against all those who choose the path of violence.
Last but not least, a pogrom was historically an unpunished crime against humanity that led only to war and annihilation. Don’t we aspire for more in Israel/Palestine?
Palestinians call it “ethnic cleansing”
Ibrahim Eid Dalalsha
Director, Horizon Center for Political Studies and Media Outreach, Ramallah, and member of Israel Policy Forum’s Critical Neighbors task force
Palestinians generally view and describe what happened during Sunday’s Huwara attacks as “racist hate crimes seeking to destroy and dispossess the Palestinian people of their homes and properties.” While no specific term has been used to describe these attacks, it was likened to the barbaric and savage invasion of Baghdad by Hulagu, the 13th-century Mongol commander.
Palestinian intellectuals tend to use “ethnic cleansing,” savage and barbaric ethnically motivated violence against innocent civilians, as another way of referring to these attacks. When such events include killing, Palestinian politicians and intellectuals tend to use the term massacre, or “majzara,” to underline the irrational and indiscriminate violence against defenseless civilians. I don’t think the term “pogrom” and its historic connotation are widely known to most people here. From a Palestinian perspective, using such terms, including “Holocaust,” is not considered a mistake. In fact, even using “Holocaust“ to describe violence against Palestinian civilians in and around 1948 was not considered a mistake until very recently when it caused such a saga for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Germany.
View of cars burned by Jewish settlers during riots in Huwara, in the West Bank, near Nablus, Feb. 27, 2023. (Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90)
In the name of historical accuracy
Rukhl Schaechter
Yiddish Editor, The Forward
The recent attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in Huwara are abhorrent. I commend those in Israel calling them peulot teror, “actions of terror,” and I trust that the perpetrators will be brought to justice. But these riots were not pogroms.
The word pogrom refers to one of the many violent riots and subsequent massacres of Jews in Eastern Europe between the 17th and 20th centuries. These attacks were committed by local non-Jewish, often peasant populations. They were instigated by rabble-rousers like Bogdan Chmielnicki, who led a Cossack and peasant uprising against Polish rule in Ukraine in 1648 and ended up destroying hundreds of Jewish communities. According to eyewitnesses, the attackers also committed atrocities on pregnant women.
Note that the massacres of Jews carried out by the Nazis, and the murders of Armenians by the Turkish government at the turn of the 20th century — as horrific as they were — were never called pogroms because in both cases, there was a government behind it. In the name of historic accuracy, let’s continue to use the word pogrom solely for mob attacks on and massacres of Jews.
When the Poles banned “pogrom”
Samuel D. Kassow
Professor of History, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut
In Poland in the late 1930s, altercations between a Jew and a Pole sometimes ended with either the Jew or the Pole getting badly hurt or even killed. When the victim was a Pole, mobs of Poles rampaged through Jewish neighborhoods smashing windows, looting shops and often beating or even killing Jews. Poles often held Jews collectively responsible for the death of one of their own. This happened in Przytyk, Minsk-Mazowieck, Grodno and other places. Jews called these riots “pogroms,” which they were. But the Polish government banned use of the term in the press. After all, “pogrom” was a Russian word, and “pogroms” happened only in a place characterized by barbarism and ignorance. Since Poland was not Russia, and since Poles were eminently civilized, logically speaking, pogroms simply did not take place in Poland. What happened in these towns were to be called “excesses” (zajscia). But certainly not pogroms!
I take it that since we Jews are so civilized, we too are incapable of pogroms. So should we label what these settlers did “‘excesses”? Or perhaps we should take a deep breath and call them pogroms?
A Jewish, but not exclusive, history
Henry Abramson
Historian
The word “pogrom” is rooted in time and place, although the type of violence it describes is as old as human history. It is a Russian word, but it entered the English language in the late 19th century through the medium of Yiddish-speakers, outraged at the wave of antisemitic disturbances that surged under rule of the last tsar of the Russian Empire, Nicholas II. Russians themselves used a variety of words for the ugly phenomenon, with translations like “riot” or “persecution,” but the term “pogrom” proved the most evocative: the Slavic prefix “po” suggests a directed attack, and the root “grom” is the word for “thunder.” A pogrom, therefore, meant a focused point where a great deal of energy was dissipated in a single dramatic act of violence.
The focused point, in the context of that dark history, was the civilian Jewish population in the tiny shtetls that dotted the Pale of Settlement. In this regard the word could be used to encompass attacks on Jewish populations from as long ago as the year 38 in Alexandria, Egypt. It does not, however, have any specific designation to indicate that Jews are the victims.
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Teenager eulogizes slain father who saved his life in West Bank terror attack just before Yom Kippur
(JTA) — Standing at his father’s grave after Yom Kippur 16-year-old Yoav Shukron thanked him for the warning that saved his life a day earlier, when a Palestinian gunman opened fire on the two of them at a West Bank spring.
“Dad, I want to say thank you for 16 years together. Thank you for giving me life,” Yoav said on Monday night as his father, Netanel Shukron, 48, was laid to rest in the West Bank settlement of Alei Zahav.
“Thank you for shouting out to me during the attack, when the terrorist came in. I don’t remember what you said to me, and I ran,” he added, in remarks carried by Channel 12 news.
Yoav had accompanied his father to the Ein Riya spring near the settlement of Neve Tzuf on Sunday to immerse ahead of Yom Kippur when the attack took place.
Yoav escaped unharmed. Shukron, a father of six, was critically wounded and later pronounced dead at Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva.
Hundreds of relatives, friends and residents attended the funeral, held after the Yom Kippur fast ended.
“Nati was the most involved father in the world,” his wife, Merav Shukron, said.
Reflecting on their 18-year marriage, she said, “We came from different families, but that didn’t stop us from being soulmates. Nati, our family is perfect, everything was perfect.”
The couple had six children, ages 4 to 16. Shukron worked as an information systems analyst at Hachshara Insurance Company, while Merav Shukron is a lecturer at Ariel University.
Merav said the family had been due to travel abroad the following week and that her husband had carefully planned the trip around spending time together, including packing a sukkah and food for the holiday.
According to the Israeli military’s preliminary investigation, the Palestinian attacker drove to the spring and opened fire. An Israeli military tracker who was nearby in an armored vehicle returned fire and wounded the gunman, preventing him from continuing the attack.
The attacker fled and was located several hours later receiving treatment at a hospital near Ramallah, where soldiers from the elite Duvdevan unit arrested him.
Israeli security officials identified the suspected attacker as Qadri Samara, a resident of the Palestinian town of Biddu who is affiliated with the Hamas terror group and was previously known to Israeli security forces, according to Channel 13. Investigators said he had visited the spring the previous day and determined that large numbers of people would be there to immerse in its waters ahead of Yom Kippur, a practice observed by some Jews before the fast.
In the aftermath of the attack, Israeli troops carried out a large operation in Biddu, mapping Samara’s home ahead of its possible demolition, searching about 100 locations and questioning about 90 suspects. The military also reinforced its forces across the West Bank, including by deploying the elite Egoz unit to the area.
About an hour after the shooting, soldiers thwarted a separate attempted car-ramming attack at the Ganim military post in the northern West Bank. One attacker was killed and a second was arrested, Channel 13 reported, adding that no soldiers were wounded.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a post on X, “No terrorist is immune, neither are those who assist them; we will settle scores with all of them – in Gaza, in Lebanon, and in Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical term for the West Bank.
President Isaac Herzog noted that the attack came “on the eve of Yom Kippur, as the people of Israel gather for the holy day.”
“Terror will not break us or shake our spirit,” he said. “We will stand against it together, united, determined and full of faith.”
Shukron’s killing has also become the first case in which Israeli officials are considering applying a death penalty law approved by the Knesset in March, according to the KAN public broadcaster.
The law, long championed by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and his far-right Otzma Yehudit party, makes death the default sentence for non-Israelis convicted in Israeli military courts of carrying out deadly nationalist attacks, while allowing judges to impose life imprisonment in “special circumstances.” It passed the Knesset 62-48 and immediately drew a High Court challenge.
Ben-Gvir raised the possibility of applying the law to Samara during a security meeting before Yom Kippur, arguing that the case was the first to meet the law’s criteria. Netanyahu did not rule out the proposal and asked IDF representatives for their position on applying the law, which they said they saw no impediment to doing, according to KAN, though the report noted that the military advocate general was not present at the meeting. The issue is expected to be discussed again in a smaller cabinet forum with the IDF’s legal chief present, the report said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Teenager eulogizes slain father who saved his life in West Bank terror attack just before Yom Kippur appeared first on The Forward.
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Herzog’s Yom Kippur pardon of soldier crystallizes choice for Israeli voters
On the eve of Yom Kippur, President Isaac Herzog pardoned Elor Azaria, an Israeli soldier convicted of manslaughter for shooting a wounded Palestinian attacker in the head in Hebron a decade ago.
Azaria served nine months of an 18-month sentence and was released in 2018. His conviction remained on his record, with the ordinary process leaving it in place until 2032, complicating life for the now 30-year-old.
To ease that burden, Defense Minister Yisrael Katz, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, in July asked Israeli President Isaac Herzog, to grant Azaria clemency, expunging the record.
This Herzog did on the eve of Yom Kippur. There is a coherent argument for that decision. Azaria was a young soldier when the shooting occurred, he served his sentence, and a criminal record can continue to impose practical obstacles on civilian life long after a formal prison sentence has ended. Herzog invoked reconciliation and the possibility of a new beginning, as well as the consequences Azaria had already endured.
But the army did not agree. Current military chief Eyal Zamir and other senior officers opposed the request, arguing that Azaria had never expressed genuine remorse.
The pardon has now returned the Azaria affair to the center of Israeli politics at a particularly consequential moment.
Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, the military chief at the time who publicly pushed for prosecution, is now the main political leader in the opposition and its leading candidate for prime minister. Netanyahu, the prime minister at the time who called for Azaria’s pardon, is still leading the other side of Israel’s great political argument. After the Oct. 27 election, Herzog will consult the elected factions and probably assign the task of forming a government to one of them, based on who he believes has the best chance.
If the numbers leave neither Eisenkot nor Netanyahu with a clear path to a majority of 61, Herzog could face a genuinely consequential exercise of presidential judgment between the two men who stand on opposite sides of the Azaria case – which he himself has turned into an election issue.
The roots of that divide go back to March 24, 2016, when Israeli soldier Azaria aimed his rifle at Abdel Fattah al-Sharif and pulled the trigger. Al-Sharif had attacked Israeli soldiers with a knife and was shot and incapacitated. Minutes later, as he lay on the ground, Azaria nonchalantly raised his rifle and fired, from a few meters away. Al-Sharif was clearly not threatening the numerous soldiers milling around.
The shooting was captured on video, and what might otherwise have remained a disputed incident became one of the defining political arguments in Israel. It was a moment when Israeli politics – notoriously complex and sometimes inscrutable even to insiders – briefly came into focus: the fault line is whether you think this is OK.
The military treated the shooting as a serious criminal matter,. Eisenkot’s position, which earned vilification from the political right, was that a soldier could use lethal force against a genuine threat but could not simply kill a captive. The case became a test of whether the IDF’s rules meant anything when enforcing them was unpopular.
Netanyahu, who then as now was prime minister, is a man of sharp political instincts. During the controversy he called Azaria’s father, Charlie, offering sympathy. The eventual conviction was for manslaughter. After Azaria’s conviction, Netanyahu openly went all the way to politicize the case, calling for Azaria to receive a pardon.
The difference was unmistakable. Eisenkot saw the case through both the institutional obligations of the army and morality; he still believed in the old Zionist notion of the IDF as the world’s most ethical military. Netanyahu saw the political benefit in amplifying and harnessing the emotional identification of many frightened people with the soldier.
Israeli society was changing, the inflection point being the Second Intifada – a campaign of barbaric suicide bombings against civilians that was launched between 2000 and 2004, even as Israel was offering Palestinians statehood on the vast majority of the West Bank and Gaza. In 2005 Israel unilaterally pulled out of Gaza, uprooting thousands of settlers, resulting in Hamas jihadists taking over and years of rocket fire. The 2010s saw more killings.
After so many disappointments and so much bloodshed, many Israelis had just given up on the Palestinians (and to be fair, the feeling was mutual, largely because of the continuing occupation and the constant expansion of West Bank settlements). A significant part of the public had become indifferent at best to the idea that a soldier confronting a terrorist should be constrained by rules that might prevent him from firing. Netanyahu was either riding the tiger or goading it on, and perhaps both at the same time.
A decade later, the institutional divide exposed by the case remains remarkably intact. The current military leadership’s opposition to the pardon places today’s IDF, at least on this issue, in the same institutional tradition that Eisenkot represented in 2016: the conviction that the army’s rules must survive the political passions surrounding a particular soldier.
On the baseline level, this sad affair is about where self-defense ends and vengeance begins, and what to do when many citizens no longer care. But on a higher level, it encapsulates a contradiction from the earliest days of Zionism. The founders wanted two things at once: to turn the Jews, via national sovereignty, into “a people like all others”; and to make of their state “a light unto the nations.” Both sound good, yet one must choose.
The bullet that Azaria fired in Hebron helped crystallize that choice, which maps neatly into the political one between Eisenkot and Netanyahu. In placing his own signature on the final page of the Azaria affair, Herzog ensured it will be a highlight of the campaign, and of the legacy of both Eisenkot and Netanyahu.
It is no coincidence that the same person advocating for a man many consider a murderer is also feverishly machinating to dismantle the foundations of liberal democracy in Israel, while on trial for corruption. For Netanyahu, the ship of old-time Zionist mythology has sailed, and he’s not aiming to cast any light unto the nations. Eisenkot, essentially, still is.
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Trump urges nations to unite against Iran in UN address
(JTA) — U.S. President Donald Trump called upon nations to stay united in their pressure on Iran’s economy, as he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday.
Indeed, Trump showed no sign of walking down from the military conflict he began with Tehran in February amid criticism that the U.S. is not accomplishing its goals, though he did hold out the prospect of a negotiation solution later this fall.
“I have a big decision to make: Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before?” Trump asked. “Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to destroy people and countries again?”
Despite these threats, the president expressed his belief that the two countries will “make a deal, right after the election because it doesn’t make sense for them not to,” referring to the House and Senate elections on Nov. 3.
During a bilateral press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump confirmed that envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner participated in a three-hour meeting with the Iranian delegation on Tuesday.
“It went very well,” Trump said. “It was a very good meeting. It’s potential greatness or obliteration. It could be a great country.”
Trump said in his speech at the General Assembly that Iran was likely waiting for the results of the midterm elections to make a deal.
Stressing that he “gave absolutely no credence” to the election when making decisions on Iran, Trump maintained that the regime is “weak and desperate.”
Despite Trump’s characterization of Iran as weak, Tehran has largely succeeded in disrupting commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial route for global energy supplies.
Trump continued to maintain that he “will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” slamming the regime’s leaders for their repeated refusal to make deals and their focus instead on making missiles capable of hitting Europe.
“Iran’s goal was to complete their mad dash to a nuclear bomb from behind this conventional ballistic missile shield,” he added. “After giving Iran every chance for a deal, I took action.”
He linked the fight against Iran with the Hamas invasion of southern Israel nearly three years ago, reminding the world that the two wars are connected.
“In two weeks, we will mark the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 terror attack in Israel, where terrorists funded by Iran tortured, mutilated and killed 1,200 very innocent civilians, including dozens of Americans and many babies — little, tiny, beautiful babies,” Trump said.
The State Department has said an estimated 1,200 people were killed in the attack, including at least 843 civilians and dozens of Americans.
“Iran’s supreme leader celebrated that massacre and called it a service to humanity,” the president continued. “The same regime slaughtered over 72,000 of its citizens this year. Recently, 10,000 were killed for protesting.”
Death toll estimates from Iran’s crackdown on anti-government protests have varied widely, and neither Trump’s figure of 72,000 people killed by the government this year nor his figure of 10,000 protesters killed has been independently verified.
While Democrats have argued that Trump hasn’t accomplished strategic goals in the conflict, the president cited a list of accomplishments thus far in the war. He said that all 159 Iranian naval ships are lying at the bottom of sea, with the air force destroyed, radars gone, missile capacity reduced and inflation devastating the country.
The president also commended the U.N. Security Council “for voting overwhelmingly to pass a resolution condemning Iran’s despicable terrorist attacks on commercial ships,” while calling upon nations to remain “united in maintaining pressure” on Iran’s economy.
Trump described the dangers posed by Iran to the world as “a reality that far too many preferred to ignore.” He declared that there is no greater threat in the world than “the No. 1 sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran,” which he accused of “spreading death and carnage and chaos across the entire Middle East and beyond.”
The president noted that just a year ago, when he addressed global leaders at the same assembly, the war in Gaza “was still raging brutally.” Hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, remained “deep in Hamas tunnels and there was no end in sight.” But on the sidelines last year, he said that steps taken “changed everything.”
“A few weeks later, we ended the war in Gaza saving untold thousands of lives,” Trump said. “We also brought home all remaining hostages, both living and dead — every single one of them. Everyone thought it was a miracle that we were able to do so, and people celebrated in the streets.”
He then expressed his gratitude to the U.N. Security Council for its unanimous endorsement of his 20-Point Gaza Peace Plan and for approving the Board of Peace tasked with managing those efforts. Israel rejected the plan this summer, arguing that it did not provide sufficient guarantees of Hamas disarmament.
Nonetheless, Trump recognized the nearly 30 countries that have joined the board and contributed billions of dollars to relief funds. Trump also thanked nations that have contributed police and troops to the region.
He also boasted of the U.S. having invested $1.5 trillion this term in the military, a sum he described as “more than ever before.” Denying reports that the country was running low on weapons, Trump declared that the country has “more munitions than we could ever possibly think of using.”
“I do not believe in letting problems fester,” Trump said. “So while others have talked, I have acted.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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