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The rising death toll in Gaza is tragic. But Holocaust scholars should know: It is not genocide.

(JTA) — Up in Broome County, New York, beneath a simple marker in a family plot in Hale Eddy Cemetery, I believe the Rev. Dr. Franklin Hamlin Littell is turning in his grave.

Littell, the son of a Methodist minister who also became one, was a towering figure in the study of the Holocaust and genocide. In postwar West Germany, he spent almost a decade as chief Protestant religious adviser to the High Commission on Germany, assigned to denazification. In 1958 at Emory University in Atlanta, he initiated the first U.S. graduate seminar on the Holocaust. Eighteen years later in Philadelphia, as chair of Temple University’s religion department, he started the world’s first doctoral program in Holocaust studies. And in 1998 at Stockton University in Pomona, New Jersey, he and his wife, Marcia Sachs Littell, established the first interdisciplinary master’s program in Holocaust and genocide studies.

My late mother, Halina Wind Preston, a Jewish educator who survived 14 months hiding from the Nazis in the sewers of Lviv, was a frequent attendee at an annual Holocaust scholars’ conference cofounded by Littell. I knew Littell, who died in 2009, and at his invitation in 2000 I traveled from Atlanta, where I was a senior editor at CNN.com, to speak on “Professional Ethics After Auschwitz” at the 30th conference in Philadelphia.

So I can imagine Littell’s revulsion if he knew that the word “genocide” was being misused against Israel by scholars and activists — including an Israeli historian who now directs the Stockton program he started.

As Israel retaliates in the wake of the bloody rampage of Oct. 7 — in which Hamas killed 1,500 Israelis, including 260 people at a music festival and hundreds of civilians in nearby communities, and took more than 200 hostages — Raz Segal, the Israeli historian who directs the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies program at Stockton University, has been attracting worldwide attention by blaming the victims.

On Oct. 18, at a vigil on the University of Pennsylvania campus, Segal called President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel “support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.” On Oct. 13, Jewish Currents published “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” in which Segal wrote that “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed” and that “Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza.”

Segal is far from a lone voice accusing Israel of genocide. At Penn, a student group that organized a rally Oct. 16 said it “unequivocally stands with Palestine in the face of ongoing genocide committed by the Israeli government, which has been assisted by other Western allies like the United States.” On Oct. 24 in Washington, D.C., students at George Washington University projected the message “Divestment from Zionist Genocide Now” onto a library facade.

And on Tuesday, Craig Mokhiber, director in the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights, resigned, citing Israel for a “textbook case of genocide.”

Littell understood that “genocide” was coined in 1944 by a Polish Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin to denote “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.” Lemkin wrote that genocide is intended “to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. ”

Historian Michael Berenbaum, distinguished professor of Jewish studies at American Jewish University in Los Angeles, said that Israel has no greater ambition than to coexist with the Palestinians as peaceful neighbors and that Littell would be appalled at the suggestion that Israel was committing genocide in its attempts to root out the fighters and sever the leadership of a group that killed and kidnapped Israelis.

“I knew and worked with and deeply respected Franklin Littell for the last 40 years of his life,” Berenbaum, who was a visiting distinguished professor at Stockton under Littell, told me. “These statements would be anathema to his values.”

Richard Libowitz, coauthor with Marcia Sachs Littell and Dennis B. Klein of “The Genocidal Mind,” agreed that the Israeli incursion does not constitute genocide.

Israel “has never advocated nor sought the total annihilation of an Arab population, whether in Israel proper, the West Bank or Gaza,” said Libowitz, who received a Ph.D. in religion under Franklin Littell at Temple and is retired from the faculties of Temple and St. Joseph’s University.

Indeed, since Israel’s founding in 1948, the Palestinian population in what now includes Israel, the West Bank and Gaza has risen from 1.4 million to 6.6 million, including 1.6 million Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Libowitz acknowledged the ferocity of the Israeli military strikes on Gaza in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, as the Palestinian death toll as reported by the Hamas-run health ministry rose above 9,000.

“Civilian casualties in Gaza — especially the death of children — are tragic,” said Libowitz. “Hamas carried out the worst murder of Jews since the Holocaust and the outrage should be understood. Israel intends to destroy Hamas, but Magen David Adom [the Israeli Red Cross] personnel treated wounded terrorists after their attack. Gazans were warned to flee the northern part of the strip. This is human tragedy, but it is not genocide.”

He added: “The stated aim of Hamas — to wipe Israel from the Earth — is certainly a genocidal intent.”

Polly Zavadivker, an assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware, told me that Segal’s statements on genocide “threaten future attempts to identify, prevent, and prosecute that crime. It is equally damaging to the legitimacy of Holocaust and Genocide Studies as a field when such false claims are presented in the guise of scholarly expertise.”

Zavadivker, who teaches courses in antisemitism, the Holocaust, and comparative genocide, said that an accusation that Israel is committing genocide “renders the word meaningless.”

In 1973, after working on it for four years, Franklin Littell and 17 other Christian theologians released a 14-point statement on Israel. The statement, which appeared as an appendix in Littell’s book, seems strikingly relevant 50 years later.

“The charge is sometimes made that Israel is belligerently expansionistic as a result of its military triumphs in the Six-Day War,” it said in part. “Visitors to Israel, however, can easily discover that the overriding concern of the majority of Israelis is peace, not more territory. Israel’s anxiety about national defense reflects the age-old human yearning for security, the anxiety of a people whose history has been a saga of frightful persecution, climaxed by the Holocaust of six million men, women, and children.

“Against such a tormented background, is it surprising that the Jewish people should want to defend themselves?” they continued. “Criticism that would use the failure of Israel to live up to the highest moral standards as an excuse to deny its right to exist … would be a double standard, one not applied to any other nation on earth.”


The post The rising death toll in Gaza is tragic. But Holocaust scholars should know: It is not genocide. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Israel’s Urban Warfare Experience in Gaza Can Benefit Allies

Israeli soldiers operating in the Gaza Strip. Photo: Reuters/IDF Handout

JNS.orgThe Israel Defense Forces’ experience in fighting Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, an area described by observers as the most challenging urban warfare environment in history, likely holds important benefits for Israel’s allies.

One of the key lessons, according to Col. (res.) Dr. Eran Lerman, vice president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, is the IDF’s use of what he described as “three-dimensional warfare.”

This concept relates to creating an unprecedented capability to generate a 3D picture of the battlefield in real-time, one that shows available friendly firepower sources in the air and the ground, and the location of enemy targets. This data is then pushed to ground forces and the Israeli Air Force, enabling new levels of cooperation.

“This means that when IDF soldiers enter an alleyway, they can see what’s behind the house because someone gives them the picture of what’s in front of them,” said Lerman.

“This is definitely the most significant and heaviest complex military campaign conducted to date under these conditions, to my understanding,” Lerman, a former deputy director for foreign policy and international affairs at the National Security Council in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, and an ex-IDF Military Intelligence officer, told JNS.

Lerman said that the IDF and the U.S. Armed Forces have been engaged in a process of mutual learning for years, adding that “the Americans had their share of urban battles. It’s not that we invented the wheel, but it seems to me that there is one central component that was implemented in combat in Gaza by the IDF with very great effectiveness, and it is three-dimensional warfare.”

The unparalleled degree of integration between advancing ground forces and the air force accompanying them from above, all working on the basis of a common battlefield picture featuring continuous updates on enemy and friendly force positions, meant that the IDF gained a major advantage against “an enemy that under normal conditions would be invisible,” said Lerman.

IDF ground forces have visual assistance through tablet-like devices that inform their combat needs at any given moment, and work more closely than ever with fighter jets, combat helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as the navy.

The ground forces’ “control of the battlefield is exceptional,” said Lerman, “both at the tactical level and at the micro-tactical level. This compensates to a great extent for the advantage that Hamas had within its own territory, which Hamas is familiar with, and where it was hiding.”

A battle management system, made by Israeli defense company Elbit Systems and called Torch 750 (also known in the IDF as Digital Ground Army), played a central role in generating this ability.

“This battle picture also prevents many friendly fire incidents, though not entirely, to our sorrow,” said Lerman. “I think these are things that will be learned.”

Israeli combat history

A glance at the casualty ratio between the IDF and Hamas reveals that in many battles, the average was around 50 terrorist casualties to one IDF casualty. Some operations, such as the IDF’s second raid on Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in March, saw some 200 terrorists killed versus three Israeli combat casualties.

This wouldn’t be the first time that battle lessons were shared between Israel and its allies. While Israel is heavily dependent on American military supplies, it has also exported products developed in the wake of lessons from Israeli combat history.

In 2018, the U.S. Army purchased the Israeli-made Trophy active-protection system for four brigades of its Abrams tanks. Trophy, which is made by Israeli defense company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, has proven to be a revolutionary system for Israel’s own Merkava 4 tanks because it can instantly detect and intercept lethal armor-penetrating threats such as anti-tank guided missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. It can also share the location of enemy threats with others.

The system was developed out of the lessons learned by Israel’s defense establishment from the 2006 Second Lebanon War, when Israeli tanks were vulnerable to Hezbollah cells armed with anti-tank missiles.

In the realm of passive armor, Plasan Sasa, an Israeli company, has played an important role in boosting the survivability of the U.S. military’s Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles. In 2008, Plasan was chosen to provide armor for 1,955 vehicles of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Allied and adversary military doctrine

Bradley Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former U.S. Army officer who taught at West Point, stated, “I think there’s much to learn for foreign militaries from the experience in Gaza. I’m confident that the United States and its allies are taking copious notes.”

Bowman, a former national security adviser to members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, added, “Unfortunately, many of our adversaries are also learning.”

These lessons will shape allied and adversary military doctrine, training, and operations, he assessed. “The degree to which militaries learn from this experience will have direct consequences on future battlefields,” said Bowman.

“The U.S. military is the most powerful military in the world, arguably the most powerful military in human history, but we make mistakes and have shortcomings. We can learn much from our allies and partners, including our Israeli allies,” Bowman continued.

He described the ongoing war in Gaza as “one of the most significant urban warfare battles in recent history,” arguing that it would be a mistake to assume it is such an anomaly that few lessons are transferable.

“If there’s a ground warfare component, there’s very likely to be an urban warfare component. Why? Because a large portion of humanity lives in cities, and because the seats of government are in cities and many military objectives are in or near cities. And some military bases and headquarters themselves are essentially urban warfare environments,” Bowman said.

He drew attention to the IDF’s impressive achievements in detecting and destroying tunnels in Gaza.

“I think part of the reason for that is because they had a running start. They’ve been working on terror tunnel detection and destruction for many years with U.S. cooperation and support, but primarily focused on tunnels designed to come underneath the borders of Israel, to infiltrate Israel, to kill men, women and children in the night.”

While such detection technology previously required the IDF to be above or near the ground where the tunnel was located, the IDF in this war was able to bring tunnel detection capabilities into enemy territory, he said.

The IDF’s ability to call up large numbers of reserve forces and send them on successful missions was also notable, Bowman added, saying that partners such as Taiwan could learn from Israel’s experience with reservists.

Hezbollah, for its part, will likely learn from the Gaza war that it needs to double down on its human-shield tactics.

An additional key lesson is the sheer magnitude of munitions required in such conflicts, Bowman said. That lesson remains relevant to Israel’s operations in Gaza, Bowman said, “but even more relevant to stockpiling the weapons Israel needs for the bigger fight that’s coming sooner or later with Hezbollah and Iran.

“And if I’m Israel, what do I do with that information? I prioritize, above all else, the stockpiling of weapons that Israel will need for a major war with Hezbollah and Iran. The weapons, the munitions—particularly the air-launched precision-guided munitions that could be cut off in the future by the U.S. Congress—as Hezbollah learns from Hamas’s use of human shields to increase civilian casualties and create concern in Washington to create political pressure to deprive Israel of the means of self-defense,” he said.

“Israel should get those weapons and munitions it needs now and stockpile them so that Israel has what it needs, when and if things get much worse,” Bowman warned.

The post Israel’s Urban Warfare Experience in Gaza Can Benefit Allies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Khamenei’s War Aims

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting via video conference with people from East Azarbaijan in Tehran, Iran, February 17, 2022. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS

JNS.orgI’m sure you’ve heard commentators describe the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel as “rivals” engaged in a “tit-for-tat” conflict. That misinterprets reality.

Ali Khamenei, Iran’s “supreme leader” since 1989, seeks to establish a new Middle Eastern empire.

Israelis, by contrast, only want to survive as an independent nation within a slice of their ancient Jewish homeland.

They would like nothing better than to enjoy amicable relations with Iranians, as they did prior to Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979.

I should add: Substantial evidence suggests that most Iranians do not hate Israelis. Nor would most Iranians suffer under the jackboot of an antisemitic, misogynist, coercively religious ruling class if they had a choice.

As for the fate Khamenei envisions for Israelis, we saw a preview on Oct. 7.

Genocide is what he indisputably intends.

Apologists for Tehran insist that its proxy, Hamas, gleefully burned babies and raped young women to “resist Israeli occupation.” That would be a despicable claim even if the Israeli government had not withdrawn every last Jew from Gaza in 2005.

Two years after that, Hamas established a dictatorship and began not infrequently launching rockets at Israelis. Israel’s missile defense systems prevented most of those weapons from reaching their intended victims.

Israelis also constructed a high-tech border fence that, they were confident, would keep them secure on the ground.

Most Israelis have now come to realize that “deterrence by denial”—a purely defensive posture—allowed Hamas’ threat to metastasize. They now see the necessity for the imposition of significant costs on aggressors—“deterrence by punishment.”

On April 1, an Israeli air strike killed Mohammad Reza Zahedi, an Iranian general deployed to Damascus to assist Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Shi’ite militias in Syria, as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. He reportedly was involved in the Oct. 7 attacks.

In retaliation, Iran’s rulers on April 14 launched more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel—the first time they had ever attacked Israel not using proxies but from Iranian soil.

The attack failed thanks to the air-defense capabilities of Israel, the United States and other countries.

After that, President Biden urged Israelis to “take the win”—to be satisfied with deterrence by denial. But that would have been an invitation to Tehran to try, try again.

So, on April 19, Khamenei’s 85th birthday, Israel hit targets close to a nuclear facility and an airbase in Isfahan, in central Iran. Russian-built S-300 missile defense systems proved ineffective.

The damage was not extensive—it wasn’t intended to be—but the message was loud and clear: You attacked us, and our shield stopped you. Now you have felt the tip of our sword, which you cannot block.

This long war is far from over.

In that regard, recall that soon after entering the White House in 2009, Barack Obama stated plainly, as had previous presidents, Democrats and Republicans, that the United States has “core national security interests in making sure that Iran doesn’t possess a nuclear weapon and it stops exporting terrorism outside of its borders.”

He set out to achieve that goal with many carrots and few sticks. “We have provided a path whereby Iran can reach out to the international community, engage, and become a part of international norms,” he said. “It is up to them to make a decision as to whether they choose that path.”

What followed, as former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren noted in an essay last week in The Free Press, was “a relentless spate of Iranian aggressions,” including attacks on U.S. Navy vessels in the Persian Gulf, support for Al-Qaeda, and attempts to “assassinate the Saudi and Israeli ambassadors (including me)” in Washington, D.C.

Oren added: “Most egregiously, Iran constructed secret underground nuclear facilities and developed an intercontinental ballistic missile delivery system.”

President Obama’s response was the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which failed to “make sure” that the jihadist regime would never “possess a nuclear weapon” it could use to threaten “Death to Israel” and “Death to America!”

Instead, the JCPOA provided economic benefits to Iran’s leaders in exchange for their vague promise to make progress more slowly on their nuclear weapons program.

They were not asked to curb their development of missiles and support for terrorists.

Three years later, President Trump withdrew from that deal and imposed sanctions that debilitated Iran’s economy. But when Joe Biden moved into the White House in 2021, he attempted to revive Obama’s deal in an even weaker form.

He has since provided Khamenei with billions in funds that had been frozen, allowed some sanctions to expire and failed to enforce others. He has made no serious effort to block Iranian oil sales.

Nor has he held Khamenei responsible for deploying Shi’ite militias to attack American bases in the Middle East, or for providing weapons and other assistance to Tehran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen, who have been attacking shipping in the Red Sea.

Almost all of Khamenei’s nuclear advances—and there have been many—have occurred during the Biden administration.

Last Friday, the foreign ministers of the G-7 (the United States and six other Western nations) released a statement asserting their “determination that Iran must never develop or acquire a nuclear weapon.”

It’s doubtful that those words on paper prompted Khamenei to reassess his grand ambition to establish a nuclear-armed, anti-American empire in league with the nuclear-armed, anti-American regimes in Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang.

He continues to regard the Jewish state as a cancer to be extirpated.

That’s why what we’re witnessing is no rivalry or game of tit for tat. It’s a battle in a long war, one that will shape the world our children inherit.

The post Khamenei’s War Aims first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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University of Toronto issues warning against campus encampments in response to protest scenes in Montreal and beyond

The Canadian Jewish News will be closed from the evening of April 28 to the evening of April 30 to celebrate the last two days of Passover. Look for more coverage on May 1 including future episodes of The CJN Daily podcast with Ellin Bessner. Sandy Welsh, the vice-provost of the University of Toronto, issued […]

The post University of Toronto issues warning against campus encampments in response to protest scenes in Montreal and beyond appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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