Defending the indefensible

“What is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide”, Pope Francis has said. “We should investigate carefully to assess whether this fits into the technical definition (of genocide) formulated by international jurists and organisations.”  That’s moderate language to a fault.

Amichai Chikli is a member of Netenyahu’s cabinet and says this amounts to a “trivialisation” of the word genocide. “As a people who lost six million of its sons and daughters in the Holocaust, we are particularly sensitive to the trivialisation of the term ‘genocide’ – a trivialisation that comes dangerously close to Holocaust denial”.

Well now. Since Francis hasn’t mentioned the Holocaust, it’s hard to see how he “comes dangerously close” to denying it. My Oxford dictionary tells me that genocide means “mass murder, especially among a particular race or nation.” “As a people who lost six million of its sons and daughters in the Holocaust, we are particularly sensitive to the trivialisation of the term ‘genocide’”  Amichai declares.

Indeed. It is without doubt that the killing of six million Jews is many times more gross than the 45,000+ Palestinians killed in the past year.   But it’s hard to think of the slaughter we see on our screens nightly as being  somehow not as bad.  It’s a question of scale. Killing any race or people at either level is a repulsive act, and the inclusion of what’s been happening in Gaza in no sense takes away from what happened to Jews during WW2.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter a damn what you call it.  Both events were and are inhuman on a grand scale.  I don’t know if any Nazi claimed that they did anything but gas six million Jews. But Israel is strong in its denial that its ‘defence’ forces are doing anything  but pursuing the enemy: ”It is solely hunting down Hamas militants and other Palestinian armed groups.”

Now that’s a lie and an insult. Its flat contradiction is on our screens nightly. Journalists, doctors, aid workers, children, women, men –  Israel is killing them all. To say otherwise is false and an insult to the viewers’ intelligence.

A steaming dung-heap of denial, a mountain of rubble covering shattered  bodies:  both are  obscene beyond words.