I think we need to be very careful. The word genocide has a precise meaning. Israel may be militarily capable of carrying out genocide in the occupied Palestinian territories, but that really tells us nothing. Genocide means the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group. Note that: physical extermination. Israel could not get away with that on a diplomatic level. There is too much media attention on the region. Particularly extreme elements of Zionism may advocate genocide, but, again that doesn’t really tell us much.

What Israel, including the mainstream of Zionism from left to right, *has* advocated and practised from the pre-state period up until the present day is ethnic cleansing — an important difference. They aim to rid the land of the native population. The Nazis had a fanatical hatred of the Jews, ultimately leading to genocide against them — probably the worst in history. The relationship between the Zionists and the Palestinians — the native people of the land — is different in many respects. In common with all European colonist movements, the main attitude is one of racist disdain for the “savages”. They just didn’t really consider them fully human. As the brilliant Nur Masalha writes of Israel Zangwell’s infamous slogan “a land without a people for a people without land” in his classic book ‘Expulsion of the Palestinians’ (page 6):

“Neither Zangwell nor Weitzman intended these demographic assessments in a literal fashion. They did not mean that there were no people in Palestine, but that there were no people worth considering within the framework of the notions of European supremacy that then held sway… When asked by Ruppin about the Palestinian Arabs, Weitzman replied: ‘The British told us that there are some hundred thousands negros [Kushim] and for those there is no value.’”

For the most part, it’s not that they consider them “vermin” so much as “inferior”. Hence they looked for the most practical and fast way to rid the land of them. What they planned in the pre-state period and executed in 1948 was select massacres, the fear or direct threat of which caused most Palestinians to flee the land that is now Israel. This is amply documented from Zionist archives by Masalah and others like him (notably Ilan Pappe).

This is ethnic cleansing, not genocide. This distinction in no way diminishes the historical injustice done to the Palestinians or their current oppression. There is little value in a competition about who was the most oppressed. The fact that the European Jews suffered genocide at the hands of the Nazis in no way means that the Palestinians are any less entitled to humans rights, justice, freedom and self-determination.

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