Israel and genocide
Brigitte DEMEURE
Thanks Benny,
I feel so helpless: what can we do besides demonstrations, pétitions, sending money and helping someone here and there...
You can also have a look on the Somo website in the NL https://www.somo.nl/ how they try to make corporations accountable which work with the Israeli state and army...
Brigitte
Le 06/08/2025 à 16h39, Benny Beit-Hallahmi a écrit :I don’t think that terminology matters.
Whether you want to use the term genocide or not, the people in Gaza are being tortured and killed every day.
For months, the IDF has been telling people there to move to safe zones, and such orders were issued again today.
This is supposedly to protect civilians. Why does the world accept the reality in which hundreds of thousands of homeless people are told to move around, and then are attacked in these safe zones, which are never safe?
Over the past year, tens of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank have been expelled from the homes which had been destroyed. Why is the world ignoring this?
Israel is still enjoying an immunity from criticism, because of historical anti-Semitism, or current anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is real but cannot serve as an excuse for current crimes.
These are being committed because of the support offered by the United States and other Western countries. The memory of the Holocaust has been used by Israel and its supporters since 1945 to great advantage.
Crimes against Jews cannot justify crimes against the Palestinians.
Benny
From: clios...@googlegroups.com <clios...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Brian D'Agostino
Sent: Wednesday, August 6, 2025 2:49 PM
To: clios...@googlegroups.com
Cc: Howard Stein <hfs...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [cliospsyche] Israel and genocide
Thank you Howard, Benny, and Esa. Esa, genocidal intent can in part be inferred from a pattern of actions, as Bartov points out. Whether it is present in this case is precisely one of the questions being investigated by the International Court of Justice as part of South Africa's case.
Benny provides an important reminder that history cannot be reduced to psychology, a principle that clinicians and psychohistorians frequently forget. In this case, the expropriation of the Palestinians is the elephant in the room. That said, the gratuitously cruel and sadistic form that Israel's starvation campaign is taking is indeed something that requires a psychological explanation, which is where Howard's remarks become relevant. I also want to thank Howard for unpacking and developing the "psychology of ideology" that is lurking over this whole idea that it is somehow an abomination to apply the term "genocide" to Israel. Some years back, Howard wrote a seminal article in the Journal of Psychohistory applying Volkan's concept of "chosen trauma" to the case of Jewish exceptionalism; perhaps Howard or someone else can provide the reference.
On Wed, Aug 6, 2025 at 6:14 AM Benny Beit-Hallahmi <be...@psy.haifa.ac.il> wrote:
Howard Stern asks: “How could a group of people (Jewish Israelis) who have been so terribly victimized over centuries turn into such brutal victimizers, rather than have empathy for the people they harm?”
May I offer a correction. Jewish Israelis have not been victimized over centuries. That’s impossible.
Let me inject a bit of reality.
Jewish Israelis have always been victimizers, because the State of Israel was created through the dispossession of the indigenous population. Most Israeli men have some military experience. The military has one goal, and that is keeping down the Palestinians.
Zionism did not start after 1945. It started in the 19th century.
Let me introduce a quotation I often refer to.
David Millard, an American preacher who visited Palestine in 1842, left us this prophetic warning:
“Should the time ever take place when the Jews shall again possess the land of their fathers, a very important overturn must first take place with the nations and tribes that surround it. The land is at present inhabited by native Arabs, who till the soil and mainly people the towns and villages. The question arises, how are these inhabitants to be dispossessed of the land? Is a purchase contemplated? Who, or what power is to enforce such a purchase, and where would the present inhabitants emigrate to? Or is it contemplated that they are to be driven out by the sword? This, I am convinced, is the only means by which the land can be cleared of its present population. But in this case, the native inhabitants would, of course, be driven back upon Arabia, which bends like a crescent round the south and east of the Holy Land. The present inhabitants would not thus be driven out without obstinacy and bloodshed, carrying with them at the same time, the most malignant inveteracy. From Arabia, aided by other tribes, they would sally from time to time, to ravage and lay waste the whole land” (Millard, 1843, p. 348).
This was 100 years before the Holocaust.
Benny
From: clios...@googlegroups.com <clios...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Howard Stein
Sent: Wednesday, August 6, 2025 5:54 AM
To: clios...@googlegroups.com; Howard Stein <hfs...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [cliospsyche] Israel and genocide
9-5-2025
Dear Brian (and all my friends on the cliospsyche listserve),
Good Tuesday evening from Oklahoma. I have read Brian's mini-essay (in the form of a letter) many times. To me it is incisive, well-reasoned, empirically substantiated, and courageous. To my ears, it addresses, among many things, the power of language, and the language of power. Brian raises the questions of whether terms/concepts such as genocide, Holocaust, and other mass atrocities can be claimed and used as the exclusive intellectual-emotional "property" of speicific groups, or whether they can be adopted for comparative purposes (if I may put it in social science jargon for the moment) of promoting greater understanding of unconscious/political/special interest role in these widespread, recurrent horrific events.
I wish to turn to a conceptual matter that concerns the history of some widely used terms:
Consider the terms Holocaust and Shoah: A passage by the World Jewish Congress/UNESCO reads:
“Holocaust” is the English term and “Shoah” the Hebrew term used to describe the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany during World War II.Both terms have a theological or cosmic dimension. “Holocaust” is derived from the Greek for burnt offering and is generally defined as a vast destruction caused by fire or other non-human forces. “Shoah,” meanwhile, has its biblical root in the term “shoah u-meshoah” (wasteness and desolation) that appears in both the Book of Zephaniah (1:15) and the Book of Job (30:3).
https://aboutholocaust.org/en/facts/what-is-the-difference-between-holocaust-and-shoah. Accessed 9-5-2025. World Jewish Congress/ UNESCO
In my admittedly limited reading, the term Holocaust (Hebrew Shoah) has been both claimed by many Jewish people as the distinct, unique horror of the Nazi period 1933-1945. The largely mass-produced and industrialized murder of Jews, Roma, Soviet war prisoners, is claimed by many Jews as a history-and culture-bound horrific phenomena that cannot and must never be used for comparative purposes. The same is true for the term genocide. It is as if to say: "However horrible mass murders have been for other human groups, nothing can be compared with the genocide and Holocaust committed, in Lucy Dawidowitz' felicitious phrase, "the war against the Jews" (if I remeber the title of her book accurately). It is not an outright claim that "ours was worse, more terrible," but I believe this idea and feeling are implicit.
In the late 1970's John Mack coined the term "egoism of victimization," and around the same time, I developed the notion of "narcissism of victimization." Vamik Volkan and his colleagues have developed much further these notions of entitlement to revenge, in an effort to reverse or undo historic wrongs. Volkan's notion of "Chosen Trauma" directs our attention to the unconscious elaboration, re-writing, distortion, mythologization, selective use of historical data in the service of current unconscious and political needs. The role of often-charismatic leadership in exploiting collective hurts and vulnerabilities is essential to the social mobilization of people to commit mass atrocities.
Repetition compulsion/re-enactment in the service of turning passive victimization to active victimization is implicit in Brian's astute parenthetical wondering at the end of his description of how "The Netanyahu government has reduced the food distribution sites in Gaza from 400 to 4, creating a grotesque "Hunger Games" situation of starving people scrambling over one another for a piece of bread. (Ask yourself what historical intergenerational trauma this policy could be re-enacting)."
We come, I believe, to the widely asked question: How could a group of people (Jewish Israelis) who have been so terribly victimized over centuries turn into such brutal victimizers, rather than have empathy for the people they harm? To my mind, the first issue is why is this so incomprehensible? At least part of the answer lies in generations and centuries of Jewish sages and writers describing Jews as the "martyr people," for whom periodic mass exile and slaughter is expected. Another part is the expectation of many Christian (and other?) groups that this is the historical role of the Jewish people (sometimes as eternal punishment for the accusation that "the Jews killed Christ').
After World War II and the Jewish Shoah, many Jews, including many in Israel, vowed "Never Again!" would they allow this to happen to them. Many para-military and pre-national armed forces formed to try to prevent this: e.g., Haganah, Palmach, Irgun. The attack from all sides immediately after the declaration of Statehood in 1948 helped consolidate the "Never Again!" vow and slogan. Largely through the military support of Israel by the US (and other European countries?), and the implicit American use/exploitation of Israel as an extension of its power in the eastern Mediterranean, Israel became armed to the hilt and became the mighty (nuclear?) power that it is now.
In recent years, Palestinian/Gazan/Hamas slogans and calls for "From the [Jordan] River to the Sea" both confronted Israeli Jews with current annihilation wishes and threats, and reactivated historical wounds. After Hamas' terrorist attacks, especially October 3rd 2023, and rocket inundations, Israeli political and military policy quickly escalated into the relentless destruction of Gazan people, cities, and culture itself. The idea that this might in fact be an act of genocide gained credence. When the IDF (I believe) declared that there are no Gaza innocent women and children, ordinary citizens, but that everyone was a terrorist, all Gazans became vulnerable to many IDF members' brutality and shooting of people waiting in lines for distribution of food.
As a result, what in Israeli Jewish ideology could not and must not be called genocide, in fact became in action what genocide is. Victims can become victimizers. Comparative history and psychohistory is not only possible, but essential. The power to control language has found its limits; reality confronts denial and rationalization. Ideological exceptionalism has more and more cracks in its concrete edifice.
I have written this as commentary and extension of Brian's outstanding essay. I may err in some details, but the integrity of Brian's contribution is irrefutable. Thank you, my friend, Brian.
Warmest regards,
Howard
Howard F. Stein
7501 W. Britton Rd., Apt. 273,
Oklahoma City OK 73132 USA
E-mail: hfs...@gmail.com ;
Cell Phone: 405-226-2484
Poet Laureate, High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology;
Psychohistorical Poet Laureate
On Sun, Aug 3, 2025 at 3:55 AM Brian D'Agostino <bdagost...@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear colleagues,
As we all know from press reports, Israel is starving the civilian population of Gaza (largely children). The Netanyahu government has reduced the food distribution sites in Gaza from 400 to 4, creating a grotesque "Hunger Games" situation of starving people scrambling over one another for a piece of bread. (Ask yourself what historical intergenerational trauma this policy could be re-enacting).
In addition, in the nearly two years since the horrific and evil events of 7 October 2023, Israel has essentially bombed Gaza back to the stone age. In both public and "expert" opinion, more and more people are describing these policies as "genocide." Others claim that, however reprensible, these policies should not be called genocide because the analogy with the Nazi Holocaust that this term suggests is both false and anti-Semitic. This argument seems to assume that "genocide," on the model of the Final Solution, is any largely successful effort to murder every member of a religious or ethnically defined group.
In an effort to shed light on these questions, I looked up in Wikipedia the Genocide Convention, which provides the authoritative definition of genocide under international law. According to this 1948 treaty, genocide is any of five acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:"
"(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
In the case of Gaza, it would appear that primarily (b) and (c) are the forms that genocide is taking (committed with the genocidal intent indicated), including starvation and the systematic destruction of Gaza's infrastructure. Apropos this, Holocaust historian Omer Bartov recently published an Op Ed in the New York Times (see attached), followed by an interview in the Times responding to his critics (also included in the attached). Bartov wrote:
"I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group."
As just one of many examples of genocidal intent expressed by Israel's leaders, Bartov cites Nissim Vaturi, deputy speaker of the Israeli Parliament, who said on X that Israel’s task must be “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” Bartov concluded back in May 2024 that Israel was committing genocide, and he cites a number of other genocide scholars who have since come that conclusion. I believe his attached article and interview constitute as good a starting point as any for a needed discussion on this internet forum of this urgent and painful topic.
Brian D'Agostino, Ph.D.
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Howard F. Stein
7501 W. Britton Rd., Apt. 273,
Oklahoma City OK 73132 USA
E-mail: hfs...@gmail.com ;
Cell Phone: 405-226-2484
Poet Laureate, High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology;
Psychohistorical Poet Laureate
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