JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

200 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 3:199
commanders (Avidan, Sadeh, Carmel, and the CoS Yadin) opposed this.
Some didn’t, and expelled Arabs—Alon, Even. In the few cases where
Arabs had the upper hand, nothing remained of the Jewish villages (Gush
Etzion, Kalia).
I think academics should be careful. There is a difference between conflict
and genocide. Kashmir is a conflict, not a genocide. Sri Lanka could
have become a genocide, but didn’t; it remained a bloody, horrible conflict.
Chechnya is a frightful conflict that could, and did, almost become a genocide,
but caused many thousands of casualties. In Palestine/Israel, there
were two massacres: Deir Yassin, with more than 100 victims (no one has
exact figures), committed by a Jewish group; and the medical Jewish convoy
to Mount Scopus, with 46 doctors and nurses, committed by Arabs.
Neither was a genocidal act. These were massacres, though compared with
Kashmir, for instance, or Zimbabwe, or the mass murder in Hama in Syria
in 1982 (some 10.000 civilian dead), or Chechnya, they pale into relative
insignificance. If we are humanists, however, we have to deal with every
case like this, whether we talk about tens, or hundreds, or thousands; they
were live people who wanted to live. But one has to keep proportions,
nevertheless.
The 1948 war was a war—which is a tautology, but tautologies have
the advantage of being true. It was, and continues to be, a bloody conflict.
Israeli invasions of the Lebanon in 1982 and 2006 were incursions causing
a large number of civilian casualties on both sides, but mostly on the Lebanese
side; you can argue until you are blue in the face about who was
responsible, and where right and wrong are. But people were killed, so that
makes it a conflict. Conflicts can, and sometimes do, deteriorate into genocidal
situations; genocidal situations can, and sometimes do, become conflicts.
Conflicts can, sometimes, usually, mostly be settled. Genocides have
to be prevented, stopped. There is a difference. The 1948 war was, in my
view, a typical case of a conflict. It could have become a genocide, on
either side. It didn’t.
In a conflict situation, we very rarely have a back-and-white picture. In
the Arab-Israeli conflict, I think both sides are absolutely right, and that
both sides are dead wrong. The moment you take one side only, you help
the conflict to bleed further, and increase the danger of its becoming genocidal.
Should genocide scholars become involved in attempts to help settle
conflicts? That, it seems to me, is up to every individual. To say, as some
have implied in this current argument, that Israel is an illegitimate entity
means in fact that as it is illegitimate it should be somehow abolished,
which of course is a genocidal statement, because it means that the 6.2
million Jews there should be either killed or expelled (or both). When you
say that Palestinians have no right to their independence, or you want to