The Israeli lawmaker heralding genocide against Palestinians

JVL Introduction

This article is old, dating from May 2017. It was misdated and posted in error.

So we took it down as it is not currently relevant. But the link to it has gone out in our weekly mailing and people are querying the “Not found” message they are getting

We are therefore made it available again with this caveat.

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The author of the article reposted below is Prof Daniel Blatman, a historian of the Holocaust and genocide at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Here he discusses Belazel Smotrich, an elected representative of a party in the governing coalition, who has raised the option of genocide against the Palestinians.

Smotrich’s hero is Joshua Bin Nun, and he takes the biblical words of the Book of Joshua as the literal truth.

As Blatman points out, this Book describes actions that are explicitly defined as genocide in the 1948 UN Convention on the topic and indeed show remarkable similarities with Heinrich Himmler’s genocidal instructions in 1943.

There are those in Britain and elsewhere who would rule such historical comparisons taboo.

Fortunately, Blatman is free to express his views in Israel and Haaretz is willing to publish them.

This article was originally published by Haaretz on Tue 23 May 2017. Read the original here.