Apartheid works fine as a word for what's going on but when people go straight for 'genocide' is when the alarm bells ring.
Let’s start with “ethnic cleansing”. Although this is a relatively recent phrase, the early leaders of the Zionist project were quite clear that this is what they wanted to do, without using the modern phrase. They saw the indigenous people not just as inconvenient, but as ethnic “enemies”. That is they were considered enemies because they were from other ethnic communities. Indeed, they even used the term “cleanse”:
According to Benny Morris, recently declassified documents in the archives of the IDF reveal that in 1947, Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders concluded that a Jewish state could not come into being in the territory assigned to Jews by the UN
without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians…. In the months of April–May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.
This resulted in “far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought,” including “many cases of rape [that] ended in murder” and executions of Palestinians who were lined up against a wall and shot (in Operation Hiram).
The dismantling of Palestinian society, the destruction of Palestinian towns and villages, and the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians were not unavoidable consequences of the war declared on the emerging Jewish state by Arab countries. Rather, as Morris repeatedly confirms, it was a deliberate and planned operation intended to “cleanse” (the term used in the declassified documents) those parts of Palestine assigned to the Jews as a necessary pre-condition for the emergence of a Jewish state.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/02/26/israel-the-threat-from-within/
There is detailed evidence over and over for attitudes like this from the Zionist movement, and repeated evidence over and over for it having taken place. And this is the 1948 period alone, not that which took before or after. And these were not refugees “fleeing a war”. Indeed, an estimated 50% of the total expulsions of that period took place before the “Arab-Israeli” war began.
Ilan Pappe has detailed evidence for the approximately 1 million people expelled from their homes at gunpoint, and hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed. This is irrefutable evidence of planned ethnic cleansing. (Though, of course, people who don’t like the evidence prefer to discount as much of it as they feel they can get away with, saying, for example, the numbers were lower, or there were fewer forced expulsions than claimed, fewer killings than claimed, and so on. All of which should spark at least some recognition).
And then we have the 1967 annexations.
Following the 1967 war, when the remaining 22 percent of Arab Palestine came under Israeli occupation, the UN adopted resolutions 242 and 338, which affirmed the obligation of Arab countries to recognize Israel’s legitimacy and its right to live in security, but also insisted on the inadmissibility of Israel’s acquisition of territory in the West Bank and Gaza as a result of the 1967 war.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/02/26/israel-the-threat-from-within/
Note, the UN resolutions, far from being blindly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel, “
affirmed the obligation of Arab countries to recognize Israel’s legitimacy and its right to live in security”. So, we have to conclude that the only reason for rejecting the resolutions is that the Israeli state wants to continue to act outside of international law.
This is without looking at the post-1967 period, the wall, Gaza, "punitive" home demolishing, collective punishment, and so on. But I invite anyone to look at the facts on the ground (and if one doesn’t like non-Israeli human rights organisations, try Israeli organisations:
Publications ) and compare them with the definition of genocide in international law:
Genocide is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part1 ; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
http://www.un.org/ar/preventgenocide/adviser/pdf/osapg_analysis_framework.pdf
Are the Israeli state’s actions “genocide”? More than 300 Holocaust survivors and their descendants think so.
Holocaust survivors and their descendants accuse Israel of