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Oxford Handbooks Online. Publications Pages Publications Pages. Recently viewed 0 Save Search. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies.
For one thing, we are witness to contending polemics—nothing new there. Israelis and Arabs of various descriptions have been doing it for a long time, and so have American Jews with each other. Israeli settlements are all in the 60 percent of the West Bank called Area C, which is under the control of the Israeli army. So Netanyahu set out in his video to transform a supposed intention into an imminent threat, an exaggeration in practice if there ever was one.
Similarly, many Palestinians in recent years have accused Israel of ethnically cleansing parts of Palestine of Arabs, and of wanting in its dark heart of hearts to cleanse all of Palestine of Arabs.
In retrospect all of this looks to have been one kind of exaggeration or another on the part of Palestinian polemicists, for virtually no one in Israel today, even on the fairly far Right, speaks of transfer. What can one say of political language, you ask? Adding the two thoughts together, we arrive at a conclusion, which, in this case goes like this: Ethnic cleansing means whatever a speaker or writer wants it to mean and is allowed to get away with meaning, and if that speaker or writer is a politician you can bet the rent that some kind of intentional misrepresentation is behind it all.
That is not very comforting, perhaps. There are multitudinous examples of such vocabulary creep. Take the word terrorism, for example. What does it mean? It used to have an agreed meaning. It meant the use of random deadly violence against civilians for the purpose of evoking terror, the better to goad some targeted adversary into a counterproductive reaction or to gain media exposure for a cause, or both. Since when is attacking uniformed military personnel on foreign soil or in foreign waters consistent with the definition of terrorism noted above?
To most Americans, terrorism is simply an all-purpose name for evil coming from alien sources. As best as my experience can discern, there is nothing that can be done about this. The same goes for the word genocide.
And it followed, as everyone knew back at a certain time, that genuine efforts at genocide focused on murdering women and children, since these are the keys to the perpetuation of a targeted population.
This is no longer how the term is used. Most younger people, my undergraduate students being a case in point, use genocide as a synonym for mass murder. This is likely because of a constant degradation in the usage of the term over the years from its original meaning in trying to come to terms with the Nazi Holocaust.
The first degradation came from the effort to accuse Turks of genocide against Armenians. This is a close case. Some Armenians marched at the head of a Russian army in a war—World War I—aimed at destroying the Ottoman Empire, hardly comparable to the situation of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Some Turkish leaders clearly supported and even enjoyed an unrestrained and utterly sadistic campaign to murder innocent Armenians. But the purpose of the murders was to drive Armenians off of what was at the time imagined would become postwar Turkish lands, not to exterminate all Armenians. Surely it must have been a dictator? Ethnic cleansing? Ethnic cleansing--an attempt at methodology?
The English phrase? In a despatch regarding a decision of the Croatian Supreme Council to mobilize extra police reservists in the conflict with Serbian guerrillas in Croatia, Reuters reported that the Supreme Council had accused Serbian guerrillas of wanting to drive Croats out of towns mainly populated by Serbs and quoted the Council:?
The aim of this expulsion is obviously the ethnic cleansing of the critical areas The obviously related expression? At the time, and for at least five years thereafter, it was used exclusively to describe the efforts of Albanian nationalists to drive Serbs from the autonomous Yugoslavian province of Kosovo with the goal of merging Kosovo into Albania.
Few journalists who employ the expression know where it originated [
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