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"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August 2018)
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"How do you spell ICE in German? GESTAPO." (S. Jonas, July 2025)
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Tom Paine, December 23, 1776
"THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. . . . [I]t would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated."
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In my view, the answer to the question posed in the title of this column is, in a word, "no." As I have written on a number of occasions (see the Addendum, below), what the State of Israel is doing to the Palestinians, in Gaza, in the West Bank, and to some extent in parts of Israel proper, rather can be best defined as part-and-parcel of the Israeli, and the pre-Israel policy of some of the pre-State "Zionists" (a word that has several meanings), as what I have termed "Expulsionism." It is a policy that was originally defined by the leading post-World War I promoter of it, one Ze'ev Jabotinsky. (As it happens there is a family lineage for the presence/adoption of that policy in present-day Israel. For one Ben-Zion Netanyahu, who just happens to have been the father of Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, was a Secretary to Jabotinsky. "Like Father, like son" does not always hold. But it surely holds here.)
As I have pointed out on more than one occasion, the modern State of Israel was in the beginning the product of a political anti-Semitism that developed in Central, then Eastern, Europe, beginning in Austria in the late 1870s. The then-contemporary type of "Zionism," that Jews, especially Central and Eastern European Jews, to escape the growing power of poltical anti-Semitism, (that is, briefly, traditional cultural/religious anti-Semitism used for electoral political purposes) should move to what was then a province of the Ottoman Empire called Palestine. It was indeed for many of them a response to expulsionist anti-Semitism, rather than some sort of a fanciful notion of a "Land of Zion" that had been part of European Jewish ("Next Year in Jerusalem") mythology/ideology for centuries. The most prominent leader of that movement was, of course, Theodor Herzl.
Of course, upon arriving in Ottoman Palestine the European Jewish immigrants found it to be already occupied by a native, Muslim, people, commonly called Palestinians. The above-mentioned Ze'ev Jabotinsky was one of the Jews who arrived after World War I who proposed that in order to deal with the "previously occupied" problem, the Palestinians simply be expelled. And so, how ironic it is that the current Israeli policy of what I call "Expulsionism" is being led by a direct ideological descendant one of the original Expulsionists.
Why Does the State of Israel Exist?
This is a very complicated question (duh!), but it can in the first (least complicated) analysis be reduced to a few simple historical points. Thus, on emigration to Palestine, then Israel, over time.
1. The original Herzl-led emigration fueled by rising European political anti-Semitism.
2. The continued emigration of European Jews following World War I, at least in part due to the rising anti-Semitism in Germany (and from 1933 onwards, Nazi Germany).
3. The intensifying Nazi-led anti-Semitism in Germany, symbolized by the removal of German citizenship from all German Jews in 1935. That of course led to an increasing desire to emigrate from that country, to a world which, for the most part didn't want them.
4. See, for example, the refusal of the United States, governed by the highly restrictive and prejudiced Immigration Act of 1925, to accept Jewish refugees (see, e.g., the German MS St. Louis incident, 1939), with the exception of certain artists, scientists, musicians/composers, and literary figures.
5. Typical of the World's attitude towards the Jews of Europe who did want to leave, in 1938 a conference was convened at Evian, France, through which about 900,000 European Jews applied for admission to one or more of the nations attending. Virtually none of them took in any number of the applicants.
6. Then, after WWII, after the Holocaust, there were about 11,000,000 "displaced persons" living in camps throughout Europe. About 250,000 of them were Jews who, again, no nation wanted. It is said that most of them made their way to the "British Mandate" which was the successor to the "Palestine" of the Ottoman Empire, created by the League of Nations, post-World War I.
7. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 following the United Nations authorized Partition, a significant number of non-Ashkenazi (European) Jews, the Sephardim, from Arab countries, made their way to Israel.
8. A very complicated series of steps occurred began in May 1948, beginning with the relinquishing by UK Government of the "Palestine Mandate" that they had held since post-World War I, to govern Palestine. This was one of the actions which led to the Partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish sectors, finalized by that UN resolution, in May, 1948. There followed the Invasion of the Israeli sector by the Five Arab Nations. The ultimate consequence of that war was the expansion of the borders of the State of Israel, including the incorporation of Jerusalem (which, under the UN mandate was to have been an international city) into it.
9. Very briefly, the borders of the modern State of Israel were subsequently established as the result of the "Six Days War" (1967, a thwarted Arab-nation invasion), modified by the "Yom Kippur" war of 1973. Then, with Egypt, the Sinai Accords of 1979 established the present boundaries.
Notably, one of sections of the former British Mandate, the "West Bank," or, as the Israeli Nationalists call it "Judea and Samaria" (as it was known in Biblical times), which under Partition was supposed to be Palestinian territory, has, because of a variety of tactics used by modern Israeli Nationalists which appear to have the ultimate objective of Palestinian Expulsion (see, e.g., Click Here), become one of the two central foci of the continuing struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinians from the time of Ottoman Palestine. The other focus, of course, being "Gaza," or the "Gaza Strip," which according to the original UN Partition determination of 1948 was to be Palestinian Territory.
Is what Israel is doing "Genocide?"
Historical examples of genocide, that is an attempt to either wipe out or significantly displace significant numbers of people, defined by their ethnicity, from territory which they have occupied either by treaty or by geographical-reality for some significant period of time, have had a racial basis in each instance.
1. The Crushing of the Indian Nations in North America, in terms of numbers, living space, and the destruction of their traditional cultures, in my view amounts to genocide (probably the largest of them, historically).
2. "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh," the great novel by Franz Werfel, described the murder/expulsion of up to 1.5 million Armenians in/from Turkey (the remnant of the Ottoman Empire) during World War I
3. The Holocaust.
In my view, what the Israeli Nationalists are doing, or attempting to do, to the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank does not amount to genocide yet, because it does not focus on killing them (although can be a side-effect). However, it is clear, particularly in the context of what they are doing to the Palestinians in the West Bank (and in Southern Lebanon as well), that a holocaust could be the outcome.
Further, I think that what the term is used for is irrelevant to what the outcomes are for the Palestinian people living in Gaza: expulsion for most (to where has not seem to have been yet worked out by the expellers), essentially forced labor at low wages for the rest. (And the "For-Profit-Plan" does not seem to have dealt with such matters as schools, health care, pure water supply, and so forth, for the remaining Palestinians.) Of course in the 1948 Partition, Gaza was designated as "Palestinian."
Finally (and very briefly for now), I find it fascinating that in the history of one of the largest expulsions/killings (either directly, or by starvation for the Plains Indians, with the slaughter of the buffalo) from lived-in-for-millennia territory, which within most definitions would qualify as genocide, in both what became the U.S. and Canada, it is little noticed that one of the motives for the "War of Independence" was to reverse the then United Kingdom policy that there was to be no settler expansion-Westward beyond the then western boundaries of the then colonies.
Much more needs to be studied and written about the treatment of Native Americans by the European settlers. But in that context, one can note in the Northwest Ordinance (Click Here), which established the first legal framework for U.S. expansion westward, the following provision:
"Article III. Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity, shall from time to time be made for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them. [31]"
Oh my!!
As it happened "many Native Americans in Ohio who were not parties refused to acknowledge treaties signed after the Revolutionary War that ceded lands north of the Ohio River inhabited by them to the United States. In a conflict sometimes known as the Northwest Indian War, Blue Jacket of the Shawnees and Little Turtle of the Miami's formed a confederation to stop white expropriation of the territory. After the Indian confederation killed more than 800 soldiers in two battles, the worst defeats ever suffered by the United States in conflicts with Indigenous nations, U.S. President George Washington assigned General Anthony Wayne command of a new army, which eventually defeated the confederation and allowed European Americans to continue to settle the territory."
Of course much has already been studied and written about the treatment of the indigenous persons living in North America. But again, given what happened to those (estimated 10 million) people, clearly a genocide, "genocide" is not the correct term to applied to the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians living in the original territory of the "Mandate." Expulsionism is.
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Addendum, SJ columns on Israeli Policy of Palestinian Expulsionism:
(Article changed on Aug 03, 2026 at 3:44 PM EDT)
(Article changed on Aug 03, 2026 at 7:02 PM EDT)
(Article changed on Aug 03, 2026 at 10:11 PM EDT)
(Article changed on Aug 04, 2026 at 8:45 AM EDT)
