SAY IT LOUD- GENOCIDE

In The Forgotten "-ism:", the writers bring up a specific obstacle in tackling the aid of Zionism by Western nations. That claim state of Israel has to the word "genocide"- the deliberate killing of a larger group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation. Many people don't know that a group of people can legally claim the rights to a word, or that that claim to the word can have dangerous impacts on others.

In section C of the reading, "The Anti-Semitic Charge: A Silencing Strategy", they write, "the Zionist project use(s) the experience of the Holocaust to legitimate the creation of an exclusionary state at the expense of the displaced indigenous Arab population, it also attempts to foreclose the possibility of other peoples- whether in Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, Turkey, Afghanistan, or Palestine- from calling attention to genocidal practices which in many ways mirror the atrocities that took place in World War II, even if not on the same scale" (12). This is one of the many ways that Zionists protect their occupation of Palestine- by illegitamizing the struggles of other groups, LIKE THE PALESTINIANS, in order to highlight the Jewish genocide and make that of other nations look more like an irrationality than anything else. The authors' inclusion of this strategy is vital to understanding the bigger picture of Zionism- as it is a worldwide movement, not exclusive to the people inhabiting occupied Palestine.

The criticism of the Israeli occupation is included under the contradictory definition of  anti-Semitism. The understanding that there is an injustice being done to Palestinians is seen as a hate-crime to the Jewish community. Unfortunately, it is hard for Zionists and allies of them to believe that Jewish people themselves organize against their (il)legal occupation of Palestine and fight for the freedom of the people they oppress on their own land. It is very possible to be a Jewish person and anti-Zionist, or an ally of the Jewish community and anti-Zionist, as there is no correlation between fighting for the freedom of a nation while discriminating against an entire group of people who happen to share the same religion as the oppressor; if that were the case, then every Christian/Catholic person would be discriminated against by those who fought for the rights and freedoms of black people in the U.S. or EVEN Jewish people in Nazi Germany. Therefore, the use of the word genocide for non-Jewish genocidal actions does not take away from the persecution of Jewish people during the Holocaust. Rather, it builds agency for other persecuted peoples and gives recognition to OTHER atrocities in the world (because this is NOT the only one and we refuse to believe it is!).

Just how greatly does this affect victims of unrecognized genocides in the world? I come from a war-torn country- Yugoslavia. My family and I have found refuge in the U.S. from the genocide of our people by Serbian soldiers and civilians, and we cannot even call it a genocide. The Genocide of Srebrenica was THE worst tragedy of Bosna-Hercegovina, claiming the lives of approximately 8,373 innocent people in 1995. To this day, we cannot legally call this tragedy a genocide because Israel's hostage of this word has aided Serbia in ignoring their faults and their acts of terror on us. This has resulted in the inability to gain funds for families of the victims and promote a reconstruction of our economy/society. Today, our country is just barely in ruins, with civilians emigrating from it every day for better opportunities in neighboring countries. The lack of a legal definition for what happened in our country simplifies it to a Civil war, something it was not (as Bosnia's lack of weapons, funds, aid, and military in comparison to Serbia's provided a bias in the war).

I want to simply know how a group can claim the rights to a word, how it can live with the consequences to this, and how we can work to change it.