Genocide? Seeing Israel Where It Is Not - by Sheri Oz

So how did Rev Dr Ployd, the editor, claim that Kireopoulos examines genocide with respect to the “conflict over Palestine”? Perhaps he just automatically associates the word ‘genocide’ with ‘Palestine’ as apparently many scholars, who have been infected with BDS mentality, do.

Sheri Oz..
Israel Diaries..
20 May '20..

If hate for Israel is triggered whenever you hear or read certain trigger-words, such as genocide, then you might see things that are not really there. I can think of no other reason for the blooper I spotted in an academic journal than that. “Racialized Violence and the Churches’ Responsibility” is the title of a special issue of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies that was released in April 2020. In the introduction by Adam Ployd, apparently editor of this special issue, he briefly describes the purpose of the collection of articles and what readers can expect from each one. He writes:

We begin with Tony Kireopoulos’s essay. He asks a provocative question: Should the killing of Black persons in the U.S. be considered a slow genocide? Using the technical United Nations definition of the term and examining its use in the conflict over Palestine, Kireopoulos comes to the conclusion that genocide is, indeed, a helpful concept for understanding racialized violence in the U.S., even if it might not meet official definitions. [emphasis added]

Regarding the merits of a scholarly journal applying an official, internationally accepted definition of a term to a situation “even if it might not meet [the criteria of the] official definitions”, may certainly be considered problematic. Kireopoulos, however, does a valient job of explaining why current ongoing slow-boil “carnage” (his term) needs to be called genocide even though the accepted tradition is to apply the term only after all the killing is over.

Genocide in ‘Palestine’

Now, given that the editor tells us that the author examines the use of the term ‘genocide’ as applied to the “conflict over Palestine”, my hackles were raised and I am sure yours are too. I had to carefully read through the article in case my search function was not working because document searches returned zero instances of the word ‘Palestine’ or ‘Palestinian’, zero instances of the word ‘Israel’, and zero instances of ‘occupation’.

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