Things like calling the Palestinians “amalek”, carving the Star of David into a playground with bulldozers, IDF soldiers taking about fulfilling prophecy…
If the claim is that militant Israelis are using religious rhetoric to justify their actions, that seems uncontroversial (though the "Amalek" thing is a misquote, and refers not to Palestinians but to Hamas itself). If instead the idea is that the "rhetoric" of "rabbis" is somehow automatically dehumanizing to Palestinians, that seems like a problematic claim.
For my part I find the implication that the rhetoric of rabbis is homogenous and aligned to be most problematic.
There are those that appear to fully back Netanyahu and his longstanding views on treatment of the Palestinian state, there are others who are loudly against the actions of the Israeli state in recent years.
( I'd remark that there are more than two extremes but feel this is not the right thread to comment about rabbis on a spectrum )
Yes, that's what snagged me here too. If the idea is just that IDF soldiers are brutalizing Palestinians while shouting religious slogans, maybe "religious language" is the better term to use. It's a common phenomenon on war and doesn't have any connotations of Jewish people being somehow exceptional about this.
You might want to let the IDF know then, cause they have taken the Amalek quote quite literally.
“‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”
Once again: that quote refers to Hamas, not the Palestinian people.
I am not disputing that it represents religious rhetoric used to justify IDF actions. I'm only pushing back on the notion that it refers broadly to Palestinians.
Kahanist extremists have used the term to refer broadly to Palestinians in the same way Christian extremists have deployed Christian tropes to dehumanize, well, everybody in the world at one time or another. But the "Amalek" quote is famous because Netanyahu said it, and we have the context for the speech in which he did: he was referring specifically to Hamas.
That's the spin that the PM's office came up in an attempt to cover its tracks after the massive stink cloud that was raised once the quote became known outside Israel.
But for naught. Because it's manifestly clear from the language of the quote (and its historical context) that it refers to the entire population, not just Hamas. And unfortunately backed now by the IDF's actions on the ground, the zillions of TikTok videos gleefully posted by its soldiers, the rantings and ravings of countless government officials and other public figures, etc.
The analysis is flawed, in that it intentionally omits the fact that among the extremists (who have come to dominate the decision-making process about what happens on the ground in Gaza), the "broader" references to Amalek have been commonly applied all Palestinians (not just Hamas or its "evil").
That's why the quote is basically a dog whistle -- intended to be heard loud and clear by one's core constituency, while seeming more innocuous to others.
BTW you'll note that Rosenberg goes on to call accusations of the current genocide "cavalier", which says a lot about where he's coming from.
This seems irrelevant at this point. Failure to prevent genocide is also a crime (of which Milošević was convicted). He did use that phrase, it has been repeated by actual perpetrators of (potential) genocide, and he has not withdrawn, clarified nor condemned since.
Netanyahu’s speech leading up to the genocide is even more clear then Trumps speech leading up to the Jan. 6th insurrection. Trump at the very least called off the insurrectionists (albeit late and unconvincingly). Netanyahu on the other hand has doubled down.
See, you're implicitly asking me here to defend Netanyahu. I believe Netanyahu to be among the very worst leaders of the last 75 years, a world-historically bad prime minister who has done more than almost anybody to heighten the intractability and human tragedy of the Israel/Palestine conflict. If you think the "Amalek" speech is irrelevant to that analysis, I agree.
What I object to is the deployment of religious tropes that essentialize Netanyahu-ism or Kahanism into Israel, or, worse still, Judaism as a whole. If you're going to get into this "Amalek" stuff, get it right.
If not, it's not like you needed it to take shots at Netanyahu. There is a decent chance that when he is ultimately ousted, he's going to be imprisoned by the Israelis.
I just want to clarify that I didn’t mean the Amalek speech is irrelevant, but rather whether he originally meant Hamas or the Palestinian people in this speech. Whichever he was originally referring to is irrelevant, if he meant Hamas, the term has grown to mean the Palestinian People, and is being used to pump up the genocide.
Likewise Trump also claims his speech didn’t mean to start an insurrection, however, it did to so, and whatever he originally meant became irrelevant as soon as the insurrectionists started, and he didn’t order them to back down.
That you are attempting to wiggle away from the plainly obvious nature of the quote, for some reason.
Nobody denies that an enormous number of civilians have been killed in the IDF's Gaza operation.
Except of course numerous Israeli government officials. (They don't deny that many civilians have been killed -- but they have continually attempted to dial down the proportion of civilian casualties, along with all the rhetoric about there being "no innocents" or "no uninvolved civilians" in Gaza to begin with).
In what way? You get that the Gaza offensive can be a long series of war crimes and unjustifiable civilian casualties and the quote can not mean what the parent comment said it meant, right? If you think the quote is an unimportant side detail, I think we can agree on that generally.
This is a thread about rhetoric, not a judgement of the whole conflict.
In that it's plainly clear that the Amalek quote does mean what the parent commenter (and anyone else who understands the region) can easily see that it does. But you keep coming up with weird evasive arguments to claim that it doesn't. Like the above, for example.
If you think the quote is an unimportant side detail
Unfortunately and very tragically -- it is anything but.
You're not engaging with what I've said. You're looking at what's happening in Gaza and deriving axiomatically a new meaning for the quote. That's understandable, but it's not valid.
Or, at least, that's what I think. We're running towards the right margin of the site with this thread now, and we're not going to convince each other of anything, so we can also let it go.
To engage with what you said: I don't think you grasp the extent to which "extremist" thinking on the question of what to do with the Palestinians (backed by violent action) has now become quite normalized in Israel.
For example, it is odd that you attempted to claim, way up top, that it's just the "Kahanist extremists" who take the broader view of the Amalek reference, as this signifies some distance with what Netanyahu thinks. When what defines the current Netanyahu era is its willful alliance with Kahanist parties -- crowned by the appointment of two of its premier representatives to Minister positions.
Along with all the obscene horror of what's been happening on the ground.
I think we've established that I'm talking about what Netanyahu actually said, and that you're talking about a meaning and a context that you impute to what he said. Maybe you're right about that. Roll the thread back to where this started, and I think you'll see why I'm saying what I'm saying.
I draw the meaning and context from both the state of current discussion in Israel, and its evolution (especially in regard to what to do with the Palestinian population) since even before 1948.
Look more into what public figures there have been saying, not just in the past 4 months, but for several years now -- not just on the margins, but in the mainstream -- and you'll see why I'm saying what I'm saying.
