Israel’s inefficient ethnic cleansing

In an innocuously titled Islamic summit seeks dialogue with Christian world Reuters reports:

But, in an apparent reference to the Palestinian fight against Israel, it said terrorism should be differentiated from “legitimate resistance against foreign occupation.”As is customary at an Islamic summit, leaders of the OIC — the second largest inter-governmental bloc after the United Nations — had harsh words for Israel, condemning it for “war crimes” against Palestinian civilians.

“The conference denounces the current and increasing Israeli military campaign against the Palestinian people and the serious violation of human rights and war crimes including the killing and injuring of Palestinian civilians,” an OIC statement said.

It called Israel’s “collective punishment of civilians” a violation of international human rights law and said “the occupying forces must be held responsible for these war crimes.”

That follows up nicely on Mahmoud Abbas’s charge that Israel’s committing “ethnic cleansing” in Jerusalem. Of course this is all nonsense. The OIC of course adopts this rhetoric as a way of excusing “legitimate resistance” that in normal terms is what we call “terrorism.”

In a pointed commentary Barry Rubin points out

There is no instance I know of in which Israeli units opened unlimited fire on a crowd, even when rocks were being thrown or shots fired against them. Individual targets were picked out. Unarmed people were killed but not deliberately and in small numbers. If Israelis were as their enemies picture them to be, there would be hundreds of Palestinians killed in a single day, tens of thousands in a year.

Read the whole article. But that paragraph is important. If the charges against Israel were true, there would be many more Palestinian dead. Not just 10 or twenty more, but by orders of magnitude.

A country engaged in “ethnic cleansing” wouldn’t be allowing its hospitals to treat its enemies’ children. And it wouldn’t allow it enemies to access its medical facilities to care for women delivering babies in high risk situations. (A higher risk in this case, came not from Israel, but from Gaza.)

And of course, if this is the way Israel carries out its ethnic cleansing, it’s no surprise that

Growth rate of Arab population in city in past 40 years is double that of Jewish population, data published by Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies reveals. In 2020, Arabs expected to constitute 40 percent of capital’s residents.

(h/t Simply Jews)

To put it mildly, if Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing it’s might inefficient at the task.

But that highlights the problem. Abbas claims Israel is guilty of “ethnic cleansing.” The OIC claims Israel is guilty of “war crimes.” Others claim Israel is guilty of a “Holocaust.” These aren’t just mischievous terms. They are part of a framework designed to justify violence – or to be blunt, terrorism, – against Israel. The more the media, the West and the peace processors ignore and fail to challenge these falsehoods, the more they allow the Palestinians and their apologists to justify terror.

Instead they treat it as the unserious ramblings of eccentrics who don’t really mean what they say.

The problem is that that the people uttering these outrageous claims against Israel are serious, not eccentric and mean everything they say.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad,