Regarding the use of the term `genocide’ to describe Arab policies towards Israeli Jews, it is important to consider Arab policies towards the three other groups of non-Arabs who live in territories designated as `the Arab world’:

(1) In Sudan, the second stage of the civil war there between Arabs and non-Arabs, which began in 1983, has resulted in the deaths of about 2.5 million non-Arab civilians. Darfur is only the latest genocidal step in this war, which reached its peak in 1988 with the deaths of 500,000 non-Arabs, primarily Dinka, mainly through an artificial famine resulting from scorched-earth policies of the Khartoum government.

(2) In Iraq, a similar program of genocide in the 1980’s against Kurds, culminating in the murder of an estimated 180,000 civilians in the Anfal campaign of 1988, was only ended because the United States intervened militarily after the First Gulf War to protect the Kurds.

(3) The Berbers of Morocco and Algeria, numbering more than 20 million people, have–unlike the non-Arabs of Sudan, Iraq, and Israel–not forcefully resisted Arabization, and because their language is given no status in government or education, in spite of the fact that they are the indigenous occupants of North Africa and constitute 45% of the population of Morocco and 25% of the population of Algeria, they are gradually switching to speaking Arabic and thus becoming Arabs.

If we consider also Arab policies towards Israel, then, the following picture emerges:

Arab nationalism calls for making the entire `Arab world’ purely Arab. If the non-Arabs will willingly be Arabized, like the Berbers, fine. If the non-Arabs will not willingly be Arabized, then Arabs have, since the 1980s, turned to the tactic of simply murdering every member of that group who can feasibly be murdered given their capabilities and the position of the international community. If the non-Arab group has limited ability to defend itself and the international community does not intervene to protect them, then the result is genocide on an enormous scale, as in Sudan. If the non-Arab group has limited ability to defend itself but the international community steps in in its defense, then the result is more limited genocide, as in Iraqi Kurdistan. If the non-Arab group is military stronger than the Arabs, then all that Arabs can do is terrorist attacks aimed at civilians, with a still more limited death toll, as in the case of Israel. But the ultimate goal remains the same in all of these cases–the complete Arabization of the territory designated as the `Arab world.’

In this comparative context, it is apparent that the reason that Arabs have not committed actions against Israeli targets which can clearly be labelled as genocide is that they simply have not had the material capability to do this.

John Myhill
English Department
University of Haifa