A "trope" is a word or phrase used in a different way in order to create an artistic effect. The most common modern use of "trope" is to convey anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish feelings. The term is used interchangeably with "shibboleth" which is an opinion that is commonly believed and repeated but that may be seen as old-fashioned or untrue.
In The Sunday Independent (November 16) Professor Barney Pityana committed the unforgiveable, lazy and prejudiced act of repeating the anti-Semitic trope that in the behavior of the Israelis towards the Palestinians that "one Holocaust does not justify another" (see here).
Pityana should be deeply ashamed that he invoked the trope that what the Israelis do to the Palestinians is tantamount to what the Nazis did to the Jews. Pityana holds a doctorate in religious studies and is an admitted attorney. He has spent his life involved in the fight for human rights and is a learned academic, and yet he succumbed. He accepted what he was told even though it was outrageous. He did not interrogate it. He was intellectually lazy. Pityana may well believe that the Israelis are committing human rights abuses against the Palestinians but these just do not amount to a Holocaust or even a holocaust or to a genocide or to a massacre.
The problem with this trope is the following:
It is untrue. It doesn't matter how much hatred the utterer may harbor towards Israel or the Jews, it just has no basis in fact. It is only a grotesquely graphic expression of belief or mischief;
Its use is intended to spread a belief in the evil of the alleged perpetrator - the Israelis. Pityana is better placed to know that the repeated use of words or idea to malign "the other" is intended to prepare the "aggressor" for termination. "Cockroaches", "vermin", Untermensch, etc. have been used in societies where real massacres, real genocides, real mass murders and real Holocausts occurred;
It is intended to deeply offend the target group. What could be more hurtful to Jews than being accused of being Nazis? No one uses the Holocaust analogy for ISIS, for example. It would have no impact even if it may be apt.
Of all people, Pityana should understand the need for allegations to be proved by fact not belief. Unless, that is, Pityana believes ancient anti-Semitic tropes like Jews murdered Christian babies and used their blood to bake matzo at Passover, or that Jews run the world and particularly its financial systems, or that the Jews were behind 9/11.
There's a classical Jewish joke part of which goes something along the lines of Mrs. Goldberg of Boise, Idaho complaining that she wants time off from running the world's financial systems for a couple of weeks so that she can help organise her grandson's bar mitzvah!
One of the most recent egregious tropes about the Israeli treatment of Palestinians suffering, to which much of the world's media was complicit, was the alleged "massacre in Jenin".
During the Second Intifada in 2002 the Israeli Defense Force embarked upon its "Defensive Shield" operation in Jenin in the northern West Bank. According to the IDF Jenin contained an extensive military infrastructure for terrorist operations against Israel that involved Islamic Jihad, Fatah, and Hamas.
Since October 2000, 28 out of 60 attempted suicide attacks emanated from Jenin-based groups. 23 of these were actually executed By March 2002 a 30-day bombing campaign by Hamas, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and Islamic Jihad in 13 separate attacks, including the bombing of Netanya's Park Hotel during a Passover meal, which left 30 people dead and 140 wounded, and the murder of 16 people four days later at the Matza restaurant in Haifa.
On 2 April the IDF entered Jenin and the army waged a pitched battle, involving house-to-house fighting with Palestinian gunmen.
Palestinian spokesmen characterised Israel's operations in Jenin from the start as a "massacre." Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erakat charged (CNN 10 April 2002) that Israeli troops had killed "more than 500 people."
On 12 April (CNN) he repeated the charge that "a real massacre was committed in the Jenin refugee camp." He added that 300 Palestinians were being buried in mass graves.
On 15 April Erakat said "And I stand by the term 'massacres' were committed in the refugee camps." He also began to refer to Israeli actions as "war crimes."
Peter Hansen, the commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) (the UN refugee agency solely dedicated to the Palestinians) told a Danish newspaper, the Danish Internatavisen Jyllands-Posten, on 19 April 2002 that 300-400 Palestinians had been killed in Jenin. He told CNN: "I had, first of all, hoped the horror stories coming out were exaggerations as you often hear in this part of the world, but they were all too true".
Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN Secretary-General's representative in the Middle East first said "I cannot say that there wasn't a massacre, but I cannot say there was a massacre." Then: "But I think that the question of an international investigation is a highly relevant question on the basis of what I saw" (CNN 18 April 2002).
Yasser Arafat claimed that the "massacre" of Palestinians in Jenin could only be compared to the World War Two Nazi sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad. 800,000 Russians died during the 900-day siege of Leningrad; 1.3 million died in Stalingrad. This led Tom Gross, former Jerusalem correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph to coin the term "the myth of Jeningrad".
Page upon page of press coverage, day after day, reported of mass murders, common graves, summary executions, and war crimes. Israel was compared to the Nazis, to al-Qaeda, and to the Taliban. One report even compared the thousands of supposedly missing Palestinians to the ‘disappeared' of Argentina. No Palestinians were missing.
A leading columnist for the Evening Standard, London's main evening newspaper, compared Israel's actions to ‘genocide.'"
The Jerusalem correspondent for the (London) Independent, Phil Reeves, began his report from Jenin: ‘A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed. He continued: ‘The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb. The people say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the dust'
Reeves spoke of "killing fields," an image usually associated with Pol Pot's Cambodia.
Even the right-wing Daily Telegraph ran headlines such as "Hundreds of victims ‘were buried by bulldozer in mass grave'" and utterly fabricated accounts such as "Israeli soldiers had stripped him [the Palestinian] to his underwear, pushed him against a wall and shot him.
The paper also cited the Guardian as saying in a lead editorial that "Israel's actions in Jenin were ‘every bit as repellent' as Osama bin Laden's attack on New York on September 11."
Gross's own insight into some of this reporting came a couple of years later with the photographer who was in Jenin for the British The Times. The photographer said he had been holed up in a house in Jenin with some colleagues. A dead donkey was nearby, slowly decomposing. In an act of mistaken groupthink, they chose to mistake it for the smell of bodies.
By contrast The Washington Post wrote there was ‘no evidence to support allegations by aid organizations of large-scale massacres or executions.'...
America's Newsday's reported: "There is little evidence to suggest that Israeli troops conducted a massacre of the dimensions alleged by Palestinian officials."
The Boston Globe reported that after extensive interviews with "civilians and fighters" in Jenin that "none reported seeing large numbers of civilians killed." On the other hand, referring to the deaths of Israeli soldiers in Jenin, Abdel Rahman Sa'adi, an "Islamic Jihad grenade-thrower," told The Boston Globe: "This was a massacre of the Jews, not of us."
According to Gross the Palestinian Authority PR operation had sold a massacre that wasn't and segments of the press eagerly bought it.
By the time the fighting ended, 23 IDF soldiers and 52 Palestinians (of whom 14 were civilians) were dead. Ultimately the Palestinian Authority, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations corroborated these figures.
Palestinian officials, on the ground, verified the Israeli numbers: Mousa Kadoura, director of Fatah for the northern West Bank, claimed 56 Palestinians died in Jenin (Washington Times 1 May 2002).
Palestinians admitted that they employed large amounts of explosive devices in Jenin. There were booby-trapped buildings and explosive devices configured as anti-personnel mines.
Captured Islamic Jihad operative Tabeat Mardawi told CNN that 1,000-2,000 explosive devices had been prepared.
An Islamic Jihad bomb-maker from Jenin told Al-Ahram Weekly: "We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the camp" (MEMRI, April 24, 2002) because of the large amounts of Palestinian explosives in the camp, it is difficult to discern what component of this destruction was caused by Israeli forces and what part was a result of Palestinian detonation.
The contrivance of this bald, massive and deeply offensive trope should ensure that absolutely no claim against Israel by the supporters of the Palestinians must be accepted as true unless objectively verified as fact.
I recently saw a photograph of a fresh-faced young student holding up a placard at an anti-Israel/pro-Palestine rally at a university campus rally. The placard said that Israel killed 3 Palestinian children every day. Every day? If I could I would challenge her to provide a factual source for her claim. The emphasis is on the word "factual".
Jessie Duarte, infamously said on 10 July 2014 in Timeslive "The state of Israel has turned the occupied territories of Palestine into permanent death camps." There's a sweeping anti-Semitic, Holocaust evoking trope in one single utterance if ever you wanted. Nothing Ms Duarte says about Israel or Jews can ever be accepted - unless and until independently verified.
If people want to criticise Israel or want to see a Jewish state cease to exist, they can argue for it, but only with facts. Not with propaganda. Not with lies. Not with beliefs that merely serve a cause or a prejudice or a hatred.
Jewish proverb: "The instruments of both death and life are in the power of the tongue."
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