Israeli Academics Lead Way in Advocating ‘Extermination’ of Palestinians

Date: 14 October 2024 - 22:07

News ID: ۱۳۲۴۰۴

WEST BANK (Dispatches) – Uzy Raby, a history professor, has been one of the most sought-after West Asia experts in Israeli media.
The senior lecturer at the department of Middle Eastern and African history at Tel Aviv University has unapologetically advocated the starvation of civilians in northern Gaza who do not follow the Zionist regime army’s order to evacuate south.
“Anyone who stays there will be judged by law as a terrorist and will go through either a process of starvation or a process of extermination,” he said during a TV interview last month.
Then, addressing a possible attack on Beirut, he reiterated the same reasoning.
“You have to inflict it [the war] on the population,” Raby said.
According to Assaf David, co-founder of the Forum for Regional Thinking and head of the Israel in the Middle East Cluster at the Van Leer Al-Quds Institute, Raby and others like him “are more militant even than the military-security establishment currently leading Israel’s war”.
Evidence for that can be found in the support some of them gave to the plan of former senior Israeli officer Giora Eiland.
The plan called for forcibly displacing all civilians from the northern part of the enclave, or subjecting them to starvation and military force, which in the view of critics may amount to ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Israeli scholars on West Asia have always been rather conservative on Israeli-Palestinian and regional issues, said David.
But since the war began in October 2023, some of them have espoused far-right discourse, similar to the extremist views of Israel’s most far-right ministers, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
Dr Harel Chorev is another West Asia lecturer at Tel Aviv University who advocated the Eilan plan. He told Channel 13 that he would “sign with both hands” on the plan, as it is consistent with his own plan for Gaza.
In March, Chorev called for a military operation in Rafah despite U.S. objections. “Rafah must be conquered,” he told Maariv newspaper.
Professor Eyal Zisser, Tel Aviv University vice rector and member of the Middle East department, has called on the Israeli military to “occupy Gaza now.”
In June, Professor Benny Morris, one of the leading scholars of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and member at the Middle East department at Ben-Gurion University, shockingly called for Israel to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran.
Apart from urging for more potential war crimes and for the occupation of the Gaza Strip, these academics are additionally advancing a seemingly dehumanization campaign against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims.
According to Yonatan Mendel, a lecturer at the Middle East department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israeli academics have uncritically sought to mobilize the public behind the army’s devastating campaign in Gaza.