When "pogrom" just won't do

It isn't often that I see David T of Harry's Place expressing his support of Ehud Olmert, the right of centre Prime Minister of Israel. But there he is, saying how much he agrees with Olmert's description of settler attacks on Palestinians in Hebron as "a pogrom". 

 I wholly disagree with the use of the word “pogrom” to describe the actions of the people who attacked the Palestinians in Hebron. Firstly, using that word does the same job of creating moral equivalence that’s so often used by antisemitic propaganda which tries to neutralize terms like “holocaust” by demonstrating that Jews are the equivalents of their historical murderers.

Pogroms were organized mass racist attacks on completely peaceful and quietist Jews, organized with the connivance and sometimes the active assistance of the Tsarist authorities and the Russian Orthodox Church. They were usually started as the result of antisemitic preaching at the time of Easter. There was also a small number of pogroms by Polish Christians against Polish Jews returning to their home villages in 1945-46 having survived the Holocaust. A distant cousin of mine was murdered in 1946 in such an attack. The Jews were attacked as Jews, with claims that they were destroying Russia, or in the case of the Poles, because they were returning to reclaim their own homes into which Poles had moved. They involved many murders, vicious physical attacks, looting, wholescale destruction of property and the rape of women. They almost invariably went unpunished.

Here we have an account of a small number of Jewish Israeli individuals who shot at a number of Palestinians at a time when some other Jewish Israeli individuals were being evicted from property whose ownership is contested, but whose eviction has been carried out by the Jewish state in defence of the rights of Palestinians. The individuals have been arrested, and if found guilty will be rightly sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. However, they do claim they were being threatened with lynching, and my understanding is that there is footage showing they were being stoned by Palestinians before they started shooting. Not that that would be a justification for shooting or otherwise attacking individuals, but it does show how wrong it is to describe this as a “pogrom" and how much using that term is intended to smear a particular set of Jews as being the equivalent of the murderous anti-semites of recent history.

Olmert has his own reasons for using the word “pogrom”. He is clinging onto power and trying to create a position for himself outside the mainstream of Israeli politics, where he has wholly lost credibility and has no remaining constituency. He is currently being indicted for crimes of corruption, and it seems to me this particular bit of opportunism is fully consistent with the more despicable side of his history. He may well end up on the same circuit as Jimmy Carter once he’s out of office.