We’re propagandized incessantly about anti-Semitism and “Islamism”—terms without stable definitions—but there turns out not to be any terminology in the English language to describe the forcible displacement of a whole population on sectarian grounds by a Jewish State, even if that State has spent its entire history and pre-history doing just that, and invokes an elaborate ideology to rationalize it. The predictable result is that we have words for things we can’t define, but lack words for things that keep recurring. The first thing leads to snap judgments, the second, to blindness about the obvious.

“The Arabs want to push the Jews into the sea,” is an old Zionist PR line, uncontested in mainstream discourse for decades. Naturally, the reverse claim is a taboo: it’s forbidden to say that the Jews want to push the Arabs into the sea. And I agree that one shouldn’t. But that’s because both claims are false; neither should be said.

It seems perfectly fair to say, however, that The Jewish State has spent its existence pushing Arabs into, the sea, or failing that, toward it. The Palestinian refugees of 1948 were pushed westward from Mandate Palestine into Gaza; the Palestinian refugees of 1982 were, after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, literally pushed out of Beirut into the Mediterranean. And after October 2023, the people of Gaza have been pushed out of its cities onto its beaches, with the plain intention of pushing them further westward, out of Gaza, destination unknown. So it is with the Shiites of South Lebanon, now caught between Israel and the deep blue sea. 

The separation wall at Abu Dis, West Bank

“Without a Jewish State,” one so often hears, “Jews will have no safe place to call their own.” Right–no “safe place” but a continent here and there, e.g., Africa, Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Oceania. The same people then insist that Israel needs to start wars on eight fronts because it faces existential threats wherever it turns.  As for the Lebanese Shiites, they can forget about a “place to call their own.” A more basic question arises: where are they going to go? There are only two options, leave or die, the standard Zionist ultimatum. It’s too bad that we lack a single, pithy word for the phenomenon. We could sure use one.