But, well, I don’t know what else to call a statement like this: “
Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.” (Shapiro followed it with the hashtag #SettlementsRock.) Arabs like to bomb crap and live in sewage. Perhaps I’m crazy. Perhaps there’s a definition of the word “racism” that wouldn’t include a statement like that. But since the statements “Black people are violent and want to live in sewage” or “Jews are violent and want to live in sewage” would both sound… somewhat racist, I don’t see how the conclusion can be avoided. What do you call a crass pejorative generalization about an entire ethnic group? I know one word, but I’m open to others. (By the way, it’s amusing that Shapiro can see
Gazan children swimming in sewage and think “Wow, Arabs must just really have a thing for sewage,” a train of reasoning roughly akin to “Wow, Haitians must really love dying in earthquakes, since a lot of them seem to have done it.” Though I am reliably informed that Shapiro is a master of logic, so I am sure there is more to this than mere simple-minded prejudice.)
Shapiro’s thoughts about Arabs are all along similar lines. Usually conservatives are careful to draw a distinction: they are not condemning an ethnicity, but rather adherents to an ideology, namely Islamism.
Not so with Shapiro: for him, the problem is not Islamism or even Islam writ large. It’s Arabs: “The Arab-Israeli conflict may be accurately described as a war between darkness and light. Those who argue against Israeli settlements—outposts of light in a dark territory—argue for the continued victory of night.” Arabs “value murder” while Israelis “value life,” and “where light fails, darkness engulfs.” Arabs are therefore, as an undifferentiated unit, a people of darkness. Palestinian Arabs
are the worst of all: they are a “population rotten to the core… Palestinian Arabs must be fought on their own terms: as a people dedicated to an evil cause.” The “Arab Palestinian populace… by and large constitutes the most evil population on the face of the planet.” Since they’re “rotten to the core,” there’s no such thing as a good Arab: your evil is defined by your ethnicity, by being a member of the People of Darkness and Murder rather than the People of Goodness and Light. Again, it may just be my failure to understand Facts and Logic, but I am having trouble understanding how population-level generalizations about the moral characteristics of particular ethnic groups can be anything other than bigotry.
Shapiro has been clear about the implications of his view of Arabs as a dark and murderous people. He
has said that “Secular Zionism[, which] requires that Arab citizens of Israel be guaranteed equal rights,” “has always provided the seeds of [Israel’s] destruction.” Instead, “God’s road map requires the Jews to kill those who seek to kill them.” Since Arabs universally “value murder,” I can’t see how this is anything other than a philosophical justification of genocide. Shapiro
has said thatArab nefariousness could be stopped without resorting to genocide, and is offended by anyone who tries to invoke the g-word to describe his beliefs. But since he has said (1) that Arabs are inherently murderous and bent on destroying Israel and (2) God permits Jews to kill those who seek to kill them, it’s hard to see how he could disagree with anyone who did advocate genocide, except on pragmatic grounds.
Shapiro once explained his actual preferred solution to the problem of the dark Arab hordes:
mass expulsion. As he said, bulldozing Palestinian houses and subjecting them to curfews are insufficient “half-measures”: the only solution is to drive every last one of them forcibly from their homes and take their land:
The Arab enmity for Jews and the state of Israel allows for no peace process. The time for half measures has passed. Bulldozing houses of homicide bombers is useless. Instituting ongoing curfews in Arab-populated cities is useless… Some have rightly suggested that Israel be allowed to decapitate the terrorist leadership of the Palestinian Authority. But this too is only a half measure. The ideology of the Palestinian population is indistinguishable from that of the terrorist leadership. Half measures merely postpone our realization that the Arabs dream of Israel’s destruction. Without drastic measures, the Arab dream will come true… If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper. It’s an ugly solution, but it is the only solution… It’s time to stop being squeamish. (Odd that the NYT didn’t choose to quote this passage in its profile.)
Every last Arab—even those who are Israeli citizens—must be deported, Shapiro said, because their ethnicity means that they harbor a murderous “Arab dream.” But to anyone who thinks this sounds like the textbook definition of “ethnic cleansing,” he has a firm response: “It’s not genocide; it’s transfer. It’s not Hitler, it’s Churchill.” Shapiro is referring to the Allied expulsion of German-speakers from Polish territory immediately after World War II, in which “Anywhere from 3.5 million to 9 million Germans were forcibly expelled from the new Polish territory and relocated in Germany.” Shapiro favorably quotes Churchill’s desire that “There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble … a clean sweep will be made.”
There is only one problem with the precedent cited by Shapiro: it is actually a forgotten historic atrocity, which was characterized by mass rape, torture, and murder, and left at least
400,000 people dead. Germans were interned in concentration camps and endured horrific journeys in which pregnant women froze to death. As Tara Zahra
explains in a review of R.M. Douglas’s
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War:
After the Nazi defeat, the Volksdeutsche fled or were expelled to the West, and were stripped of their citizenship, homes and property in… “the largest forced population transfer—and perhaps the greatest single movement of peoples—in human history.” Douglas amply demonstrates that these population transfers, which were to be carried out in an “orderly and humane” manner according to the language of the Allies’ 1945 Potsdam Agreement, counted as neither. Instead…. they were nothing less than a “massive state-sponsored carnival of violence, resulting in a death toll that on the most conservative of estimates must have reached six figures.” …Ironically, then, the postwar population transfers completed a process of segregation and ethnic cleansing that Hitler himself had begun….Interned women throughout Czechoslovakia and Poland were subject to rampant sexual abuse, rape and torture. Germans were also forced to wear armbands or patches marked with the letter “N” for Nemec (German)—collective payback for the humiliation that the Nazis had inflicted on populations in the East. When they were finally transported west, the expellees traveled by cattle car, sometimes going with barely any food or water for up to two weeks. One victim recalled that each morning, “one or more dead bodies greeted us…they just had to be abandoned on the embankments.”… Douglas concludes by calling the expulsions a “tragic, unnecessary, and, we must resolve, never to be repeated episode in Europe’s and the world’s recent history.”
This is the model that Shapiro believed should be applied to the murderous Arabs. (Perhaps Israel could even have them wear patches with little “A”s on them. But that might seem a little racist, and Shapiro is
firmly against racism.) Shapiro has
since suggested that his position on ethnic cleansing has evolved (without admitting that he ever endorsed it), in part because large-scale population transfer is simply impractical. His position on the inherent evil of Palestinians, however, does not appear to have softened.