By TERRY GOLDMAN
Los Alamos

I write to appreciate Jody Benson’s civilized response (link) to Rabbi Shlachter’s post (link).

Of course, I have some quibbles with language. Bret Stephens’ NYT opinion piece (link) covers better than I can, the misuse of the word “genocide”. Benson degrades the meaning and power of that word just as those who call someone a Nazi for their bad (not even evil) behavior. We should all be more careful in our use of language.

My other objection is to the use of the term “ethnic cleansing”. As a member of a very large family of people repeatedly subjected to ethnic cleansing for about 3,000 years, I think that I have a better idea of what that means than Jody Benson does.

First there was Egypt, which, to be fair, could be viewed as mass self-deportation. Then there was a lesser event due to Persia 500 years later and about 2,000 years ago, the Romans forced the removal of something like 90% to 95% of the Israeli population from their country. Being stateless, they stopped being Israelis and became Jews.

But that wasn’t enough for the world either. If I recall my history correctly, England ethnically cleansed itself of Jews around 1295 C.E., France did likewise less than a hundred or so years later, and most people are familiar with Spain in 1492 C.E., followed by Portugal a few years later. In all of these cases, the expulsion was virtually complete, with perhaps a few Jewish doctors remaining along with the minuscule fraction of the Jewish population that could fake their ethnicity and religion sufficiently.

Of course, this was all comparatively civilized to Germany’s most recent effort of murdering rather than just expelling something like 90% to 95% of the Jews they encountered. I remain impressed that Germans (so far) seem to now understand how wrong that effort was.

But enough history; who knows what will happen next, even here? I just hope that I have made my point clear that “ethnic cleansing” is different from trying to root out murderous terrorists (I would like to say, inhuman, but they are all too human) whose goal is ethnic cleansing by genocide or any other means and who hide behind the civilian population they pretend to protect, leading to horrendous numbers of civilian deaths.

If anyone has a better possible idea for how to accomplish eliminating terrorists and retrieving hostages safely, I would be supportive of making the attempt. I am sure, however, that no one in this conversation (active or passive) here knows anywhere near enough to come up with a plausible suggestion. Ultimately, even Gandhi failed to prevent the mutual ethnic cleansing of Hindus and Muslims, and I am sure that he had a much deeper understanding of humanity than any of us.