One underappreciated aspect of the news about Israel’s ex–MoD and IDF CoS Moshe Ya’alon is his use of ethnic cleansing rather than “genocide.” As we’ve seen, the latter term is controversial, in large part because all the controversies mask a meta-debate about what authority to cite as definitive — basically, the Israeli ~experiential understanding of it as the singular event that laid the basis for the state vs internationalist understandings that refer to UN definitions. In the former view, the “heart” of genocide, if we can use such a metaphor, is a systematic effort to eradicate an entire people from the face of the earth; so, by that standard, (a) Israel’s military actions have not been genocidal, and (b) the use of the term by others is almost personally insulting. (NB: I’m just describing that, not endorsing or rejecting it.) Personally, I think the quibbling over that term is almost entirely ideological, and its main effect has been for ~western populations to appropriate and internalize the debate. That, along with what seemed from the beginning the plainly obvious plan of annexing the occupies territories, is why — again, from the beginning — I’ve been saying it’s best understood as ethnic cleansing.