The dictionary definition of "pogrom" is "an organised massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jewish people in Russia or eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries." So, there is something deeply strange about hearing pogrom used in Hebrew to describe what some Jewish people are doing to Arabs in 21st-century Israel.
It's one of those words, like "apartheid", that were once seen as evidence of lurking antisemitism, but the dwindling fraction of Israeli Jews who still support the state's original liberal democratic values have begun to use them about the far-right reality they now inhabit. Consider what happened in the Palestinian village of Huwara last month.
Huwara is in the northern West Bank. Nobody there under the age of sixty can recall a time when they didn't live under Israeli military rule. People under forty will remember a time where there were only a few thousand Jewish settlers in the occupied territories, but now there are about 700,000 of them.
