Genocide?

(Originally published in The Times of Israel)

 I wrote this on January 22, 2024:

‘Jew-haters aiming to eliminate Israel very deliberately decided to falsely attach the word “Apartheid” to Israel in the early 2000’s. With constant repetition, the lie has stuck.

Now, those Jew-hating Hamas sympathizers and their useful idiots are intensively working on attaching the libels “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” The libels are patently false.

But, just as with “Zionism is Racism” and “Apartheid,” one can expect that 20 years from now, it will be accepted wisdom amongst many in the chattering classes, those whose bigotry or ideology predisposes them to believe libels against Jews, and the just plain stupid that Israel is guilty of ethnic cleansing and genocide.’ https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/is-the-world-upside-down/

I was off by eighteen and a half years.  It took 18 months, not 20 years.

All over social media, on college campuses, at demonstrations protesting just about any perceived injustice in the world, charges of Israel’s alleged genocide in Gaza are made and accepted as truth.

It is one thing if some malicious individual or useful idiot wants to forget that it was Hamas, supported by many Gazans, who started the war on October 7, 2023 by breaking a truce and engaging in a murderous attack on civilians.

And if they want to forget that Hamas could immediately end the war and the suffering of Gazans by releasing the hostages and laying down its arms.

And if they want to forget that Hamas deliberately buries itself amongst civilians to achieve its explicitly stated goal of having as many Gazans as possible killed so that it can delegitimize Israel in the world’s eyes and gain the sympathy of ill-informed and morally confused people, many of whom are more than willing to cooperate in condemning Jews and the only Jewish-majority nation in the world.

And if they want to ignore real experts like John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, co-director of the Urban Warfare Project, and a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare, who has repeatedly stated that Israel takes more measures to avoid harm to noncombatants than any other army in the world, including the American army.

And if they want to ignore the fact that the non-combatant-to-combatant fatality ratio in the Gaza War is the lowest in the modern history of warfare.

But when they cross the line and falsely accuse Israel of genocide, they have inarguably crossed over to Jew-hatred, and they have excluded themselves from any good-faith discussion of issues surrounding the war or the Israeli-Palestinian dispute generally.

From ChatGPT:

“Genocide is defined under international law as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. This definition is codified in Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The five acts considered genocidal are:

Killing members of the group

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

These acts must be committed with the specific intent, known as dolus specialis, to destroy the group as such. This intent is a critical element that distinguishes genocide from other serious crimes under international law, such as war crimes or crimes against humanity. The term "genocide" was coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to describe the systematic extermination of Jews during the Holocaust. He combined the Greek word genos (meaning race or family) with the Latin suffix -cide (meaning killing) to create the term.

Determining whether a situation constitutes genocide involves a complex legal analysis, including establishing the requisite intent and proving the commission of one or more of the defined acts. This process often requires thorough investigation and judicial proceedings to assess the facts and apply the legal standards appropriately.”

There are about two million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel.  According to U.S. government figures, there are about three million Palestinians in the West Bank and two million in Gaza.

That is a total of seven million people. If one is stupid enough to trust Hamas, which itself has backed off these numbers, about 55,000 Gazans have been killed.  This includes about 25,000 terrorist combatants.

So, even using Hamas’ seriously suspect numbers, about 30,000 non-combatant Gazans have been killed.  Even if one limited the population to Gazans only, which would mean 30,000 deaths out of two million people, this in no way imaginable amounts to genocide. Indeed, given the nature of the conflict and the tactics of Hamas, this is an extraordinarily low number of fatalities.

(By the way, the Palestinian population has steadily increased over the decades.  If Israel were intent on destroying a people, they have been the most incompetent perpetrators in history.)

Tragic? Absolutely. Genocide?  Absolutely not.  Unless one does what some groups, like Amnesty International, did, and that is modify the definition of the word just to fit a war in which Jews are defending themselves against an enemy that has openly stated that it wants to wipe all Jews off the earth, i.e. commit genocide.

Those who change the definition of genocide in order to condemn the only Jewish-majority nation on earth are applying a double standard to Jews, a flagship act of anti-Semitism.

“Determining whether a situation constitutes genocide involves a complex legal analysis, including establishing the requisite intent and proving the commission of one or more of the defined acts. This process often requires thorough investigation and judicial proceedings to assess the facts and apply the legal standards appropriately.”

Have any of those charging the Jews with “genocide” engaged in the required “investigation and judicial proceedings?”  Has anyone?  No.  But that does not stop them from throwing out a slur that incorporates a myriad of Jew-hating tropes amounting to a blood libel.

Falsely making that charge is particularly egregious because, as noted above, the word “genocide” was specifically created by a Jew to specifically describe the Nazis’ attempt to wipe the Jewish people off the face of the earth.

To falsely use that same term against Jews amounts to a form of Holocaust minimization or denial and is an attempt to shame the victim and excuse the guilty and the complicit.

“See, Jews themselves do it.  They’re no better than us.  Their experience is not unique, so what have they been making a big deal of for all these years?”  This is blatant anti-Semitism.

If one wants to deal in misinformation and make charges without context and history, one is free to do so.  But falsely accusing the Jewish nation of genocide crosses the line into Jew-hatred and puts the accuser in the company of some very despicable people.

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Some interesting numbers:

Total estimated casualties Arab-Israeli Wars and Battles 1948–2025:

Israeli deaths: Approximately 24,981

Arab/Palestinian deaths: Approximately 91,361

Combined total: Approximately 116,342

Arab vs. Arab Conflicts 1948–2025:

Combined Total Estimated Casualties: Over 1,700,000 deaths

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Speaking of ethnic cleansing:

Jewish Population:

Yemen, 1968:  53,000  Present: 0

Lebanon, 1948: 20,000  Present: 0

Iran, 1948: 100,000  Present: 9,300

Libya, 1948: 38,000  Present: 0

Syria, 1948: 30,000  Present: 0

Tunisia, 1948: 135,000  Present: 1,100

Iraq, 1948: 135,000  Present: 0

Morocco, 1948: 265,000  Present: 2,500-3,000