If I were a Palestinian fighting in the rubble of Gaza, I would probably think Israel was committing genocide. If I had been a German hiding in Dresden or a Japanese civilian near Hiroshima in 1945, I probably would have felt the same way about the United States. But none of this amounts to genocide.
Genocide has a specific effect. definition: “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnic origin, nationality, religion or race.” The term was coined by Rafael Lemkina Polish Jew, in response to Winston Churchill's observation about the Holocaust: “We are witnessing a nameless crime.”
To be fair to Israel's critics, images of war lend themselves to claims of genocidal intent. But that is largely due to Hamas's strategy. They cannot win and will not fight a conventional war. And civilians in Gaza do not have bomb shelters; only Hamas fighters do it.
Israel's adversaries, Hamas and Hezbollah, have a fixed goal of removing Israel. Meanwhile, since the founding of Israel, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the Palestinian population has grown more than eight timeswhile the population of the Gaza Strip has increase 600% since 1960.
Even Israel's allegations undermine the claim of genocide. Israel is condemned for inadequate warnings about attacks and insufficient humanitarian support to Gaza. But if the goal was genocide, why drop warning leaflets or provide aid?
There is much to criticize Israel without resorting to accusations of genocide. And many very negative labels can be defensible, or at least debatable, used to criticize Israel's actions in Gaza (killing, cruelty, excessive, wanton) without mischaracterizing its intent.
It is a sign of the times that absolving Israel of genocide counts as an outrageous defense. It's a little like when I tell some of my fellow Trump critics that the former president is not Hitler and they think I'm rushing to defend him.
The claim that Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is racist and genocidal is very old, with deep estate in Soviet propaganda along with Holocaust denial. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader in the West Bank, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation about this garbage at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. Vladimir Putin, whose war against Ukraine fits he UN definition of genocide, has revived this tactic to distract and divide the West.
All this is worth mentioning, and not only to demonstrate the pretextual nature of the accusation and highlight the double standard applied to Israel at the UN and elsewhere. In recent years, American journalists have agonized over the problems of disinformation in general and Russian disinformation in particular. There was a related, robust debate on Whether journalists should rate Trump's lies”lies.” But in a random day, politicians, experts and activists They routinely accuse Israel of genocide with little or no response from journalists.
In fact, in several cases the media has accused Israel of atrocities only to have to backtrack once the facts come to light. In the latest example, dozens of deaths at an aid site were initially attributed to an Israeli attack, but the report now includes Israel's claim that most of the injuries were due to stampeding crowds.
Vague claims of genocide have consequences, none of them good. First, it is understandable that genocide arouses a feeling of complete moral authority in its opponents. Any form of resistance can be justified, which is why so many people have gone to great lengths to justify or “contextualize” the horror of the October 7 Hamas attack.
Secondly, this accusation fosters a feeling of collective guilt. Jews around the world, regardless of their attitudes toward Israel or Zionism, are being managed for abuse and discrimination for his alleged complicity in genocide. Many extremists subscribe to a moral syllogism that says Israel is like Nazi Germany, so if you support Israel, you are similar to a Nazi. Since Jews support Israel, Jews or “Zionists” are fair play for all form of harassment.
Finally, if Israel is going to be accused of genocide regardless of its actions, it has much less incentive to show restraint in its effort to defeat an enemy that is avowedly genocidal.
In fact, it is worth noting that those who loudly call for a ceasefire to stop Israel's genocide are usually not calling for Hamas's surrender. That would stop the bloodshed, by whatever name, immediately.
