Whose Genocide Is It Anyway?
The libel that Israel is engaged in genocide attempts to do the unthinkable—to link the Jewish state with Nazi Germany. This cynical calculus is as wrong as it is obscene.
As Israel continues operation Swords of Iron against the Hamas terrorist group, pro-Palestine protests the world over have been accusing the country of genocide.
Get down there on Saturday and show our abject political leaders what side we're on. pic.twitter.com/CHCqKVa5FR
— Nick Riemer (@NickRiemer1) November 2, 2023
While the smear of apartheid has long been leveled at Israel in an attempt to draw a moral equivalency to apartheid South Africa, this newer libel that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians attempts to do the unthinkable—to link the Jewish state with Nazi Germany. This cynical calculus is as wrong as it is obscene.
The common definition of “genocide” is the deliberate targeting of an entire group of people in an effort to eliminate that group. The term was originally coined by the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Reflecting on the mass slaughter of 6 million Jews, Lemkin declares, “New conceptions require new terms.” The neologism is a combination of genos, Greek for “race,” and cide, Latin for “killing.”
In Lemkin’s understanding, genocide refers to “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group” or “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” The crime of genocide was codified by the United Nations in 1946 with the passage of General Assembly Resolution 96, defined as “a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings.”
In 1948, the UN General Assembly passed its “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” which refers to five distinct acts, the commission of any one of which constitutes the crime of genocide: (1) killing members of the group in question; (2) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (3) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (4) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (5) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
So, do the actions of the State of Israel during the current war against Hamas satisfy any of these definitions?
The Israel Defense Forces’ “Code of Ethics,” issued in 1994, identifies the eleven key values of the IDF: tenacity, responsibility, integrity, personal example, human life, purity of arms, professionalism, discipline, loyalty, representation, and camaraderie. Two of these values are of special relevance here: human life and purity of arms. According to the Code, the value of “human life” means that the “soldier will do his utmost to preserve human life.” Furthermore, the value of “purity of arms” requires that the “soldier will use his weapon and his power to vanquish the enemy only to the degree required, and will exercise self-restraint in order to prevent unnecessary harm to human life, body, honor, or property.” Indeed, in a document issued in January 2023 in response to an increase in Palestinian stone throwing, which can cause severe injury, the IDF made clear that lethal force can only be used in response to a “clear and present danger” involving a “life-threatening situation.”
David Bernstein
Has Israel lived up to these guiding principles in Gaza? Yes. The IDF has gone to considerable lengths to minimize civilian casualties. As in previous wars, Israel has dropped leaflets and sent text messages directing Palestinian civilians to evacuate dangerous areas—in this case, the north of Gaza. This evacuation is being monitored from Israel by tracking the movements of cell phones in Gaza. Israel also uses precise targeted weapons in order to minimize civilian casualties in dense urban environments. One such weapon, used for the first time in this war, is the precision mortar dubbed “Iron Sting.” According to the Jerusalem Post, “The mortar is designed for use in both open terrain and urban environments, while using its precise targeting to reduce the possibility of non-combatants being injured.”
Tragically, all wars claim civilian casualties—and this is especially true in Gaza, due to the dense urban conditions and to Hamas’s deliberate strategy of attempting to maximize civilian casualties. According to a recent NATO report, Hamas “has been using human shields in conflicts with Israel since 2007”:
Hamas relies on the Israeli government’s aim to minimise collateral damage, and is also aware of the West’s sensitivity towards civilian casualties. Hamas’s use of human shields is therefore likely aimed at minimising their own vulnerabilities by limiting the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) freedom of action. It is also aimed at gaining diplomatic and public opinion-related leverage, by presenting Israel and the IDF as an aggressor that indiscriminately strikes civilians.
Hamas has used its nearly two decades of control over Gaza to build an extensive network of fortified tunnels in, under, and around civilian infrastructure in order to smuggle contraband and weapons, while carrying out a campaign of terror against Israel and its civilians. Even more tellingly, Hamas is currently using Gaza’s largest hospital as its headquarters. While the first duty of any government is to protect its citizens, Hamas’s central governing principle is to oppress its people while placing them squarely in harm’s way. Given this, it is clear that Hamas bears moral responsibility for all lives lost in this conflict, both Israeli and Palestinian, including those civilian Palestinians whom Israel has taken great pains to protect.
The demographic data also contradicts the idea that Israel is committing genocide. Since the year 2000, the population of Gaza has nearly doubled; it boasts the 39th highest birthrate among the world’s countries, and the average life expectancy is nearly 76 years of age (the average life expectancy in the US is just over 77 years of age). If Israel is intent on committing genocide in Gaza, it is doing a very poor job.
Just as there will always be civilian casualties in war, unfortunately there will also always be a few individual soldiers who intend to hurt or kill civilians. In the IDF, thankfully, this number is small and, crucially, soldiers who contravene the IDF Code of Ethics and the laws of war are treated as criminals and prosecuted as such.
For Hamas fighters—who should not be referred to as “soldiers,” since they do not adhere to any laws ornorms of warfare—violence against civilians is the point, and the more carnage a fighter inflicts, the more he is celebrated.
Hamas’s founding covenant calls for an “Islamic Resistance Movement” that “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” and provide “one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders.” The raison d’être of Hamas, then, is to expel every Israeli and Jew from Israel-Palestine, eliminating both the state of Israel and the Jews who inhabit it. “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad,” the document states. It cites a Hadith (a saying of the Prophet Mohammed) that makes this point chillingly clear:
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.
(Hamas issued a new charter in 2017. It is still rife with inflammatory language about the “Zionist entity.”)
So, whereas the IDF Code of Ethics requires all Israeli soldiers to act with “purity of arms” and make every effort to avoid civilian casualties, Hamas’s 1988 charter calls for unremitting jihad against Jews. While the IDF Code of Ethics prohibits war crimes up to and including genocide, the Hamas Covenant defines genocide as its core mission.
We saw this mission in action on 7 October, when Hamas carried out one of the most heinous anti-Jewish pogroms in history in a campaign of terror that satisfies every definition of genocide.
Paul Berman
Commenting on the brutal massacre of civilians at the Kfar Aza kibbutz, Israeli Major General Itai Veruv told reporters:
I saw hundreds of terrorists in full armor, full gear, with all the equipment and all the ability to make a massacre, go from apartment to apartment, from room to room and kill babies, mothers, fathers in their bedrooms… I have heard during my childhood about the pogroms in Europe, the Holocaust, of course. All my family came from Europe, they are survivors. But I never thought I would see… things like that.
By the time the dust settled following the most lethal slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, more than 1,400 Israelis had been killed—mostly civilians and in unspeakably brutal ways—and more than 220 civilians had been kidnapped and taken to Gaza by force.
The 1,400 dead were not collateral damage; they were the intended civilian targets of Hamas. Not only did Hamas intentionally target Israeli civilians, marking them out for death purely because they were Israelis and thus committing an act of genocide, but they carried out their murderous campaign with a level of savagery that almost defies understanding. And that savagery was deliberate and planned. As documents found among the bodies of dead Hamas terrorists reveal, their orders were to target civilians, take hostages, and to “kill as many as possible.”
Clearly, the real génocidaires in the Israel–Hamas war are the Hamas terrorists and those who support them, not Israel. So, why the genocide smear?
Pro-Palestine protests erupted immediately after Hamas’s murderous rampage in Israel—even before any Israeli military response. From the Arab world to the US and Western Europe, pro-Palestinian activists celebrated the brutal murder of Israelis, even handing out sweets in celebration. And since the start of Israel’s Swords of Iron operation, signs decrying the “genocide” in Palestine have been a ubiquitous sight at the protests. Once marginal and rare, claims of “genocide” now seem ubiquitous in anti-Israel demonstrations and discourse.
As the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci observed, every revolutionary movement, including terrorist ones, conducts two wars simultaneously: a “war of position” and a “war of maneuver.” The latter is actual war as we know it, with guns and bombs. However, as terrorists well know, wars are not only fought on battlefields, but on social media, in newsrooms, and ultimately in the hearts and minds of spectators the world over.
Palestine is by far the largest per-capita recipient of foreign aid, yet much of this money is siphoned off for graft, for weapons, and to support terror. By immiserating their population in Gaza and by hiding their fighters among the civilian population, storing caches of weapons in or near civilian infrastructure, and using that same infrastructure to make war, Hamas forces Israel to inflict collateral damage. This is Hamas’s goal: it wants bodies and wreckage that it can place in front of cellphones and news cameras to blame the carnage squarely on Israel. The more deaths—especially civilian deaths—the better in their nihilistic calculus. Unfortunately, Hamas has had great success with this strategy. While much anti-Israel vitriol is surely the product of antisemitism, much of it is due to Hamas’s PR strategy and the “useful idiots” who swallow it.
But this still does not fully explain the specific charge of genocide.
Most would agree that genocide is the single greatest evil that man can perpetrate. Therefore, to execrate a nation to the greatest extent possible, one must accuse that nation of genocide. Oppression, human rights abuses, war crimes, occupation, apartheid—these are all serious charges, but the charge of genocide is the ne plus ultra. It is the greatest smear those who truly hate Israel can muster, so they weaponize it. Facts be damned.
As the political scientist James Farr has argued, “Only in the rarest of circumstances… does language function apolitically as a neutral medium for expressing ideas or describing things.” More often, it serves “the needs, interests, and powers of those individuals or groups who use it.” In accusing Israel of genocide, the rhetorical tacticians of the anti-Israel movement are attempting a semantic sleight of hand, redefining “genocide,” this evil of evils, as some vague combination of civilian deaths, the destruction of dual-use infrastructure, and wartime hardships, rather than the greatest affront to humanity: the killing of an entire people.
Since the Middle Ages, Jews have been accused of murdering children and using their blood for ritual purposes. This blood libel lives on today in a new form, as the Jews of the state of Israel are accused of purposefully killing children in a campaign of genocide.
This new blood libel—the charge of genocide—is also an attempt to yoke the state of Israel to that very regime whose industrial murder of Jews gave rise to the necessity to create the term “genocide” itself: Nazi Germany. As the philosopher Bernard Harrison has argued, the intent “is to defame Israel by association with the most powerful symbol of evil, of that which, because it contains not the least scintilla of goodness, must be utterly rejected and uprooted from the face of the earth.” Harrison continues:
To use “Nazi analogies to criticize Israel’s policies” is to disseminate the suggestion that Israeli policies are morally indistinguishable from Nazi policies, and hence that the state of Israel is therefore in no way morally distinguishable from the Third Reich, from which, if true, it surely follows that the existence of the State of Israel has as little to be said for it as the existence of the Third Reich; which is to say, nothing; and from that that the Jews, since so many of them support the existence of Israel, are, collectively, enemies of mankind. To disseminate such suggestions, for whatever reason, and with whatever color of moral commitment or humanitarian concern, is, I submit, to disseminate anti-Semitic views of a rather traditional kind.
It is for this reason that likening Israel to Nazi Germany has been recognized as an antisemitic act by the US State Department in its working definition of antisemitism.
Since even before Israel’s founding in 1948, ideologues and antisemites have argued that Jews have no right to national self-determination, no right to a homeland, and no right to defend the homeland that has been begrudgingly granted them.
Today, these ideologues have a new weapon with which to target Israel—the baseless smear of genocide. This libel is fundamentally antisemitic and opens the door to greater and more extreme hostility toward Israel. It makes violence against Israel and against Jews worldwide seem more acceptable. At the same time, fallaciously accusing Israel of genocide serves to obscure the nature of the real genocide occurring here. It conceals Hamas’s genocidal acts and intentions, while furnishing an anti-Jewish blood libel refashioned for the 21st century.
