About Genocide and Antisemites
The obvious misapplication of the word–-genocide– to Israel’s military response to being attacked by Hamas agents in Gaza is a political one and the intention of those using it is obvious. The word was created in the 1940s to capture the essence of what the Nazis in Germany were intending: the systematic, industrialized elimination of an entire people based on their ethnicity and the way some of them prayed. Jews, whatever their connection to synagogues, were stripped of citizenship, dehumanized through propaganda, ghettoized, and ultimately murdered en masse.
But the definition that governs today is not the word’s origin story; it is the 1948 Genocide Convention. The Convention requires proof of a specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such. Not to defeat it militarily, not to displace it, not even to kill large numbers of its members in the course of a war, but to destroy the group because it is the group. The International Court of Justice has held that where a state’s conduct admits of another reasonable explanation, genocidal intent cannot be inferred; it must be the only reasonable inference from the facts. A war against an entrenched enemy that initiated the conflict, embedded itself beneath a civilian population, and promised to repeat October 7 “again and again” supplies that other explanation on its face. One may believe the war was prosecuted too harshly, too long, or with too little care — those are serious charges, and they have names in the law of war: disproportionality, indiscriminate attack, collective punishment. What they are not is genocide. The element that separates genocide from war, even terrible war, is intent, and it is precisely the element the accusation skips past.
On October 7, 2023, Israel was attacked by a horrific Islamist onslaught, in which over 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, were murdered, many others raped, and 251 taken hostage, many of whom were murdered while in captivity. Almost instantly, Israel was decried by many in the West as the aggressor.
As a people, Jews are familiar with this pattern. The victims of pogroms through the centuries drew no sympathy from the rest of the world, and when the Nazis commenced what some call the shoa and others the holocaust, the response from those who knew or had reason to know what was going on was mostly to close their borders and prevent Jewish emigration to their countries to escape what was being done to them. The indifference of the world to the plight of those Jews was nothing new and, as we saw in 2023, continues to this day.
Seen without that indifference, the attack of October 7 can only be seen, as one observer, frequently critical of the current Israeli Government has described it, as “an Islamist-initiated war geared to Israel’s destruction. This was what Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who orchestrated 7 October, intended and this is what his fellow Islamists, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, Iraqi Shi’ite militiamen and, above all, the Islamic Republic of Iran, who joined the assault, were and are engaged in.”
Israel’s response was to attempt to destroy Hamas and free the hostages. Though its Government is riddled with some truly evil elements, the Israeli Defense Forces (‘the IDF’) did not attempt to rid Gaza of its inhabitants and surely it could have done so if that had been its intent. Not undertaking what would have been, indeed, a genocide, Israel found it impossible to achieve its objective to fee Gaza from Hamas rule. The tunnels built under the buildings in the Gaza Strip, hiding Hamas fighters who were also embedded in the civilian population, in apartment buildings, schools, hospitals and mosques (yes, illegally under the rules of war which don’t apparently apply to a terrorist organization) made it next to impossible to protect Israel against them while preventing civilian casualties.
Someday, almost certainly under a different Israeli Government, we will find out the extent of the IDF’s attempt to protect against civilian casualties. We do not know, today, whether they were half-hearted or that individual soldiers acted improperly, but we do know of the many efforts to warn civilians to clear out of neighborhoods and even specific buildings about to be targeted and, yes, as a result masses of civilians were driven away from targeted areas.
Yes, ministers in the outgoing government have said revolting things — about “human animals,” about ruin, about emigration — and some of them plainly meant them. Those men are evil, as noted above. But the ugly statements of individual politicians, including ones the Prime Minister has conspicuously declined to fire, are not the same thing as a state policy carried into execution, and the law has always known the difference. Nor does the humanitarian catastrophe prove some intent to commit a genocide. The restriction of aid was at times indefensible and Israel will have to answer for it; but a state pursuing the physical destruction of a population does not facilitate millions of tons of food, water, and medical supplies into that population’s territory, however haltingly, under pressure, and with interruptions that cost lives. A government bent on extermination had the means to accomplish it in weeks. That it did not is not a credit Israel should have to claim; it is simply a fact fatal to the charge.
I am not an expert on military strategy or how to fight a war in an urban territory, but I am not sure all those who seem to know so much by virtue of their study of internet posts by political figures, know any more than I do. The Israeli Government owes us all, especially those in Israel and Gaza, a full explanation and the refusal of the current Government to provide one as previous Governments have done following other precarious moments in Israel’s history.
But the reason the internet and other places are filled with claims of a genocide is not simply to suggest an irony that the heirs of the victims of the one in the 1930s and 1940s then perpetrated their own genocide (a comparison which is odious in the extreme) but to place inordinate blame on the Jewish state–-Israel–-for something brought on by others. You can argue that the families of those displaced by the creation of the State of Israel or by its success in defending against the almost continuous attempts to destroy it, have many reasons to be unhappy. That certainly is so, though I would respond by pointing to whose fault that is, and, honestly, it is not Israel but those who have claimed leadership over that population.
In any event, attacking and murdering civilians who did nothing to them–-some of them babies, after all, can never be accepted as legitimate “resistance” and those who tell us it is, only heighten the Jewish view that we will always be blamed for whatever happens to us. Certainly not every critic of this war is an antisemite. Israelis themselves have been the war’s fiercest critics, and some of the loudest voices accusing Israel of genocide are Jews, even Israelis.
Watch, though, the selectivity. Watch how Sinwar’s stated aims vanish from the account, how Hamas appears, if at all, as weather rather than as author. Watch how the murder of civilians — some of them babies, after all — is dignified as “resistance,” as though any people on earth would accept that word applied to its own murdered children. Watch how quickly some reached for the theory that Israel itself moved the Nova festival closer to Gaza to fatten the casualty count — a claim with no support whatsoever, embraced on both the left and the right, and recognizable to any Jew as the oldest libel in our inventory wearing new clothes. When the scrutiny is unique, when the silence about the other side is total, when the blame finds us no matter what is done to us — we have a word for that pattern, because we have met it in every century. Those of us who grew up in the shadow of what our forebears endured recognize it without being told.
We get it. And we hear your disinterest and silence, yet again. But branding the Jewish state, alone among nations defending themselves, as genocidal — that is not criticism. It is the pattern.
And, honestly, those of us who have grown up in the shadow of what our forebears went through, the failure of the world to come to grips with what the Nazis did, the refusal to allow Jews to seek haven as it happened, the widespread and often eager collaboration of ordinary Europeans in the destruction in keeping with its history of pogroms and other attacks on us, the expulsion from Arab lands of those Jews whose families lived there for centuries and now, the current view that there is something wrong with a state dedicated to providing a haven for Jews, but nothing worth discussing about the dozens of other states understood to be the homeland of a particular people. No one disputes that Japan is the state of the Japanese, Armenia of the Armenians, or Ireland of the Irish — Ireland and Germany, like Israel, extend citizenship to their diasporas, and no one calls it racism. There are nearly two dozen members of the Arab League and more than fifty Muslim-majority states. There is one Jewish one, roughly the size of New Jersey, and it alone is told that its existence as such is a crime, or somehow wrong.
We get it. And we hear your disinterest and silence, yet again. Calling us names, branding us as defenders of a genocide or killing children is, however, unbearable and antisemitic. Please stop.