Bad but Not Genocide

For a bit over 85 years, many throughout Europe, and quite a few in America, have been waiting to deflect the guilt the world has felt for lending assistance to or at the very least standing by and allowing the Holocaust to happen.  This War Against the Jews, as historian Lucy Dawidowicz called it, was certainly the textbook case of a genocidal plan. Premeditated and planned on January 20, 1942, when 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,”  this was a clear program of attempted genocide.  That “Final Solution” phrase was the code name for the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of European Jews, but ultimately of Jews throughout the globe. This mass murder of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators required the coordination and cooperation of governmental agencies throughout Axis-controlled Europe. The SS envisioned that some 11 million Jews, some of them not living on German-controlled territory, would be eradicated as part of the Nazi program. We know the world watched and often helped to perpetrate it.

Now those who throughout their lifetimes have known the history of this genocidal plan – although incredibly to this day some among them falsely deny that the Holocaust ever took place – seem pleased at last to sling the accusation of genocidal behavior back against Jews and Israel, the only sovereign Jewish state, born in the aftermath of the Holocaust and a refuge for many survivors as well as other Jews fleeing anti-Semitism and persecution.  But in the face of this accusation of “genocide” I ask: Did the state of Israel or the Jewish community anywhere gather as did the Nazis at Wannsee or organize a tribunal like the one planned and explicitly initiated by the Central Committee of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) — the ruling “Young Turks” party – in order to perpetrate a genocidal slaughter of ethnic Christian Armenians between 1915-1923?

There’s no evidence of such a plan, and the approximately 70,000 Palestinians killed out of the 2.2 million in Gaza are nowhere close to those slaughtered in these earlier genocidal actions.  Even the Rwandan state-led mass slaughter of approximately 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus over the 100-day period in 1994 dwarfs the events in Gaza.

The loose talk of genocide by Israel has been destructive.  Not only is it targeting Israel but all Jews everywhere. The latter attacks are reinforced by anti-Semitic emotions that are always in the atmosphere; the war in Gaza just supersaturated that atmosphere and now an antisemitic storm is raining down on Jewry everywhere.

To attack Haredi and Hasidic Jews, whose opposition to Zionism is open and declared, particularly among those living outside of Israel, who are often the targets of the accusers of a Palestinian genocide in Israel, is not because they were soldiers in the IDF – they refuse to serve – but purely because they are easily identifiable as Jews. It’s pure antisemitism, since these Jews are proudly antizionist; and those frequently attacked are not in Israel either.  No less the attacks on synagogues or Jewish community events outside of Israel.  Conflating Israel and Jews throughout the world is of course part of the desire to deflect guilt for genocide against the Jews and an expression of simple Jew-hatred.

I also believe that it comes from ignorance and a pointed unwillingness to admit that the Hamas attacks from Gaza on 7 October 2023 that led to this war were clearly the result of a genuinely genocidal plan against Israel, as we see from the documents found which reveal Yahya Sinwar and Hamas’ plans from August 2022 for such a murderous assault overwhelmingly against civilians, women, children and babies.  As the current New Yorker reports “Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, and other Hamas leaders had discussed for several years with [Lebanon’s Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah and the Iranian regime a multifront “plan of annihilation” against Israel.” It also ignores the large number of Hamas operatives among the victims of the Israeli counterattack.  And it disregards the fact that among the Palestinian invaders on 7 October, there were many Palestinian civilians who took advantage of the breach in the border fence and followed the Hamas Nukhba Force and joined in the depraved violence and the genocidal attack.

The many young Jews outside of Israel who naively believe that if they repeat the false accusation of Israeli genocide against Palestinians during this Gaza war or join in irresponsibly singling out of the Israelis as the most egregious practitioners of genocide, they will somehow successfully disassociate themselves from the anti-Jewish sentiments that have been aroused by such accusations against Israel, including the boycotts of Jews as participants in all sorts of social and professional contexts and the wide array of violence against them. In the long view of Jewish history, the evidence is that such a strategy will not work.  An accusation against a Jewish homeland and Jews in one place does not leave Jews living elsewhere untouched. Beware, my Jewish friends abroad who sling the arrows of genocide against Israel; you may find them aimed at you very soon.

That said, pointing out that “genocide” is not part of the Israeli counter-attack on Gaza and now on Lebanon that the Netanyahu government has fought, is not to approve of the way this war has been prosecuted.  Nor is it approval of the unconscionable tolerance of violence against Palestinians in the occupied territories, which is painful to witness and has many opponents among Israelis.  Israel’s current government and its supporters are tinged with the worst instincts and intolerable ethnocentrism that have increasingly infected this country and many of its leaders.  I only pray that the voters here in Israel who have been incited with hate by those who support Bibi will rise up and throw this evil coalition into the dustbin of history and prosecute those responsible for it.  It will, however, accomplish nothing by calling these wars genocidal.  We in Israel must end the wars and punish our own as well as those on the other side whose hate and lust for power keep the violence going.