Gaza and genocide

Hamas states explicitly in its charter that it wants to destroy Israel, kill all Jews there, and kill Jews elsewhere. The Hamas charter quotes the openly antiasemitic passage from the Hadith:

### Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say TO Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).  ###

The quote above is a call for the genocide of Jews. Hamas can inflict great damage on Israel, as we saw in the October 7th atrocities. There is no doubt that if Hamas had invaded with better weapons, a few more thousand terrorists, and better transportation, a couple more thousand Jews would have been killed.

Let us examine the meaning of genocide. Article 2 of the United Nations Genocide Convention defines genocide as “a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part.” In my opinion, the Chinese government is performing genocide against Tibetans and Uighurs, and similarly, the Russian government against the Ukranians, the RSF in Sudan against Sudanese Africans, and the Myanmar government against the Rohingya. 

Israel does have the military capacity to commit genocide. It is worthwhile, therefore, to examine statements made by Israeli leaders, not just journalists, media commentators, bloggers, etc. Also, many Israeli Jews do not agree with the following statements made by some Israeli leaders.

The October 7th Hamas attacks have consumed Israeli society with deep grief and outrage. I list some government and military leaders’ statements. Read them and see if you think they are a warrant for genocide.

1.   Israel’s Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, stated: “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly”. Gallant continued, “We will eliminate everything – they will regret it.”
2.   Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible – we do remember,” The bible explicitly states that all Amalekites must be killed, not just the men who ambushed Israelites – a direct call for genocide.
3. Maj. Gen. Ghassan Allian, who heads the Israeli army’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Palestinian Territories (COGAT), declared.  “There will be no electricity and no water (in Gaza), there will only be destruction.” 
4. Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, declared: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.” 
5.   Amit Halevi, a Likud member in parliament, said, “There should be two goals for this victory: One, there is no more Muslim land in the land of Israel … After we make it the land of Israel, Gaza should be left as a monument, like Sodom”.
6.   The former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett expressed, in typically unashamed terms, in an interview on Sky News on 12 October: “We’re fighting Nazis.”
7.   Moshe Feiglin, the founder of Israel’s right-wing Zehut Party and former Likud representative in Israel’s parliament stated  “You wanted hell, you will get hell,”, and has also called for the destruction of Gaza.   Other quotes from Feiglin include:  “There is one and only (one) solution, which is to completely destroy Gaza before invading it. I mean destruction like what happened in Dresden and Hiroshima, without nuclear weapons”  and “Gaza should be razed and Israel’s rule should be restored to the place. This is our country”.

8.   Amichai Eliyahu, Israeli Heritage Minister, said in a radio interview that dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza was a possible tactic Israel could employ.  “Your expectation is that tomorrow morning we’d drop what amounts to some kind of a nuclear bomb on all of Gaza, flattening them, eliminating everybody there,” the interviewer said.
9.   Bezalel Smotrich, Minister of Finance, said in an interview, “I hoped we wouldn’t have to pay a heavy price,” but that’s the price we have to pay to reach the point where “in Gaza, there will be 100 or 200 thousand Arabs, not two million Arabs.”  He also stated: “Two million people wake up every morning with a desire to destroy the State of Israel and to slaughter, rape and murder Jews.
10.   The Israeli politician Nissim Vaturi has reiterated his call for Gaza to be burned down, saying “there are no innocents there”. Referring to Palestinians still in northern Gaza after repeated orders from the Israeli military for them to flee, Vaturi, a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party said “One hundred thousand remain. I have no mercy for those who are still there. We need to eliminate them.”

11.  In an Israeli television clip cited by South Africa in its application, Col. Yogev Bar-Sheshet spoke from Gaza: “Whoever returns here, if they return here after, will find scorched earth,” he said. “No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future.”

12. Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to Britain, recently explained to the British TV host Iain Dale that Israel had to lay waste to Gaza because “every school, every mosque, every second house” was connected to a tunnel used by Hamas.

Some Israeli politicians have outright called for a repeat of the Nakba, or catastrophe in Arabic when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled and hundreds of villages demolished from 1947 to 1948 at the establishment of the state of Israel.

13.   The Nakba (catastrophe) is the Palestinian term for the expulsion and fleeing of Palestinians in 1948.  Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker for Israel’s parliament, said “Nakba? Expel them all,” “If the Egyptians care so much for them – they are welcome to have them wrapped in cellophane tied with a green ribbon.”

14.   Ariel Kallner, a member of Israel’s parliament, said, “Nakba to the enemy now! This day is our Pearl Harbour. We will still learn the lessons. Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48. A Nakba in Gaza and a Nakba for anyone who dares to join!”

These statements are preparing Israelis for the deaths of tens of thousands more Gazan Palestinians (already as of January 14th, 23,000 have been killed) and, perhaps, eventually a hundred thousand or more.  Current Israeli leaders have no projected limit on the Gazan death toll.  The only question is will the world be able to stop them?