Genocide

It has become commonplace for anti-Israel protesters to accuse the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of practicing genocide in its war against Hamas in Gaza.

The term “genocide”, incidentally, was coined during the Holocaust by a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin. He defined it as “”the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group”.

Is Israel guilty of genocide? The death of thousands of innocent Israelis and Palestinians during this ongoing conflict is a tragedy. There are no winners. The real losers are the families who are left to mourn the loss of their loved ones.

That having been said, one needs to look at figures. According to Reuters, the Palestinian Health Authority – hardly an objective source of information – claims that over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza.

Back in October last year they claimed that 471 had been killed in an Israeli attack on the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City. The “attack” turned out to be a misfired missile launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad that damaged an area adjacent to the hospital. Most experts concluded that the number of deaths totaled half that figure or even fewer.

In mid-March, UNICEF USA reported that 13,450 children had been killed in Gaza, citing figures from the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry. Later, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs would halve that number.

Given the fact that the IDF claims to have killed some 15,000 Hamas terrorists over the past eleven months, the remaining number of Palestinian dead, even were one to accept Hamas’ figures, amounts to no more than 25,000.

However, even the BBC, notorious for its coverage of the Israel/Palestinian conflict, was forced to admit that “(the Hamas-run health ministry’s) overall tally of those killed does not distinguish between civilians and combatants”.

As we all know, the war in Gaza is an urban conflict. Hamas terrorists use civilians as shields. They operate out of hospitals, schools, kindergartens, mosques and UNWRA distribution centers. It is, in fact, remarkable that so few Palestinian civilians have been killed given the circumstances.

Since the Gaza Strip’s population amounts to some 2.3 million, 25,000 civilian deaths, however tragic and regrettable, hardly constitutes genocide.

Lemkin coined the term “genocide”, because millions of Jews had been systematically rounded up, taken to concentration camps and murdered as part of the Nazi plan for a “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. One third of world Jewry was exterminated.

When protesters misuse the term “genocide” in their attacks on Israel, they are not only displaying their ignorance or being dishonest, but also have no idea what the term really means.

We Jews, unfortunately, know only too well.