Between the recent UN ruling declaring that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and the almost equally recent resolution by the International Association of Genocide Scholars to the same effect, you could be excused for thinking that Israel is, indeed, committing genocide in Gaza.
Certainly, it’s hard not to come to that conclusion if all you know about the war are the shocking photos of dead Palestinian children being pulled from the rubble, the odd social media post by your favourite celebrity or even just a superficial read of the headlines coming from major newspapers, governments, and humanitarian organisations.
The problem is, it’s all a complete lie. Not that the war, which started with Hamas’ massacre in southern Israel on 7 October 2023 and its taking of 250+ Israeli citizens and foreign nationals, isn’t absolutely devastating, that it hasn’t gone on far too long, and that there are thousands of non-combatant casualties, including a high number of children. But it isn’t a genocide.
Political
Analysis SA
MY TRUSTED SOURCE
And if you believe that I am rather outranked by the endless supply of “experts” that insist that Israel is very much doing what I am outright denying, you may be right, but there are just as many individuals and organisations that back me up.
Also, just looking at these two more recent damning accusations of genocide against Israel, it quickly becomes clear that they may not be the impartial observers that they make themselves out to be. The United Nations, in particular, has shown a strong anti-Israel bias long before the current war, but has become, in effect, a mouthpiece for Hamas since October 7th.
Indeed, members of the UN’s agency dedicated purely to the Palestinians, UNRWA, were either complicit in the massacre itself or cheered it on, while the UN in general has been exacerbating the hunger crisis during the war by refusing to work with Israel for the distribution of aid. That this current resolution reflects the views of people with existing hatred for Israel is no more surprising than the fact that the report barely mentions Hamas.
As for the resolution by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, it has been widely reported that 86% of those who voted ruled that Israel were committing genocide, but less frequently mentioned is that only 28% of the 500 members of this association actually voted, all of whom anonymously. By contrast, one letter arguing vehemently against the resolution has amassed the signatures of well over 500 pre-eminent scholars, Holocaust survivors and former prosecutors.
Understanding Genocide
Whatever you may think of those making the claims against Israel, however, genocide has a very specific definition, both in terms of international law and wider morality.
Legally, as described in the Geneva Convention, for something to be considered genocide, it needs to fulfil the following criteria:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Does Israel fulfil these criteria? Absolutely not, as I will show. But it’s easy to make Israel seem guilty of almost every part of this definition. All it takes is the complete erasure of one of the two parties involved in this war.
Proving Intent
Proving intent of genocide is not a simple task, but sadly, there are certain members of the Israeli government who have tried their hardest to make the prosecution’s case for them by calling for, if not genocide, then at least ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. This primarily comes from far-right, religious-nationalist extremists like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and their supporters.
In the wake of the sheer brutality of Hamas’ action on October 7th and the shocking anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric (and sometimes action) from the heart of the liberal-democratic world, this very small minority contingent of Israelis has been granted a much louder voice and, yes, more support from the wider public. This is, indeed, very troubling. But they are still a minority and, crucially, they don’t actually set policy in either crafting the goals of the war or how the war is executed.
There are numerous concrete pieces of evidence of this.
First, and most simply, however glib he may appear when saying so, Netanyahu is entirely correct in his assertion that there’s a very easy way to tell that Israel has no intention of committing genocide: Israel’s highly advanced military could have wiped Gaza off the map in the space of an afternoon. Certainly, they wouldn’t have bothered sending in soldiers to risk their lives, limbs, or jobs and family lives in ground operation after ground operation, when an aerial offensive would have been a whole lot more efficient.
And this has been true every time that Israel has been accused of genocide against the Palestinians throughout its history: if genocide was ever its intention, it has been very, very bad at it. There were roughly 1.5 million Palestinians in 1948; today there are around ten times that much, with around six million living in Gaza and the West Bank. Even during this horrendous war, the estimated population of Gaza has actually grown, year by year, despite the thousands who have died.
Israel has long had the ability to eradicate the Palestinians but has never come remotely close to doing so. By contrast Hamas has never had the ability to annihilate Israel, but it has consistently shown that it would if it could.
It’s also worth reiterating that whether you believe them or not, both Netanyahu and the IDF have been entirely clear of their goals in this war: the freeing of the hostages taken into Gaza from Israel on October 7th and the removal of Hamas as both a threat to Israel and as a governing force in Gaza.
Netanyahu’s lack of clarity on his plans for the enclave after the war may not help matters, but it doesn’t change that the goals of the war have been consistent throughout. Or, for that matter, that these objectives still haven’t been met, with 48 hostages remaining in Gaza and Hamas being down but decidedly not out.
Which brings us to Israel’s actual conduct during this war.
Genocidal Actions?
Taking a look at the five criteria set out in the Geneva Convention for Israel’s actions to be considered genocidal, the first two are typical of any war and can only be considered genocidal if they are accompanied by a clear genocidal intent (which, again, they aren’t), and even Israel’s harshest critics would concede that the final criteria obviously does not apply.
Which leaves us with “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”. It’s with these two points that those who accuse Israel of genocide have the most room to play. This is where they can point to Israel’s “deliberate starvation” of Gaza and to the number of Gazan children who have died during this war or the physical destruction of most of Gaza, including vital infrastructure like hospitals and schools.
I have written extensively about it in the past, so on the matter of intentional starvation, I’ll keep it brief: There has clearly been severe hunger in Gaza, but it is much more likely the result of gross mismanagement by Israel, theft and exploitation by Hamas, and the UN’s refusal to work with any Israel-led humanitarian efforts than a concerted effort by Israel to starve the population of Gaza. Israel has admitted millions of tonnes of food into Gaza throughout the war, pausing only relatively briefly when it believed that it had sent in enough supplies to last six months during the ceasefire earlier this year, in a frankly bone-headed move to try and play “hungry chicken” with Hamas. Netanyahu has used half-hearted threats of withholding aid to try and weaken Hamas (entirely unsuccessfully) and to placate the hard-right members in his government, it’s true, but this has never come close to amounting to intentional starvation of the entire population.
The IDF’s actions in Gaza, meanwhile, arguably give genocide accusers the most ammunition, if you’ll pardon the pun, but they are also the very thing that the anti-Israel contingent is most wildly wrong about. And the reason they get it so very, very wrong is that they consistently ignore Hamas’ part in every aspect of this war. At best, they acknowledge the horrors of October 7th and might even make gestures towards Hamas being a force for evil (some even going so far as to consider them almost as bad as Netanyahu) but when it comes to the radical Islamist terror group that started this war in the most barbaric manner imaginable, the level of cognitive dissonance on display by Israel’s most vehement accusers is genuinely mind-boggling.
The IDF’s actions in Gaza have undoubtedly included some tragic mistakes, perhaps even individual actions that cross the line into war crimes, but also include attempts to separate the civilian population from Hamas, provide aid for that population, and to give them weeks of warning in advance of an attack even when it compromises Israel on a strategic level. But this is, fundamentally, a war that Israel did not start and it’s a war that would end the minute Hamas surrenders all remaining hostages and lays down its arms. None of these are the acts of a genocidal army.
The same, however, is not true of Hamas.
Understanding the Enemy
Hamas’ aim: Hamas is a radical Islamist terror group and death cult that is a subset of the Muslim Brotherhood and shares the same basic objectives of all radical Islamist groups: to destroy Israel, murder its Jews, and create an Islamist caliphate across the entirety of the Middle East and beyond. Its objectives on 7 October 2023 are consistent with the aims of every terror attack it has committed since its foundation in the 1980s: the gleeful massacre of Jews and the destruction of any attempts at peace between Israel and the rest of the Arab/ Muslim world (Saudi Arabia was arguably very close to joining the Abraham Accords in October 2023), and the discrediting of Israel on an international level by forcing it to launch a massive invasion into Gaza. It has also continually promised to repeatedly commit massacres like the one on October 7th until Israel is no more.
One also can’t overlook how Hamas’ attack was clearly only supposed to be the opening salvo of a series of attacks by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies with clearly genocidal intent. Key to this was Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Iranian proxy that eclipsed Hamas in terms of manpower, weapons, and military competence, who according to Israeli intelligence was gearing up to commit an October 7th like massacre of its own but, thank God, were beaten by Israeli intelligence and military forces before this could occur. With a bit more planning, Hezbollah could have attacked at the same time as Hamas, and the results would have been – well, let’s say we would be talking about an actual genocide.
Hamas’ Gaza: Since seizing power in 2007 after Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Hamas has held Gaza and its people hostage. It confiscated billions of dollars in aid to turn its founders into multi-billionaires and to turn Gaza into what is probably the world’s largest terror base. It used hospitals, schools and mosques as military bases. It stored arms and munitions in children’s crèches. It built rocket launchers in the homes of ordinary Gazans. And, in its coup de gras, it created hundreds of kilometres of tunnels running under one of the most densely populated areas on Earth for the exclusive use of its terrorists. They have shown not just a willingness to commit genocide against Israel, but to commit a genocide on the Palestinians of Gaza if it will help achieve its aims.
Hamas’ War: Hamas’ war crimes are almost too many to count. Hamas had set up Gaza to be destroyed by Israeli forces by interlacing military with civilian infrastructure and forcing Israel to go through civilian infrastructure to access its network of tunnels. It kidnapped more than 250 Israelis, including literal babies, and hid them within “civilian” homes. It has failed to distinguish itself from civilians by not wearing uniforms. It has prevented Gazans from leaving active war zones and from accessing their tunnels. It has booby-trapped every building it has vacated, killing Israeli soldiers and/ or forcing Israel to resort to not-always-accurate air strikes. It wilfully martyrs civilians and its own members not for any military advantage but as propaganda tools to discredit Israel on an international level.
If victory is defined not as surviving a war but achieving its primary aims, Hamas, despite being decimated and hopefully inches away from being physically defeated, has won this war. And the international community played its part in ensuring that it did.
More Facts on the Ground
OK, so, this is Hamas, but what about the Israeli Defence Forces? Just because Hamas is guilty of more war crimes than you can count doesn’t give Israel the right to respond however it deems fit.
The thing is, for all that the war in Gaza can accurately be called a tragic quagmire of the highest order, Israel has been careful to keep within the limits of international law as much as possible. Has it always been successful at it? No, probably not. But there’s nothing about the situation in Gaza that makes following the rules and conventions of war easy or even possible. Hamas made very sure of that. Indeed, more than that, Hamas made sure that every action Israel would take would be a moral compromise that extends far beyond the usual immorality of war.
Hamas agents, for example, work as journalists in Gaza, primarily for Qatar’s mouthpiece, Al Jazeera (an organisation that is outright banned in many of the more moderate Arab countries and by the Palestinian Authority), which ensures that when Israel targets them, Israel will be blamed for killing journalists. The same is true of Hamas’ infiltration of Gaza’s humanitarian organisations, and in particular UNRWA.
(Both of these points are frequently denied by the anti-Israel side, admittedly, but at the very least, the idea that anything operates in Gaza without Hamas’ approval is clearly absurd.)
As for the matter of the IDF obliterating the vast majority of Gaza’s infrastructure with its “indiscriminate bombings”, well, it has done so, but these attacks are neither indiscriminate nor are they done with the intention of killing civilians.
The IDF has dropped millions of pamphlets, made thousands of phone calls, and have constantly given civilians the opportunity to vacate war zones. The reason the IDF have destroyed so much of Gaza, comes down to Hamas doing everything in its power to erase all lines between Gaza’s military and civil infrastructures. The terror tunnels alone are such a vital tool in Hamas’ war and its survival that it’s hard to see how Israel can possibly win this war without destroying or at least crippling them. And to get to the tunnels you have to go through the civilian houses and institutions under which they are built.
As for the number of civilians killed verses combatants, things get even more complicated. Every civilian death, especially when it comes to innocent children, is nothing less than an unimaginable tragedy, but it is also an unavoidable reality of war. All the more so in a war where one side sees the wholesale death of their own civilians and their own children, as not only acceptable but desired.
I’ve largely resisted bringing up specific numbers when talking about civilian casualties because, honestly, I have no idea what the actual numbers are. And neither do you. The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health is the best indicator for the amount of Palestinian non-combatant deaths in the war, but it is either entirely or somewhat unreliable depending on your perspective. Israel insists that the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths is somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1 with those who claim to be on the Palestinian side put it closer to 8:1. We will only know the real toll of this war when it is done, and even then perhaps not.
One figure we do know for sure, though, is that a full half of Gazans are under the age of eighteen. Hamas is well aware of that fact. They use indoctrination to rob them of both their childhood and any sense of hope. They use teenagers as soldiers (read: cannon fodder) and hide their munitions among toddlers and infants. There is no greater enemy of the children of Gaza than Hamas.
To get a more in-depth look at exactly what conditions Israel is fighting under, may I strongly suggest watching these two interviews, with two actual urban warfare experts – who, incidentally, have two opposing views on the current operation in Gaza City.
Why This All Matters
Aside for why this obviously matters greatly to Israel and Jews around the world who have faced a shocking rise in antisemitism, these false allegations against Israel will have repercussions well beyond the obvious.
First, and most simply, they enable Hamas – not just to gain the upper hand in ceasefire negotiations but to, heaven forbid, even remain in power in Gaza after this war, which would be the worst possible outcome for both Israel and the Palestinians. Second, if Israel’s defensive war against Hamas is a genocide then any defensive war – but in particular those against Islamist fundamentalists who use similar methods to Hamas – could easily be considered the same. Which, not for nothing, would hurt normal, moderate Muslims above all others.
Claims of genocide against Israel in this war, therefore, not only continue the time-honoured tradition of using blood libels against Jews (and now their state), but amount to a major win for Hamas, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and anyone else who resorts to terror and religious extremism to wage war against our liberal-democratic civilisation.
Do. Not. Fall. For it.
