Israel-Hamas war is horrific, but not a genocide
For more than three months, I have watched in horror as Hamas, the Iranbacked terrorist entity that governs the Gaza Strip, has been joined by the state of Israel in committing war crimes.
Hamas forces slaughtered 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers without provocation on Oct. 7, while taking more than 250 men, women and children as hostages. Some of the dead, all of whom lived in or were visiting areas near Israel’s border with northern Gaza, lived near Gaza because they worked to improve the lives of Palestinian Arabs living there. Gaza has released many of the Israeli hostages, but it continues to hold dozens more, another war crime.
Israel, for its part, has bombarded the Gaza Strip with heavy artillery that has turned many of its buildings to rubble and has forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into a small area of southern Gaza. The compression of the Arabs, who were already densely packed into 140 square miles of territory, has caused famine-level hunger and the rampant spread of disease. The Israeli government has denied truckload after truckload of humanitarian aid to Gaza, which is itself a war crime.
Across the globe, pro-Palestinian demonstrators, including many who gathered on Jan. 13, have demanded that Israel stop its “genocide” of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Because Israeli attacks have killed, at this writing, some 24,000 Gazans, the vast majority not linked to Hamas and almost a third of them children, many commentators call those attacks an attempt to perpetrate a genocide.
But the depredations of the Israeli government, while real, deadly and carried out en masse, are not a genocide.
Genocide, which literally means
“the killing of a people,” is, according to Merriam-Webster, “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.” It is, in other words, the murder and attempted
Because Israeli attacks have killed some 24,000 Gazans, the vast majority not linked to Hamas and almost a third of them children, many commentators call those attacks an attempt to perpetrate a genocide.
murder of a large group of people simply for being who they are.
The Nazis carried out a genocide against Jews and Roma people because they saw them as races so substandard they should not be allowed to live; against homosexuals, whom they saw as insults to the Fatherland; and against political leftists, whom they saw as threatening their hegemony. Before the Third Reich (1933-1945) murdered 11 million people in Europe, Turkey tried to make its land free of Armenians, killing 1.5 million of them; after it, the Khmer Rouge regime tried to make its land free of Western influences by murdering at least 1.5 Cambodians and throwing thousands of others into camps. Those were genocides. There have been others.
To be sure, there are Israelis who would like Israel to be free of Arabs, including members of its government, and the state has been no friend of the Palestinians, with millions of them living under military occupation in the West Bank territory. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has no intention of bringing the war in Gaza to a close; with a 15% approval rating, he knows he is out of office once the shooting stops.
But Hamas’s charter does want a Palestine without Jews. Its call for Palestine to be free from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea is a call for its Jews to leave or be killed. As columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote in the Jan. 14 Washington Post, calling for a political-diplomatic end to the Gaza conflict: “Two peoples immersed in their own suffering will need to come to terms with a simple reality: Neither is going anywhere.” [italics hers].
I ask that demonstrators discard their “Stop the Genocide” placards and rally against the reality of the Gaza war: “End the occupations by Israel AND Hamas”; “Allow aid into Gaza”; “Ceasefire NOW.” And know the full story before you hit the streets — or the Internet.