Genocide is the murder of a significant part of a specific ethnic or religious group, solely because they are members of that demographic. It is one of humanity’s gravest crimes.
Israel stands widely accused of having engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. We would say it is to laugh, were the charges not so serious and so incredulous.
At this point, the proprieties of writing op eds call upon us to offer citations to this effect. Ordinarily, we would quote some half dozen leaders of countries, organizations such as the United Nations, maybe a movie star or two, perhaps a professional athlete, a European politician or three, all opining that Israel is indeed guilty of such monstrous behavior. But we will skip it: this charge has become so widespread that we need not document it. Rather, we now move directly to refutation.
What kind of genocide warns its victims? Throughout the conflict, Israel dropped leaflets, sent text messages, and made phone calls to Gaza civilians warning them to evacuate before strikes. When Israel notified Palestinians to depart from Gaza City before moving against Hamas strongholds, they refrained from bombing the masses of people leaving. Then Israel sent thousands of trucks laden with food and medical supplies into Gaza for enemy civilians. When has any army in history fed the population it supposedly seeks to exterminate? These deliveries became sites of chaos, with crowds swarming the trucks and armed Hamas fighters hiding among civilians to attack the distributors, who defended themselves. Does Israel really need to lure people with humanitarian aid in order to commit “genocide” against them?
Consider Israel’s military capabilities. Israel conquered Egypt in the Six-Day War of 1967. If Israel wanted to commit genocide against Gaza’s two million Palestinians, all of them would be dead by now. How long would this have taken? Not six days. Perhaps six hours, if not six minutes. The fact that the vast majority of Gazans remain alive is itself powerful evidence against the genocide charge.
Israel, presumably, committed genocide by killing some 65,000 Gazans (these are statistics brought to us by the not always reliable Hamas itself). No. The deaths of these unfortunate people, however many of them there are, were caused by this terrorist organization, not the IDF.
Consider an analogy: if a would-be murderer rushes at you, you justifiably kill him in self-defense. But suppose he has his two-year-old twin children strapped to his chest, and it is your bullets that kill all three of them. Who is responsible for the deaths of these infants? You? Him? Both sharing the blame equally? No. This is entirely the responsibility of the attempted murderer. Hamas uses Gazan women and children as human shields. The attacker bears all of the culpability; the defender, none of it.
If Israel wanted to engage in genocide in this conflict, it would not have expended the lives of hundreds of its own soldiers, each of them precious to this country. IDF soldiers were used for ground invasions, risking their lives in booby-trapped houses and tunnels. No, if genocide were the goal, the Gazans would have been murdered en masse from the air, where Israel’s military has a far greater comparative advantage. The choice to fight on the ground, at great cost to Israeli lives, demonstrates an attempt to minimize civilian casualties: the opposite of genocide.
Consider the statistics. Across the world, for all military battles where such data is available, the average army kills nine enemy non-combatants for every fighter killed. The Israeli record in Gaza? A ratio of one to one point five. The IDF has been extraordinarily solicitous about the lives of enemy civilians, especially when compared to any other military force in modern history. Does that sound like genocide?
It apparently does seem that way to a mighty large number of commentators, journalists, scholars, and celebrities. How could they have gone so far wrong?
Anti-semitism is one exceedingly plausible hypothesis. Russia and Ukraine show no compunctions about killing the civilians of their enemy. Why is it that the “G” word is never uttered in that context? Could it be that there are far too few Jews involved on either side? The “G” word was never mentioned in connection with the Dresden saturation bombing of the Allies, nor with Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Presumably, there were too few or no Jews involved in either of these horrific episodes. When Jews defend themselves, suddenly the standards change, and the ancient hatred finds new expression.
Now, with a ceasefire in place, however fragile, perhaps cooler heads will prevail. But the record is clear: Israel commits genocide? Give it a rest.
If there is any genocide in the Middle East, it is being committed against Israel, not by the Jewish State. On October 7, 2023, some 1,200 innocent non-combatants were murdered, and another 250 kidnapped, solely because they were members of a certain ethnic group. Hamas’s charter explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews worldwide. If that is not genocidal intent, then nothing is genocide.
The charge of genocide against Israel is not merely wrong. It is a perverse inversion of reality. It weaponizes the memory of actual genocide victims to delegitimize the Jewish state’s right to self-defense. Those who level this charge cheapen the very meaning of genocide and dishonor the victims of actual genocides throughout history.
Oded J. K. Faran holds LL.B. and LL.M. degrees in law from Sha’arei Mishpat College in Israel. He is the General Director of Faran & Co. International Translations Ltd. and lives in Tbilisi, Georgia. Walter E. Block is Harold E. Wirth Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics at Loyola University New Orleans.