Last night I had a nightmare about some unknown group of people who were going after me for some unspecified thing that I did, and eventually I realized that they were going to arrest me and I would be convicted of an unspecified crime and sent to jail. I can’t remember all the details, but it was so realistic that I woke up at 3 a.m. and couldn’t shake the idea that it had really happened. I couldn’t get back to sleep because, unlike with other bad dreams, I continued to be terrified until I got up. I told Malgorzata about the dream, who replied, “You are a Jew in a world that hates Jews.” She added that she had had similar dreams of terror after the WWII, after she and her mother returned to Poland from their exile to the Soviet Union (Malgorzata was born in the Caucasus in 1943 after her mother fled Poland during the war, and both returned to Poland—only to face more antisemitism—in 1946.
I give this information only because today I am quite depressed about the situation in the Middle East, and especially about the unwarranted hatred for and accusations against Israel emerging throughout the world—even in the American Left. This is surely the source of my dream. So I may write a couple of posts today about the war and the ensuing hatred, just to calm myself down,
Some of the accusations flying around are palpably false, including the assertion Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians, and that Israel is also an apartheid state that, many imply, should be erased.
In fact, both of these terms, “apartheid” and “genocide” apply better to Palestine and Hamas than to Israel.
Here’s an article from Quillette about the misuse of the “genocide” accusation. The author, Zachary Goldsmith, is identified as “the author of “Fanaticism: A Political Philosophical History” (2022). His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, NBC News, and Law & Liberty, among other venues.”
Click to read:
First, the definition of “genocide,” which comes from the UN:
The crime of genocide was codified by the United Nations in 1946 with the passage of General Assembly Resolution 96, defined as “a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings.”
In 1948, the UN General Assembly passed its “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” which refers to five distinct acts, the commission of any one of which constitutes the crime of genocide: (1) killing members of the group in question; (2) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (3) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (4) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (5) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
So, do the actions of the State of Israel during the current war against Hamas satisfy any of these definitions?
Goldsmith argues “definitely not”:
Has Israel lived up to these guiding principles in Gaza? Yes. The IDF has gone to considerable lengths to minimize civilian casualties. As in previous wars, Israel has dropped leaflets and sent text messages directing Palestinian civilians to evacuate dangerous areas—in this case, the north of Gaza. This evacuation is being monitored from Israel by tracking the movements of cell phones in Gaza. Israel also uses precise targeted weapons in order to minimize civilian casualties in dense urban environments. One such weapon, used for the first time in this war, is the precision mortar dubbed “Iron Sting.” According to the Jerusalem Post, “The mortar is designed for use in both open terrain and urban environments, while using its precise targeting to reduce the possibility of non-combatants being injured.”
Tragically, all wars claim civilian casualties—and this is especially true in Gaza, due to the dense urban conditions and to Hamas’s deliberate strategy of attempting to maximize civilian casualties. According to a recent NATO report, Hamas “has been using human shields in conflicts with Israel since 2007”:
Hamas relies on the Israeli government’s aim to minimise collateral damage, and is also aware of the West’s sensitivity towards civilian casualties. Hamas’s use of human shields is therefore likely aimed at minimising their own vulnerabilities by limiting the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) freedom of action. It is also aimed at gaining diplomatic and public opinion-related leverage, by presenting Israel and the IDF as an aggressor that indiscriminately strikes civilians.
Hamas has used its nearly two decades of control over Gaza to build an extensive network of fortified tunnels in, under, and around civilian infrastructure in order to smuggle contraband and weapons, while carrying out a campaign of terror against Israel and its civilians. Even more tellingly, Hamas is currently using Gaza’s largest hospital as its headquarters. While the first duty of any government is to protect its citizens, Hamas’s central governing principle is to oppress its people while placing them squarely in harm’s way. Given this, it is clear that Hamas bears moral responsibility for all lives lost in this conflict, both Israeli and Palestinian, including those civilian Palestinians whom Israel has taken great pains to protect.
The demographic data also contradicts the idea that Israel is committing genocide. Since the year 2000, the population of Gaza has nearly doubled; it boasts the 39th highest birthrate among the world’s countries, and the average life expectancy is nearly 76 years of age (the average life expectancy in the US is just over 77 years of age). If Israel is intent on committing genocide in Gaza, it is doing a very poor job.
But Hamas is committed to the genocide of the Jews, and cries of “Israeli genocide” started even before Israel began its post-October 7 defense by bombarding Gaza:
Hamas’s founding covenant calls for an “Islamic Resistance Movement” that “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” and provide “one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders.” The raison d’être of Hamas, then, is to expel every Israeli and Jew from Israel-Palestine, eliminating both the state of Israel and the Jews who inhabit it. “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad,” the document states. It cites a Hadith (a saying of the Prophet Mohammed) that makes this point chillingly clear:
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.
(Hamas issued a new charter in 2017. It is still rife with inflammatory language about the “Zionist entity.”)
So, whereas the IDF Code of Ethics requires all Israeli soldiers to act with “purity of arms” and make every effort to avoid civilian casualties, Hamas’s 1988 charter calls for unremitting jihad against Jews. While the IDF Code of Ethics prohibits war crimes up to and including genocide, the Hamas Covenant defines genocide as its core mission.
We saw this mission in action on 7 October, when Hamas carried out one of the most heinous anti-Jewish pogroms in history in a campaign of terror that satisfies every definition of genocide.
Now I’m not denying that innocent civilians are being killed by the IDF during the war, and that is a tragedy, for every life lost leaves behind loved ones and relatives who are devastated. But, as you know, this is largely because Hamas uses human shields, and in fact relishes Palestinian deaths because they’re good propaganda. And I’m not denying that a few errant Israeli soldiers kill Palestinian civilians out of hatred (if caught, these soldiers are charged with crimes). But that is a far cry from what Hamas does, which is to repeatedly and deliberately target Israeli civilians, and celebrate those who commit murder (they also pay them off if they go to prison).
What bothers me is that everyone with two neurons to rub together knows that Hamas, many Palestinians, and many Palestine supporters in the West either explicitly or implicitly call for a genocide of the Jews. Hamas is committed to it, and those who shout “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, are, some perhaps unknowingly, calling for an elimination of Israel and of the Jews who live there. (Or are they only suggesting that Israel’s Jews be moved to another place? A “one-state solution” is also a recipe for genocide.). In contrast, Israel, though it’s an enemy of Hamas and not friends with Palestine, is not sworn to eradicate it, either. In fact, Israel has made five offers of a two-state solution to Palestine since the 1930s—and all were rejected. It is Palestine who attacks Israel repeatedly—with terrorist attacks on civilians, with rockets aimed at civilians, and with the horrible butchery of October 7.
Yes, if you’re going to single out which entity is sworn to eradicate the members of the other, the answer would be Palestine. Those who answer “Israel” do so in the face of the facts and in light of their “settler-colonialist” analogy between Jewish “white” oppressors and subjugated Palestinian “people of color”. Of course I’m a secular Jew, but I wasn’t a particularly big defender of Israel until recent events have offended me as a scientist with their arrant distortion of the truth in service to ideology.
And, as part of their linguistic tactics, Palestine and its supporters level the worst possible accusation against Israel and the Jews—that they’re Nazis.
This new blood libel—the charge of genocide—is also an attempt to yoke the state of Israel to that very regime whose industrial murder of Jews gave rise to the necessity to create the term “genocide” itself: Nazi Germany. As the philosopher Bernard Harrison has argued, the intent “is to defame Israel by association with the most powerful symbol of evil, of that which, because it contains not the least scintilla of goodness, must be utterly rejected and uprooted from the face of the earth.” Harrison continues:
To use “Nazi analogies to criticize Israel’s policies” is to disseminate the suggestion that Israeli policies are morally indistinguishable from Nazi policies, and hence that the state of Israel is therefore in no way morally distinguishable from the Third Reich, from which, if true, it surely follows that the existence of the State of Israel has as little to be said for it as the existence of the Third Reich; which is to say, nothing; and from that that the Jews, since so many of them support the existence of Israel, are, collectively, enemies of mankind. To disseminate such suggestions, for whatever reason, and with whatever color of moral commitment or humanitarian concern, is, I submit, to disseminate anti-Semitic views of a rather traditional kind.
It is for this reason that likening Israel to Nazi Germany has been recognized as an antisemitic act by the US State Department in its working definition of antisemitism.
Goldsmith concludes:
Today, these ideologues have a new weapon with which to target Israel—the baseless smear of genocide. This libel is fundamentally antisemitic and opens the door to greater and more extreme hostility toward Israel. It makes violence against Israel and against Jews worldwide seem more acceptable. At the same time, fallaciously accusing Israel of genocide serves to obscure the nature of the real genocide occurring here. It conceals Hamas’s genocidal acts and intentions, while furnishing an anti-Jewish blood libel refashioned for the 21st century.
It’s tine to call out the brainless ideologues who accuse Israel and the Jews of practicing “genocide” against Palestinians, as it’s a palpably false accusation that, if you know history, actually is the other way round. Likewise for calling Israel an “apartheid” state. Whether you construe that term to mean that Arabs in Israel are discriminated against (another completely stupid claim) or that Israel doesn’t want a two-state solution (ditto, though the possibility is vanishing), it’s a false accusation. If you’re a gay person, an atheist, a woman, or a critic of Islam, you are a victim of apartheid in Palestine. A Jew who is found in Palestine alone is doomed to be killed. This is not true of Palestinians, 18,000 of whom crossed the border every day to work in Israel.
Yes, Palestine is committed to genocide against the Jews, and is also an apartheid state.
Robert Habeck, Vice Chancellor of Germany, Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action:
https://twitter.com/BMWK/status/1720130870864998800
Robert Habeck has received a lot of praise in Germany for this speech: From conservative to left-wing politicians. From serious daily newspapers to the populist tabloid Bild.
What a great speech, clearly reasoned and clearly principled —
how refreshing! The seriousness with which Germany’s obligation to Israel is taken is such a striking contrast with Putin’s abrogation of Russia’s treaty obligation as a guarantor of Ukraine’s independence …
Great speech, I’ll second that anytime.
Excellent speech. Astounding clarity.
Masterful.
You could add, though of course you don’t need to, that after the jihadists get rid of the Jews, they’ll come for the rest of us next. They aren’t even waiting until they get the last one, reasoning that we who help in any way defend or befriend Jews are standing in their way. In that sense, we are all Jews now. Perhaps we always were. We were once just farther away and there were more of us.
Citizens in democratic countries please make your governments know that they will be unelectable if they turn their backs on Israel.
Sadly, misguided people have been softening up the definition of genocide for at least a couple of decades, in all sorts of contexts — mainly I think because the absolute opprobrium of the idea, inviting unconditional condemnation, is something they want to co-opt for their own cause, whatever that is, and using the “nuclear option” of the G-word is a cheap and easy way to do it. We just had a very ill-advised example in Canada last year, when Parliament voted to declare the (now thankfully defunct) residential school system to be an example of genocide — as if the schools to which First Nations children were compulsorily sent for a century were not simply cruel, shoddy, and educationally inefficient (all of which they were), but as if killing the children who attended them were the institutions’ primary purpose.
Religion of peace my pustulent, santorum-dripping ass.
Jerry, things might be changing for the better. I just heard part of a program on On Point on NPR (NPR!), about the recent spate of anti-Semitism. Simon Sebag Montefiore was on it. He’s great, I already ordered his book on Stalin.
I’m not sure how a “recent spate of anti-Semitism” is a “change for the better.” Do tell!
Because it was an anti-anti-Semitism report and it was on NPR, which has not been as forthright in supporting Israel as they could be. Just hoping some of the lefts recent coming out in support of Hamas will wake people up.
I think I had heard the same one, or at least something similar on NPR recently. The interviewee was giving much the same talking points that we read about here from Jerry, and the interviewer was not openly disputing them. And there are similar op-eds on the CNN web site.
I don’t know if that means a little bit of a pendulum swing, or if it simply means that news and opinion outlets have become a bit bored with the same old Israel bashing and have found a new toy instead.
Good to hear. I have been listening to NPR locally and they seemed very pro-Palestine…as in always talking about the innocent victims of Israeli strikes with no mention of how these people are put in danger by Hamas, nor mentioning that Israel tries to avoid these killings.
I was starting to think that NPR stood for National Palestinian Radio…
I didn’t have the same dream, of course, but I too am deeply perplexed and horrified by the way the left (especially) and the international community (with few, but important, exceptions) are siding with Hamas. It’s just too unbelievable to be true; yet it is IS true. This is the “sinking feeling” that Michael Oren discussed the other day.
I’m also concerned about conditions in the U.S. President Biden’s commitment to Israel seems strong (despite his recent calls for pauses), and the administration’s support for Jews and Jewish institutions has been very strong—even in the face of antisemites and others who are valorizing Hamas. Here’s my nightmare scenario. Suppose that our next President is not a strong supporter of Israel. Suppose our next administration is not as vocal or activist in its condemnation of antisemitism. What happens then? Will the latent antisemitism in the U.S. spin out of control? (I won’t detail what could happen, but you can all imagine.)
What scares me is the possibility that a change of administration or a new event on the ground in the Middle East could unleash in an already violent society (the U.S) violence like we haven’t seen in the U.S. before.
Think of what would have transpired in 1941 if Judith Butler’s Progressive global Left had been in operation then, and the Japanese Empire had claimed it represented God. We would have heard bien-pensant Progressives insisting that the US was responsible for Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, and calling for a US cease-fire to start on December 8. [In fact, earlier in the year almost equal absurdities came from the pop-Left of the time, but these suddenly stopped, as if a spigot had been turned, on June 22 of 1941.]
What I find alarming is that this Holocaust inversion is regularly used by Iran and of course Hamas, but now it is becoming mainstream in the West. It won’t be long before Amnesty and other flawed human rights orgs start repeating this accusation against Israel, which will only legitimize more violence.
Let’s be blunt: if Israel really wanted to wipe out Gaza they would have dropped one of the nuclear weapons. They haven’t.
The smooching of the ‘left’ with fundamentalist Islam is one of the 2 reasons I left the ‘left’.
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While our “brainless ideologues” in the West might be borrowing the language of “genocide” from Israel’s other enemies, they would have arrived there independently. “Genocide,” “apartheid,” accusations of unrestrained use of military force by Israel . . . anti-Black racism is worse than it’s ever been, you are erasing trans people, there is a war on women, things are worse than ever.
I once believed such claims to be hyperbole, partisan spin, overheated neurons firing on cable TV. And they are—for the nonideological left. (The right has its counterparts.) I then thought this exaggerated language simply reflected a deep and widespread ignorance of history. Nobody with even a rudimentary historical understanding of warfare, slavery, civil rights, and the treatment of women and sexual minorities in much of the world could utter such phrases and retain their intellectual dignity. I now lean toward the idea that it is also self-aggrandizement in collective form. “We” are fighting a great cause, “we” are courageous, “we” are strong, “we” will be the generation who prevails against the worst evils the world has ever seen. They are all symptoms of a perpetual adolescence that plagues parts of Western society.
The hyperbole one can attack with ridicule, the ignorance with education. I’m not sure how to address either the ideological mind rot or the rampant self-importance once it takes a grown-up form and is allowed a place in powerful institutions.
Semantics?
You didn’t happen to reread Kafka’s novel The Trial recently, did you, Jerry?