The misguided South African “genocide” accusation

If you’ve been following the charade that is South Africa’s (SA’s) claim at the International Court of Justice that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, you’ll know that SA—that paradigm of good governance and equity—is relying heavily on statements by Israeli officials and military people made right after October 7—statements to the effect that Gazans should be wiped out.

Those statements were either made in the heat of the moment or, as the article below shows, are simply misquoted. Further, if you want to see whether Israel is committing genocide, you don’t use quotations; you have to observe if its behavior is aimed at wiping out not just Hamas, but all the Gazans. Only a dolt would think that’s true: the IDF is clearly the world’s most moral army, warning Gazans of strikes, telling them where to go to avoid fighting, never deliberately going after known non-combatants, and so on.

In contrast, Hamas is among the world’s most immoral militant groups, deliberately trying to kill Israeli civilians (do they ever warn Israelis before they strike Don’t make me laugh.); firing rockets willy-nilly into Israel, sending terrorists across the border to blow up Jews, committing repeated war crimes by hiding behind civilians, and, of course, explicitly stating that their aim is to exterminate the Jews. (The deaths of Gazan civilians, reprehensible and sad as it is, can be largely laid at the door of Hamas, who seems to want Gazan civilians killed and facilitates it.)

Moreover, as Hamas has emphasized, the butchery of October 7 was just a rehearsal for repeated episodes of the same kind of butchery.  It is shameful that although South Africa, the paradigm of current hatred and bad governance in Africa, can bring a case against Israel, no other nation in the world is willing to bring a case against Hamas, the group that runs Gaza. And that case would be much easier, since Hamas has declared its genocidal intentions.

The only upside for Israel of this sad episode is that when the country is found guilty—as is inevitable in such a lopsided world—it can and will simply ignore the Hague’s decision.

But it turns out that the Israeli quotes tossed around with such abandon by South Africa, supposedly approving of genocide, aren’t as damning as they seem.

Reader Norman, who sent me this article from The Atlantic, added his summary:

No, writes Yair Rosenberg in the Atlantic. Some on the far right have made stupid statements, but Israel’s leadership—Netanyahu, Gallant, Herzog—have not. They have called for the elimination only of Hamas. At least some of this chatter about the genocidal intent of Israel has been perpetrated by a reporter at NPR, whose conclusions were carelessly spread by other news outlets. (I don’t trust NPR on any subject.) Other claims of genocidal intent come from (indefensible) purposeful omissions, mistranslations from the Hebrew, missed plays on words, misinterpreted biblical allusions, as well as innocent—but careless—reportage. On balance, it seems to me that the media is all too ready to believe—and spread!—the worst interpretations of Israeli words and actions.

Click the screenshot to read, but more likely than not you’ll be paywalled. (NOTE: a kind reader gave a link, here, that’s good for 13 days; I’ve added it to the screenshot.) Judicious inquiry can also yield you a copy (I haven’t found it archived), but I’ll give a few quotes (indented) to show how flimly SA’s assertions are:

Rosenberg recounts how NPR reporter Leila Fadel interviewed David Crane, a lawyer with expertise in prosecuting cases of genocide at the Hague. Crane said that making a case against Israel would require proof that the head of state had directed those under him to destroy all or part of a people. The article goes on:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Crane said, had not made such a statement, which meant that legal intent could not be established. By contrast, he added, “Hamas has clearly stated that they intend to destroy, in whole or in part, the Israeli people and the Israeli state. That is a declaration of a genocidal intent.” Fadel was not convinced, and deftly countered with several damning quotes from the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant: “We are fighting human animals.” “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” The segment ended inconclusively.

Last week, a similar exchange unfolded on BBC radio, when an anchor pressed British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps about Israel’s conduct in Gaza. “The defense minister said, ‘We will eliminate everything,’ in relation to Gaza,” the host observed. Wasn’t this a clear call to violate international humanitarian law? Under repeated questioning, Shapps allowed that Gallant might have overstepped in the emotional aftermath of Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,000 Israelis, but insisted that the quotation did not reflect the man he’d been regularly talking with about “trying to find ways to be precise and proportionate.”

As it turns out, there’s a reason the quote did not sound like Gallant: The Israeli defense minister never really said it.

On October 10, as the charred remains of murdered Israelis were still being identified in their homes, Gallant spoke to a group of soldiers who had repelled the Hamas assault, in a statement that was captured on video. Translated from the original Hebrew, here is the relevant portion of what he said: “Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.” This isn’t a matter of interpretation or translation. Gallant’s vow to “eliminate it all” was directed explicitly at Hamas, not Gaza. One doesn’t even need to speak Hebrew, as I do, to confirm this: The word Hamas is clearly audible in the video.

The remainder of Gallant’s remarks also dealt with rooting out Hamas: “We understand that Hamas wanted to change the situation; it will change 180 degrees from what they thought. They will regret this moment.” It was not Gallant who conflated Hamas and Gaza, but rather those who mischaracterized his words. The smoking gun was filled with blanks.

But of course given the dislike of Israel by the mainstream media (NPR is a particularly frequent offender), the mistake spread (“duplicative journalism,” as Harvard would call it):

And yet, the misleadingly truncated version of Gallant’s quote has not just been circulated on NPR and the BBC. The New York Times has made the same elision twice, and it appeared in The Guardian, in a piece by Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch. It was also quoted in The Washington Post, where a writer ironically claimed that Gallant had said “the quiet part out loud,” while quietly omitting whom Gallant was actually talking about. Most consequentially, this mistaken rendering of Gallant’s words was publicly invoked last week by South Africa’s legal team in the International Court of Justice as evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent; it served as one of their only citations sourced to someone in Israel’s war cabinet. The line was then reiterated on the floor of Congress by Representative Rashida Tlaib.

Does nobody do fact-checking anymore? Apparently not; one outlet copies another, and nobody checks the source. Could this be because the quotes are so convenient a way to indict Israel, even though you need much, much more than quotes to prove genocide? It turns out that this kind of distortion wasn’t rare:

Unfortunately, this concatenation of errors is part of a pattern. As someone who has covered Israeli extremism for years and written about the hard right’s push to ethnically cleanse Gaza and resettle it, I have been carefully tracking the rise of such dangerous ideas for more than a decade. In this perilous wartime environment, it is essential to know who is saying what, and whether they have the authority to act on it. But while far too many right-wing members of Israel’s Parliament have expressed borderline or straightforwardly genocidal sentiments during the Gaza conflict, such statements attributed to the three people making Israel’s actual military decisions, the voting members of its war cabinet—Gallant, Netanyahu, and the former opposition lawmaker Benny Gantz—repeatedly turn out to be mistaken or misrepresented.

Often people are referring to Hamas and not Gazans (as in Gallant’s characterization of Hamas as “human animals”, misrepresented by the antisemite Rashida Tlaib in her defense of the SA accusation.  Those words may not present good “optics,” but they’re no.proof of genocide.

Likewise, Netanyahu did not broach the idea of deporting Gaza’s population—he was referring to Hamas. Netanyahu’s statement about Amalek (I won’t go into it; you can read it) was gotten wrong by the media: there are two such stories, and the media used the wrong one to imply that Netanyahu was calling for the extirpation of an entire people. He was not: he was referring to another story that calls for revenge for those who killed innocents. He was subject to yet another distortion when referring to a story in the Old Testament.

Make no mistake: Rosenberg is no fan of Netanyahu (nor am I):

I’ve written extensively about Netanyahu’s profound failures. He welcomed the far-right into Israel’s government and gave its members titles and ministries. He has regularly refused to rebuke their extremism because he fears losing power. He is the reason Israel is reduced to arguing that it is innocent of genocidal intent, not because its politicians haven’t expressed it, but because those politicians aren’t military decision makers. In other words, Netanyahu is the one who created the context in which banal biblical references could be understood as far-right appeals. But Jewish scripture should not be distorted by journalists or jurists in an erroneous attempt to indict him.

In the end, Rosenberg concludes this:

These omissions and misinterpretations are not merely cosmetic: They misled readers, judges, and politicians. None of them should have happened.

He doesn’t explain why, but it’s clear from the words above: this is part of an “erroneous attempt to indict [Israeli leaders].”  Rosenberg is too kind. It is part of a pervasive dislike of Israel and the desire of the media to see the country found guilty.

Rosenberg comes to an anodyne conclusion—the media should get things right—but it’s still important, for this is an indictment of a country for genocide

Neutral principles like these can’t resolve the deep moral and political quandaries posed by the Israel-Hamas conflict. They can’t tell readers what to think about its devastation. But they will ensure that whatever conclusions readers draw will be based on facts, not fictions—which is, at root, the purpose of journalism.