When All Is Genocide

Happy days for Jew-haters came last week with a gargantuan op-ed in the New York Times—3,620 words in length—denouncing Israel’s war in Gaza with the damning title: “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”

The essay appeared in the paper of record that has an abysmal record of objectivity when it comes to Israel. Honestly, it was more befitting of an even more anti-Israel outfit, such as the BBC.

(For perspective, I have four bylines to my name at the Times’ op-ed section, the longest being 1,061 words. Rarely does the paper publish one over 1,000. This was more magnus opus than opinion.)

Apparently, charging Israel with genocide deserves such fanfare. It didn’t hurt that he is Israeli, too. The Times selected a Jewish “scholar” who teaches Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. They apparently believed that his expertise, ethnicity and affiliation made him the final word on the subject.

I have some news that is truly fit to print: The op-ed is utter nonsense.

We have sadly come to learn that, especially in the Ivy League, “Studies” as a suffix to one’s major—Gender, Women’s, African-American, Climate, Queer, Indigenous— requires very little “studying” to graduate.

Good grades in college can come from social activism over book learning. Raucous protesting, showing contempt for the United States, demonizing the black sheep of whiteness, and calling for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews are becoming the summa cum laude of higher learning.

The Ivy League is now conferring PhDs in reputational ruin and brand annihilation.

I recently published “Beyond Proportionality: Israel’s Just War in Gaza,” a book that clarifies international humanitarian law, the laws of armed conflict and military doctrine in the context of this war. The Times op-ed has little use for those details, however. More than 3,000 words were devoted instead to distorted facts and imaginary thinking.

The crux seems to be that the Gazan war dead, combined with the destruction of its infrastructure, amounts to genocide—even though the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, ratified in 1948, never contemplated that meaning.

Mass casualties and fallen buildings in wartime do not a genocide make. It doesn’t even prove the existence of war crimes. Death tolls and devastated landscapes are endemic to war.

Imagine if in 1945, the New York Times charged the United States with genocide based entirely on the bombings over Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden. Worse still, what if the paper never mentioned Pearl Harbor or the German atrocities that would come to be known as the Holocaust?

Imagine if in 1945, the New York Times charged the United States with genocide based entirely on the bombings over Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden. Worse still, what if the paper never mentioned Pearl Harbor or the German atrocities that would come to be known as the Holocaust?

Well, that’s precisely what this op-ed fails to report. What took place on October 7, 2023 goes largely unmentioned. It completely ignores the scale of the barbarism and claims Israel’s equating of Hamas with the Nazis is “propaganda.”

The silent treatment is also given to the hostages in Gaza, the fact that Hamas and Islamic Jihad still have not surrendered (unlike the Nazis and kamikazes in World War II) and have all throughout promised repeat performances of October 7— “again and again.”

Talk about burying the lede!

It downplays the war itself, calling its continuation a “misnomer”—even though Hamas is still firing rockets, and killing IDF soldiers and Gazans seeking humanitarian aid. Most importantly, Hamas is recruiting terrorists to shore up its ranks.

Genocide requires a finding of specific “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Genocides are never to be confused or conflated with war.

When a nation is at war, the objective is the killing of militants, and the destruction of weapons warehouses, launching pads, and command centers. Civilians, inevitably but unintentionally, are killed in the process. But the laws of war are not violated so long as the targets had a military necessity. Dead civilians are “collateral” to the war aim—which is why they are referred to as “collateral damage.”

International tribunals never judged Serbia’s 1992-95 mass killings in Bosnia and Herzegovina to be genocide because, except for the massacre at Srebrenica, all the other deaths resulted from war.

The Times’ op-ed tries to circumvent this definitional problem by citing that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that the Palestinian people would pay a “huge price” and Gaza would be turned to “rubble.” IDF officials called the participants of October 7 “human animals” deserving of “total annihilation.”

So what? After gangraping Israeli teenagers, torching Jewish infants, and murdering 1,200, what did one expect the prime minister, and wartime generals, of the nation so savagely attacked to say? And what other outcome could Gazans have expected—the delivery of bundt cakes in gratitude for the most heinous slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust?

The Final Solution to the Jewish Question was entirely separate from  World War II. So, too, was Turkey’s elimination of its Armenian population during World War I. The Cambodian, Rwandan, Congolese and Sudanese genocides were also unrelated to wars, as are today’s killings of Tigrayans in Ethiopia and the Uyghurs in China—two genocides that the world simply won’t address because they are unrelated to its favorite pastime: antisemitism.

There can be no genocide if civilians are not targeted for death. The only reason Gazan civilians are dead is because Hamas insists on deploying friends and family as human shields. Yet, in the deranged mind of this genocide “scholar,” even Israel’s evacuation warnings count against it. Apparently, displacing civilians from one safe zone to another “morph(s) into genocide.”

What?!

This is the moral narcissism of yet another Jew leveraging personal integrity for career advancement. Here he is concocting  an imaginary crime—a new form of genocide where it doesn’t matter how or whether anyone gets killed.  Destroying homes is now genocidal, too, because it makes “the revival of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely.”

Why is that?  Gaza can be rebuilt, as were Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden—all in the aftermath of a war where the losing side surrendered, which Hamas has thus far failed to do, and where the enemy was thoroughly vanquished, which also remains unfinished.

The Times op-ed laments that Holocaust scholars, and institutions dedicated to its commemoration, won’t adopt his warped redefinition of the crime. Of course they won’t! Their mission is to prevent the trivialization of the Holocaust. Crediting all human death and physical destruction as genocidal is the antithesis of Holocaust memory.

Is COVID now genocide, too?

Even more importantly, all true genocides have one thing in common—a massive subtraction of the population. But the Palestinian people have more than tripled since the “Occupation.”

Not only is the op-ed an absurdity and the crime it envisions a fabrication, but it is an insult to millions who were actual victims of a genocide. Quite an achievement for a “genocide scholar.”