by In recent decades, up to three million people died in a famine in North Korea that was largely government-induced. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were gassed, bombed, starved or tortured to death by the Assad regime, and approximately 14 million They were forced to flee their homes. China has put more than a million Uyghurs undergo gulag-like re-education camps in a thinly veiled attempt to suppress and erase their religious and cultural identity.
But North Korea, Syria and China have never been accused of genocide before the International Court of Justice. Israel has done it. How curious. And how obscene.
It is obscene because it politicizes our understanding of genocide, fatally eroding the moral power of the term. The war between Israel and Hamas is terrible, as is all war. But if this is genocide, what word do we have for the extermination camps in Cambodia, Stalin’s war? holodomor in Ukraine, the Holocaust itself?
Words that come to mean much more than originally intended eventually end up meaning almost nothing: a victory for the future. genocidal Who would like the world to think that there is no moral or legal difference between one type of murder and another.
It is obscene because it perverts the definition of genocide, which it is necessary: “acts committed with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such.” Notice two key features of this definition: it talks about facts Whereas part of the genocide case against Israel involves the misinterpretation of quotes from Israeli officials who have promised the elimination of Hamas, not the elimination of the Palestinians. and use the term as such – meaning that acts are genocidal only if they are directed at Palestinians as Palestinians, not as members of Hamas or, unfortunately, as collateral deaths in attempts to destroy Hamas.
If Israel were trying to commit genocide, it would not be putting its soldiers at risk or allowing humanitarian aid to arrive from Egypt or withdrawing many of its forces from Gaza. It would simply be killing Palestinians everywhere, in much larger numbers, like the Germans killed Jews or the Hutus killed Tutsis.
It’s obscene because it puts the wrong party in the dock. Hamas is a genocidal organization by conviction and design. Is The founding charter demands that Israel be “eliminated.”” and that Muslims kill Jews while “hiding behind stones and trees.” On October 7, Hamas murdered, mutilated, tortured, cremated, raped or kidnapped everyone it could. If he hadn’t stopped, he wouldn’t have stopped. Since then, one of his leaders has promised to do so “a second, a third, a fourth” time.
It was Hamas, not Israel, that started the war, maintains it, and will resume it the moment it has the arsenal and the opportunity.
It is obscene because it validates Hamas’ illegal and barbaric strategy of hiding among, behind and under Palestinian civilians. Since the beginning of the war, Hamas has had a dual goal: to kill as many Jews as possible and to incur Palestinian deaths to gain international sympathy and diplomatic influence.
What is happening now in The Hague will never be a victory for ordinary Gazans, regardless of the ICJ verdict. Their victory will only come when they have a government interested in building a peaceful and prosperous state, instead of destroying a neighbor. But it will serve as an unprecedented propaganda triumph for Hamas: quite a turnaround for a group that only a few months ago proudly filmed murdering children.
It is obscene because it is historically hypocritical. The United States, Great Britain, and other Allied nations killed staggering numbers of German and Japanese civilians en route to defeating the regimes that had started World War II, often known as the Good War. Events like the bombings of Dresden or Tokyo, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were tragic and far more indiscriminate than anything Israel is accused of. But no serious person considers Franklin Roosevelt to be on the moral level of Adolf Hitler. What the allies did were acts of war in the service of lasting peace, not genocide in the service of a fanatical objective.
The difference? In war, the killing ends when one side stops fighting. In a genocide, that is when the killing begins.
It is obscene because of its strange selectivity. Reasonable people can argue that Israel has been excessive in its use of force, or deficient in its concern for Palestinian civilians, or reckless in thinking about the end. I don’t agree, but it’s okay.
But how curious that the discussion has turned towards genocide (and it did almost from the first day of the war) because it is the behavior of the Jew state that is in question. And how telling it is that the accusation is the same one that rabid bigots have been making for years: that Jews are, and have long been, the real nazis — guilty of humanity’s worst crimes and deserving of its worst punishments. A verdict against Israel at the ICJ would be a sign that another international institution, and the people who applaud it, have adopted the moral perspective of anti-Semites.
It has been almost 50 years since Daniel Patrick Moynihan condemned the UN resolution “Zionism is Racism” as “this infamous act.”
“The abomination of anti-Semitism,” he said. warned, “it has been given the appearance of an international sanction.” Perhaps the ICJ will make a similar mistake. If so, the shame and disgrace will fall on the accusers, not the accused.
