This is a relatively short column about a big subject. It’s about the claim that Israel committed genocide when it sent troops into the Gaza Strip in response to Hamas’ invasion of Israel.
A few points ought to be made with reference to this. First, the United States killed 20,000 French civilians during our invasion of Normandy in World War II.
You may wonder why and how we killed so many ordinary Frenchmen. The answer is that widespread bombing — however discriminate — leads to the deaths of large numbers of people. Most of those we killed were Nazi soldiers. Some were Americans. But 20,000 of the dead were non-soldiers: French men, women and children.
Were we committing genocide against the French? No, as you likely know, we stepped in to protect both them and ourselves from psychopaths who were ruling them on behalf of a crazed ideology.
Israel’s situation is similar. The Gaza Strip has been ruled by psychopaths who act on behalf of a crazed ideology. Hamas members have regularly killed other Palestinians for the better part of two decades. The savagery dates back to before they first gained power in 2007. Once they assumed control over Gaza, they rounded up and shot their Palestinian rivals. In a single week of 2007, during what’s known as the Battle of Gaza, more than 160 Palestinians were murdered by Hamas. Thereafter, no attempt was ever made to conduct elections in Gaza. Instead, Hamas ruled the Gaza Strip through terror and coercion.
Eight years later Amnesty International issued a report on Hamas’ “brutal campaign of abductions, torture and unlawful killings against Palestinians.” That occurred even as billions of dollars in aid were being given to create a liveable Gaza. Most of this money was either stolen by Hamas leaders or spent on building tunnels and acquiring weapons.
Finally, on October 7, 2023, Hamas gunmen invaded Israel. 1200 Israelis were murdered on that day. A proportionate number for the U.S. population would be more than 40,000 Americans. Other Israelis were raped, kidnapped and tortured — as Hamas had previously engaged in atrocities against their fellow Palestinians.
Hamas’s leaders hoped that Israel’s response to their attacks would lead to tens of thousands of Palestinians losing their lives. In fact, their leader Yahya Sinwar gleefully spoke of 100,000 Palestinian deaths as an acceptable number. Sinwar’s thinking was that Israelis would grow sick of killing and that this would permit Palestinians to further their attacks and expand the conflict.
Yahya Sinwar: As a Hamas leader, he spoke of the glory that would come with tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths.
The Nazi Holocaust perpetrated against the Jews was not the only case of genocide in the last hundred and fifty years. During the First World War, the Turks engaged in campaigns of mass murder against Armenians while Pol Pot slaughtered his countrymen in vast numbers when he ruled Cambodia. Each led to the death of between one and two million people. Let us hope that we are all familiar as well with Stalin’s Holodomor, the deadly forced famine that took place in Ukraine in 1935, and with the Hutus’ slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Each one of these was a systemic campaign whose express purpose was the annihilation of another people. The least of these involved the murder of 800,000 people. This is not what has happened in Gaza following Hamas’ invasion of Israel. Israel did not kill hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and did not seek to annihilate and destroy the Palestinian population.
The Geneva Convention serves to deter actual acts of genocide. The Convention provides clear and detailed rules about what armies can and cannot do. So, if Israel was engaged in a genocidal campaign in response to Hamas’ invasion of Israel, as antisemites around the world have claimed, why do they never make reference to the Geneva Convention? Surely, Israel must have engaged in wholesale violations of the Geneva Convention?
Isn’t that so?
The reason it is never mentioned is simple. The Geneva Convention has little relevance to what took place. Why? In order to answer that question, we need some background.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.