Mick Hartley

The accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, made by Raz Segal and boosted here in the UK by virtue-signaling idiot Gary Lineker – "worth 13 minutes of anyone’s time" – is comprehensively debunked at Quillette by historians Norman Goda and Jeffrey Herf. "The accusation is wrong on the facts and objectively serves to support the intent of Hamas to murder Jews with impunity":

Crimes against humanity, defined by the 1998 Rome Statute, are systematic and conscious attacks against a civilian population in peacetime or wartime, including crimes against one’s own citizens. Offenses include torture, rape, and murder. Hamas has routinely carried out such crimes against Palestinian “collaborators,” according to Amnesty International. And on October 7th, Hamas engaged in the deliberate and premeditated targeting of Jewish civilians with no apparent military objective in mind. Israel has indeed deprived Gazans of necessities and driven them from their homes during the current war. But blockades in wartime in service of a strategic aim are not illegal, and when civilians flee a war zone after being warned to do so, it does not add up to deportation under the statute.

This brings us back to genocide. Aside from misreading Israeli intentions, neither Bartov nor Segal mentions the lengths to which Israel has gone in its four previous wars with Hamas to protect civilian lives. Israel has sent thousands of texts and dropped thousands of leaflets to residents of Gaza warning them to leave buildings in which Hamas fighters are located. In this war, Israel urged civilians in Gaza to evacuate to the south before the invasion so that they would not be caught up in the fighting. A government intent on genocide would do just the opposite—it would attempt to keep civilians in harm’s way, which is precisely what Hamas has done….

What then of the connection between today’s humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the Holocaust? In the macro sense, this comparison encourages what historians call “Holocaust inversion”—the mischaracterization of Israel’s self-defense efforts as genocide, whereby the Israelis themselves become something akin to Nazis. For decades, this libel has been a standard trope of anti-Israeli propaganda, and Bartov speculates that because Nazi Germany’s war began “as an ethnic cleansing operation” and then devolved into genocide, Israel’s conduct in Gaza might well follow a similar trajectory. This comparison is ahistorical….

As it happens, there is an interesting and challenging connection between the current Gaza war and Nazi Germany, but it is not the one Bartov proposes. It concerns the relationship between a terrorist dictatorship and the population over which it rules. Historians have long debated why Germans fought to the bitter end of the war, why the army never overthrew Hitler, and why there was no popular revolt against the Nazi regime. The famous term Volksgemeinschaft or “people’s community” captures the mixture of terror on one hand and popular consensus on the other that allowed Hitler’s regime to survive.

The relationship between the Hamas dictatorship and ordinary Gazans raises similar questions. After 17 years of Jew-hatred preached from Gaza’s mosques, taught in its schools, and beamed into its television sets, is it any wonder that so many civilians in Gaza seem to support Hamas? After years of pouring billions into tunnel construction, can there be any doubt that many thousands of Gazans were fully aware of Hamas’s intent to wage continuous war? Israeli soldiers are discovering tunnel entrances across the city and weapons stored in the bedrooms of affluent homes. Hamas trained openly for October 7th. How many Gazans knew about those preparations? Such questions do not justify intentional attacks on civilians, but they do offer some insight into military officers’ rage (and shame) two days after the worst case of mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust….

The best way to save civilian lives in Gaza at present would be for Hamas to surrender. And since that will not happen, the war will have to be fought and civilians will inevitably perish. But the genocide accusation is wrong on the facts and objectively serves to support the intent of Hamas to murder Jews with impunity. The state of Israel was established, in part, to end the many centuries in which murderers of Jews avoided reckoning for their deeds. Less than two months after the real act of genocide on October 7th, it is essential to focus on the actual event of mass murder rather than to denounce Israel’s efforts to defeat the perpetrators.