Mick Hartley

More on the "genocide" charge against Israel, here from Nigel Biggar at the Spectator:

The number of civilian casualties is indeed horrifically high. According to the ministry of health in Gaza on 9 January, more than 23,000 Palestinians had been reported killed since the start of the conflict. However, since the ministry is run by Hamas, that figure can’t be taken at face value. Indeed, it’s a practical certainty that it contains Hamas combatants – according to one reckoning, as many as 8,500. Still, when all the relevant qualifications have been made, the suffering of civilians in Gaza remains appalling in kind and massive in scale….

The dreadful truth is that the prosecution of war almost invariably involves civilian casualties, usually lots of them. And when there are sufficiently compelling reasons for fighting, those casualties may be – tragically – justified. That’s why the laws of war do not forbid the killing of non-combatants as such; they only forbid their intentional and disproportionate killing. That’s to say, the objective must be a military one, and the harm done to civilians incidental to the military purpose and no greater than necessary for it. While this principle of ‘distinction’ does limit the costs imposed on non-combatants, it can still permit very high costs indeed. 

On 7 October, Hamas tore up the laws of war by deliberately targeting Israeli civilians and unleashing upon them a frenzy of sadistic violence. That violence was so unrestrained as to imply a fully genocidal intent, not merely to destroy the ‘Zionist’ state of Israel but also to exterminate the Jewish people. In response to such an attack, Israel was fully justified in taking up arms to uproot its malevolent cause. That the process of this uprooting involves so much Palestinian suffering is due first and foremost to Hamas’s cynical use of civilian residences, schools and hospitals as human shields – again, in defiance of international law.

In contrast, the Israel Defence Forces are normally scrupulous in their choice of military targets and their minimisation of risk to civilians. And they have a technological capacity for precision in targeting that wasn’t available to the British and Americans 80 years ago. Nevertheless, it is quite right that the IDF’s actions should be scrutinised for evidence that they are imposing harm on non-combatants ‘disproportionate’ to – that is, unnecessary for achieving –the intended military objectives. To establish disproportion, however, would require specialist military expertise and a close knowledge of the facts on the ground. Humanitarian anguish is not enough.

As for genocide, Article 2 of the 1948 UN Convention prohibits only the ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. For the South African lawyers to succeed in their case, they must demonstrate that Israel is inflicting civilian casualties in Gaza, not inadvertently as the side-effect of destroying Hamas, but intentionally in order to destroy the Palestinian people as such. Proving genocidal intent would be much more straightforward in Hamas’s case than in Israel’s. Appalling civilian suffering on a large scale is, by itself, no more a sure sign of genocide than it is of military disproportion.

Meanwhile the far greater number of deaths – with far greater reason for classifying as genocides – carry on in Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Xinjiang, Yemen, Nigeria, Burma, etc. etc., and the International Court at The Hague remains unconcerned.