Mick Hartley

John Spencer in Tablet on the Gaza genocide charge:

Wanting to destroy your enemy is not genocide. It is war. War is not illegal, and in some cases, it is necessary. The aim of many of those accusing Israel of genocide is in fact to make it impossible for any law-abiding nation to defend itself against those who openly proclaim their desire to destroy us, and imagine that our adherence to law and to norms of conflict will assist them in achieving their aims….

The sad truth is that there is no meaningful comparison to Gaza. Israel is not fighting a counterinsurgency shaped over two decades with control of terrain and population. It is not a conflict in which civilians had viable options to flee to neighboring states. It does not involve the obliteration of a city by a wonder weapon. It’s a war fought in a sealed enclave where one side spent more than 20 years preparing the battlefield, constructing hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath homes, hospitals, schools, and streets, and where civilians have not been permitted safe passage through borders such as Egypt. It is also a war being fought in the age of instantaneous global communication, when algorithms on platforms like TikTok, X, and others push the most horrific images of war to billions of people in real time….

When civilian suffering becomes the decisive weapon, advantage flows to those who want civilians to suffer. If accusation and optics define legality, the optimal strategy is to embed among civilians, prevent evacuation, fight from protected sites, and manipulate information so that every death becomes ammunition. That is not the protection of civilians. It is the exploitation of them.

Worth reading in full.

It’s inevitable, really. Once the term “genocide” is introduced, and understood as the worst kind of crime that can be committed, then every propagandist will seize on it to throw at their enemies. And of course there’s always that special thrill of turning it against the Jews, whose suffering inspired the term in the first place with the Holocaust – the worst genocide of them all.