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“South Africa accused Israel [last] Thursday of carrying out genocide in Gaza and demanded that the U.N.'s top court order an emergency suspension of Israel's devastating military campaign in the Palestinian enclave. On the first of two days of hearings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), South Africa said Israel's offensive, which has demolished much of the coastal enclave and killed more than 23,000 people according to Gaza health authorities, aimed to bring about ‘the destruction of the population’ of Gaza.” Reuters
“Israel [last] Friday rejected as false and ‘grossly distorted’ accusations brought by South Africa at the U.N.'s top court that its military operation in Gaza is a state-led genocide campaign against Palestinians. Arguing it was acting to defend itself and was fighting Hamas, not the Palestinian population, Israel called on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to dismiss the case as groundless.” Reuters
The right argues that Israel’s actions do not amount to genocide and accuses its critics of hypocrisy.
“Genocide is a crime that requires specific actions and intent- i.e. acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such. By all accounts, including South Africa’s, Israel has the undeniable military capability to completely destroy the entire Gaza Strip in a matter of minutes if it so desired. Noticeably, Israel has not done so, and instead has taken extreme measures to protect Gazan civilians…
“The entire context of Israel’s military response is completely, indefensibly, ignored; nowhere does the application even consider the possibility that Israel’s actions are lawful under the doctrines of, say, military necessity, proportionality, force protection, or deterrence in responding to a terrorist organization… Yes, blockades and sieges could be war crimes – but they aren’t in this case; both the Geneva and Hague Conventions include instructions on conducting sieges under international law, and Israel has followed those rules to the letter.”
Mark Goldfeder, Fox News
“In recent decades, as many as three million people perished in a famine in North Korea that was mainly government-induced. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were gassed, bombed, starved or tortured to death by the Assad regime, and an estimated 14 million were forced to flee their homes. China has put more than a million Uyghurs through gulag-like re-education camps…
“But North Korea, Syria and China have never been charged with genocide at the International Court of Justice. Israel has… The war between Israel and Hamas is terrible — as is every war. But if this is genocide, what word do we have for the killing fields in Cambodia, Stalin’s Holodomor in Ukraine, the Holocaust itself?…
“If Israel were trying to commit genocide, it wouldn’t be putting its soldiers at risk or allowing humanitarian relief to arrive from Egypt or withdrawing many of its forces from Gaza. It would simply be killing Palestinians everywhere, in vastly greater numbers, as Germans killed Jews or Hutus killed Tutsis.”
Bret Stephens, New York Times
“But arguing the merits presumes this case is more than political theater. South Africa sees U.N. grandstanding as a way to curry favor with Russia, China and Iran, which are eager to reduce Western influence. Where was South Africa’s moral outrage when the country tolerated Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, or when it opposed the indictment of Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir for killing some 200,000 people in Darfur?…
“If the U.N. wants to find genocidal intent, try the Hamas charter. The preamble says ‘Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.’ It encourages Muslims to ‘fight Jews and kill them’ until the Jews ‘hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’ The moral inversion of the U.N. continues.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
The left is critical of the civilian toll from Israel’s military campaign, but divided as to whether it amounts to genocide.
The left is critical of the civilian toll from Israel’s military campaign, but divided as to whether it amounts to genocide.
“According to experts, in roughly two months, Israel caused more destruction in Gaza than the battle for Aleppo in Syria or the razing of Mariupol in Ukraine, and killed more civilians than the United States and its allies did in a three-year campaign against the Islamic State. Proportionally, Israel’s campaign has exceeded the destruction of the Allied bombings of Germany in World War II…
“U.S. intelligence estimated that 40 to 45 percent of the 29,000 bombs Israel had dropped were unguided, prone to cause greater collateral damage. Indeed, an Israeli rear admiral acknowledged before the ground invasion began that while the Israel Defense Forces was ‘balancing accuracy … right now, we’re focused on what causes maximum damage.’… [Israel] will one day have to ask itself whether it acted appropriately in the heat of its anger and sorrow after Oct. 7.”
Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post
“The words of Israeli officials are being offered as evidence of intent: from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urging Israelis to ‘remember’ the Old Testament account of the carnage of Amalek (‘Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings,’ reads one passage) to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowing that ‘Gaza won’t return to what it was before — we will eliminate everything’ to the minister of energy and infrastructure pledging, ‘They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave this world.’…
“I have heard many people balk at the suggestion that Gaza could be experiencing genocide. The Holocaust, after all, wiped out over 60 percent of European Jews. Israel’s war — instigated, no less, by the murder of Jews — has killed about 1 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza. One percent is terrible, of course, but genocide? Under the genocide convention, though, the term describes an intent to wipe out a defined group of people and taking steps to achieve that end. There is no threshold of death or proportion of death that must be reached.”
Megan K. Stack, New York Times
Others argue, “there is no evidence that [Israeli forces] have engaged in a deliberate campaign to ‘destroy, in whole or in part,’ the Palestinian people — which is what ‘genocide’ means in international law. Awful as the civilian deaths in Gaza have been, they still constitute less than 1 percent of the territory’s population. If Israel, with all the firepower at its disposal, had been trying to commit mass murder, the death toll would have been higher by orders of magnitude…
“But, however the case turns out, one thing is certain: It will do nothing to relieve the suffering of Palestinians. These incendiary accusations only serve, for many Israelis, to discredit more legitimate, more measured criticism of Israel’s actions. They play into Netanyahu’s ‘us vs. the world’ narrative in which the right-wing prime minister is the only person who can protect Israelis. Many of whom, no doubt, will wrongly conclude that self-restraint on the part of their forces is pointless if they are going to be accused of genocide no matter what they do.”
Max Boot, Washington Post
