The word “genocide” is thrown around by Israel-haters to conjure up Nazi imagery for credulous Western leftists. That’s the beginning and end of it.
It’s a hoax. And whenever you point out the low civilian-to-combat ratio, or note there was never any famine, or mention that the population of Gaza has possibly grown since the war began, “genocide” accusers begin pettifogging and relying on legalistic language to make their point.
But no international court has found Israel guilty of genocide, and no court would be able to do so unless the definition was radically changed. Which is why, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the International Court of Justice is contemplating an absurd watering down of “genocide” in an effort to help South Africa win its pending case against Israel.
The Genocide Convention of 1948 requires evidence of “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such.” The proof, according to the ICJ, must be found in a “genocidal plan” or inferred from a “pattern of conduct” if that conduct is the
only “reasonable inference.”
Well, if Hamas had surrendered on Oct 8, rather than engaging in kidnapping and hiding behind civilians (a war crime), no Gazan city would have been bombed, and no civilians would have lost their lives. It is reasonable then to infer that Israel was fighting against an army of terrorists, not the population. Which is a big problem for the genocide hoaxers.
And if a death toll, harsh rhetoric, and a blockade are enough to infer genocidal intent, even alongside legitimate military aims, virtually every war that Americans — or any other army, for that matter — have ever fought in could be called genocide.
In the firebombing of Tokyo and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, over 95% of the total casualties in those cities were civilians. Around 350,000 of them were killed in those three incidents alone. It would be easy for the ICJ to “infer” without any evidence that the Americans aimed to massacre as many Japanese civilians as possible, even though the Imperial Armed Forces struck the United States first, even though the United States was in the middle of fighting an active enemy who refused to lay down its arms, and even though Americans had clear military objectives for those attacks.
Japan, by the way, faced famine conditions by the end of World War II due to an Allied blockade. The U.S. did not send aid; we demanded complete surrender. Then again, both the U.S. and Britain could easily be found guilty of genocide under the newly proposed genocide standard for their actions in Germany, where they firebombed Hamburg and Dresden in 1943 and 1945. More civilians died during those nine days of bombing than did in the entirety of the Gaza war. Historians estimate the firebombing combat-to-civilian death ratio to be
roughly 100:1 or higher. A civilian-to-militant casualty ratio in Gaza was 2:1.
Most accusations of Israel genocide are accompanied by pictures of burned-out Palestinian cities. Wait until you see what firestorms did to Hamburg.
Now, I’m sure many America-hating socialists agree that the United States committed genocide during World War II. No serious historian or person does.
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We dropped millions of tons of explosives across Indochina in the 1960s and 1970s. There were somewhere between 220,000 to 365,000, Historians estimate that overall Korean civilian deaths were somewhere between 2 million to 3 million during that war. In urban battles in Iraq, civilian-to-militant casualty ratio were higher than in Gaza. War is gruesome. Sometimes they need to be fought.
Western nations like U.S. and Israel are far more inclined to protect civilians than Soviets or the Chicoms or Arabs or virtually any other army in any war. The international political effort to transform “genocide” into a malleable accusation is meant to smear Israel today other Western nations who fight Islamists in the future. After all, if there was genuine proof of genocide no one would need to change the long-standing definition of the idea.