The Language of the Debate (11)

Back in March of this year, a Special Reporter advised the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that “There are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide … has been met.” She was referring, of course, to Israel’s ongoing incursion into Gaza against Hamas.

Nobody blinked. The glib Francesca Albanese redefinition of a well-understood term slid by the council without a murmur of objection. Israel called the report “an obscene inversion of reality”, but news programs around the world now routinely describe the invasion as a genocide without significant pushback.

Was the description accurate?

15. “Genocide”

Let’s dial back the hyperbole and do a little assessment. First, from Britannica, a definition:

genocide, the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race. The term, derived from the Greek genos (“race,” “tribe,” or “nation”) and the Latin cide (“killing”), was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-born jurist who served as an adviser to the U.S. Department of War during World War II.

In case anybody isn’t paying attention to the timeframe of the coinage, Lemkin was talking about the Holocaust. That event not only met the current definition of genocide but also revived the use of the term.

Notwithstanding the drama at the UN, it should be evident to any observer without political motivations that the attempt to purge Hamas from Gaza fails to meet the definition of genocide in at least three ways:

1/ The Motive

The ordinary definition of genocide requires a motive to annihilate or decimate a people group “because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race”. Is that what’s really going on here?

Calling Palestine a “nation” or Palestinian a “nationality” is inconsistent with the historical usage of the term going back to the fifth century BC. Last Monday on Anonymous Asks, I answered the question “Was Jesus a Palestinian?” in the qualified affirmative. Why? Because since centuries before the time of Christ, the term “Palestinian” was used to describe any resident, regardless of nationality, of the territory running north-south from Phoenicia to Egypt and east-west from the Mediterranean to at least the Dead Sea. Historically, “Palestinian” is no more an ethnic or racial designation than “Muslim”. Herodotus demonstrably used the term to refer to Jews.

So then, Jews are Palestinians, as were Caphtorites, Phoenicians and Syrians over the last couple of thousand years. The current occupants of Gaza, who are ethnically Arabs, may just as reasonably call themselves Palestinians, but the word means nothing more ethnically specific than other geographic umbrella terms like “European” or “North American”. To say that Israel is targeting the Arabs in Gaza because of their “ethnicity, nationality, religion or race” is both a category error and a gross misuse of language. Tens of millions of peaceful Arabs all over the Middle East have nothing to fear from the IDF. The problem with the Arabs of Palestine is not that they are Arabs or Muslims, but that they are in the wrong place doing the wrong things.

Here’s a silly notion: perhaps Israel is targeting a very particular group of Arabs because they are unrelentingly hostile to Israel’s survival and keep proving it by killing Israelis or cheering on those that do. That’s the meaning of “From the river to the sea.” It’s a call for the genocide of Israelis (who are legitimately a nation) and Jews throughout the world.

Now that meets the dictionary definition of genocide, at least from the motivation side. But to say there is a Palestinian “genocide” is simply rhetorical posturing.

2/ The Method

The definition of “genocide” also requires “deliberate and systematic destruction”, which the facts very much call into question. In fact, the destruction in Gaza is about as selective as it can possibly be. Green Beret combat veteran Nick Freitas, who has been boots on the ground in Gaza, explains there is nothing that meets the definition of genocide going on there:

“I think the people who are calling it ‘genocide’ are either being intentionally dishonest or don’t know what the word ‘genocide’ means … I’ve been in that environment where you are kicking in multiple doors to try to get to your bad guy, and every other room is women and children. We go through an incredible level of training in order to make sure we hit the right target. But that’s a complex environment, especially when that one time a twelve-year old picks up an AK47 and starts shooting. Is that a ‘civilian casualty’ or is that a ‘military age male’? In that moment, it’s a military age male. You’re shooting at me. That’s not how it’s going to be reported by Hamas to CNN, who will dutifully report, ‘X number of children killed on the objective.’

So what is considered ‘reasonable mitigation of civilian casualties’?”

It’s a good question. Israel’s methodology in Gaza is by no means genocidal, showing no evidence of the intent to wipe out Gazans en masse. The whole Freitas video (see the link above) is worth watching, as he makes a good case that Hamas deliberately drives up Arab civilian casualty numbers in order to manipulate Western observers.

3/ The Level of Carnage

Finally, how does the Gaza conflict match up with the Holocaust (to which it is frequently compared in the media, and which was directed at a civilian population) in terms of carnage? The relative numbers of dead per day answer the question of whether Israel is attempting to eradicate the civilian population of Gaza, as the media claims, or waging war against a terrorist faction using Gaza’s civilian population as human shields, as the Israeli government claims.

As I pointed out in a September post on the subject, even if the Oxfam high-end figure of 250 per day reasonably approximates the death toll in Gaza (some, including Wikipedia, indicate the Oxfam numbers are way too high), that number currently stands at less than 2% of the most conservative estimates of Holocaust totals. (It should be noted that some respected historians have revised the WWII total down to 5,000,000 from the generally accepted 6,000,000. For the purposes of our calculation, we’ve dropped it all the way to 4,000,000. Nobody can say that’s not fair.)

So then, even if we inflate the Gaza numbers and lowball the Holocaust estimates, at the current attrition rate it would take until 2083 for the casualties in Gaza (combined military and civilian) to match the number of innocent Jewish civilians exterminated by Hitler in WWII. That’s another 59 years.

In short, comparing 2024 Gaza to the Holocaust is apples and oranges, and everyone doing it is either woefully ignorant or deliberately deceptive. It brings into serious question whether in fact there is any “deliberate and systematic destruction” going on in Gaza at all. As much as the deaths of civilians are always to be deplored, nothing Israel is doing in Gaza is remotely unparalleled, at least as far as scale is concerned, in wars waged by other nations.

The marketing problem for Israel is that, well ... they’re Israel.

In Summary

Gaza is not a “genocide”, not by any normal standard. But college students in America don’t know that, or simply don’t care. The rhetoric serves as a fine example of the crafty manipulation of language in the service of liars and propagandists.