By Aiden Harow, Opinions Editor
Genocide has become a joke. It isn’t very funny.
In a recent appeal to the International Court of Justice, South Africa, in its latest feeble yet transparently obvious attempt to distance itself from its own brutal apartheid past, has levied the very charge against Israel that Israel was founded to prevent: genocide. This charge has since become the new trendy virtue signal amongst opponents of Israel and has even affected international politics, with Nicaragua recently using South Africa’s ICJ precedent to accuse Germany of committing genocide by selling weapons to Israel (laughable once you take a look at their veritable laundry list of human rights violations). While it is tempting to react to these patently ridiculous accusations with the hilarity they deserve, it is necessary to treat the evident moral bankruptcy of the global judiciary with the utmost seriousness. The speed and intensity of the world’s betrayal of Israel while it fights for the eradication of a sadistic Iran-sponsored terrorist militia is tragic. But even more tragic is the cruel irony of the state created to protect survivors of Nazi atrocities being the focus of a global effort to pervert genocide as an idea and to weaponize Jewish generational trauma for cheap political gains.
The 1948 Genocide Convention was drafted after World War II in order to formally hold Nazi Germany and others accountable for the horrors they inflicted upon Jews and other ethnic minorities, crimes previously undefined by international law. The term “genocide” itself was coined by Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who, outraged by the lack of international response to the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, devoted his life to ensuring that governments would no longer be able to exterminate entire groups with impunity, and played a key role in the international adoption of the Convention. The Convention, modeled off of Nazi policy, highlights five key behaviors, any one of which can constitute a genocide when targeted towards a specific group: killing, causing bodily or mental harm, imposing unsurvivable living conditions, preventing births, and forcing children into other groups. Those brandishing the Convention in the direction of Israel claim that Israel has violated the first three in Gaza, and, at surface level, those accusations may appear to be valid. However, in a childish display of selective amnesia, they have neglected the entire activating principle of the Convention: “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Not only is Israel not attempting anything of the sort, but it has done everything it can to protect Palestinians in Gaza, even to the detriment of the effort to protect itself from Jihadist terror.
The two main accusations levied against Israel that international lawyers argue support a genocide case are: indiscriminate bombing of civilians and using starvation as a weapon by withholding humanitarian aid. News media frantically repeats that there are over 33,000 Palestinians dead, over 20,000 of them civilians, and that 70% of Gaza is facing imminent famine according to the UN’s World Food Programme. Al Jazeera, the BBC, CNN, and the rest decry Israel for attacking hospitals and schools, mowing down hungry families as they attempt to gather morsels from whatever aid has made it through the crushing Gaza blockade. What they don’t show the world, however, is what a mere Google search can reveal. They don’t show the world the simple facts. Why? Because the facts cause their fallacious narrative to unravel at the seams.
During the current war, using Hamas’s figures for total dead and the IDF’s figures for dead combatants for the sake of parity, Israel’s military has killed at a civilian-combatant ratio of about 1.7:1. This may seem high. After all, should Israel really need to kill 1.7 civilians for every terrorist? The answer, definitively, is yes. In fact, compared to other notable conflicts, Israel’s ratio is positively stellar. The Korean War had a ratio of 3 civilians to every combatant. America’s war in Iraq had a ratio anywhere from 3:1 to 5:1, with the number unclear due to the number of civilians vaporized during the “shock and awe” of the first day of Desert Storm. The two Chechen Wars had a combined ratio of 7.6:1. The UN Security Council has repeatedly asserted that the standard ratio in modern conflicts is as high as 9:1. And yet, Israel is the one accused of genocide. Not North or South Korea, not the US, not Russia (until recently), but Israel, the country that drops leaflets and sends text messages to civilians in the area of a military operation at the cost of the element of surprise, drops small munitions on targeted buildings as a warning sign to minimize civilian casualties, and has called off countless assassinations and bombing runs because the families of the targets might be in the area.
This vicious double-standard was made even more glaringly apparent in the mainstream coverage of the recent raid on Al-Shifa hospital. For weeks, news feeds have been saturated with images of crying Palestinians digging through rubble and headlines bemoaning the 400 civilian deaths. However, in what amounts to nauseating journalistic malpractice, these so-called “news networks” conveniently neglect to mention that the IDF killed 250 terrorists and captured over 500 more at Al-Shifa! This amounts to a civilian-combatant ratio of just 0.53:1, astonishingly low considering the densely populated urban areas within which Israel has been forced to wage brutal guerilla warfare. This should have been reported as a triumph of the IDF, a masterclass in operational precision that protected as many civilians as possible. But that information apparently isn’t relevant. The media has appearances to keep up after all.
On the equally ridiculous point of Israel’s supposed weaponization of starvation, Israel has increased its aid to Gaza by over 50% this year, continuously breaking single-day records for trucks of food and medicine sent into the Strip. The UN World Food Programme estimates that, in order to feed the entire population of Gaza for a single week, 4,900 tons of food are needed. Since October 7, Israel, on its own, has provided 191,000 – 243,000 tons of food, enough to feed all of the 2.2 million people of Gaza for 9 to 12 months! Average food prices in Gaza are actually dropping! And yet, six months into this war, 70% of Gazans are facing food insecurity according to the UN. Where is all the food going? Maybe ask the terrorist militia that has been caught on camera numerous times hijacking aid convoys before they reach their intended starving recipients. Or just blame Israel. Everyone else is doing it. And it’s way more fun.
It is abundantly clear to anyone with even an ounce of integrity that Israel is not committing genocide. Any attempts to claim otherwise are simply pathetic bids by nations with despicable human rights records to capitalize on what is newly in vogue, punch above their weight class, and sweep their own murderous pasts under the rug. The Genocide Convention is not applicable to the current war, and using it to smear Israel for pats on the back from the Arab world and radical progressives is an insult to all victims and survivors of genocide past and present.
This is not a genocide. This is a joke. And we’re not laughing.
But, if you got this far, you probably already agree. The rest stopped reading after the first paragraph.