The word “genocide” was coined towards the end of World War II to describe the Holocaust against the Jews, but here’s its definition:
In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.
Note that the intent to destroy the group is a necessary element. For Israel towards the Gazans, it is transparently obvious that there is no such intent; Israel takes more pains than any other military in the world to prevent civilian casualties. It is also obvious that there is no such intent because if the intent existed, the goal could be accomplished in short order, given Israel’s military technology. It is further obvious that it is the Palestinians who have a genocidal intent towards the nation of Israel and towards Jews as a whole: they state it, and the attack of October 7 was an attempt to carry it out with maximum ferocity and cruelty. They are really not subtle about it. The politics of the world have dictated that it was the Israelis who were charged with genocide in the ICJ, however.
The definition of “genocide” raises another question: are the Gazans a “nation”? Are they an “ethnic group” or a “racial group” or a “religious group”? I submit that they are none of those things. They had no history as a nation prior to their starting to say they were a Palestinian nation, during the 1960s. Even in 1947, when the UN partitioned the portion of Palestine that was still controlled by the Brits after the Ottoman Empire – which had once ruled over a huge portion of the Middle East – collapsed and the Allies took over, the “Palestinians” didn’t think of themselves as a separate country. The West Bank and Gaza each contained Muslims who at the time were ethnically and historically similar to people in Jordan and Egypt, and their main objection to partition was that they wanted the area designated to the Jews (Israel) as well as the parts they got. They did not want a Jewish nation at all, and that’s why five Arab nations declared war on the infant Israel in 1948, invading it with the intent of occupying it and strangling it in its crib. The Arab refugees from Palestine were encouraged to leave Israel and wait till the land was reclaimed by the larger Arab states’ victory, a victory that never came. In the meantime, for 75 years those Arabs and their many descendants have been kept in that same condition, with propaganda fanning the flames of Jew-hatred, and the UN taking care of them while their corrupt leaders siphon off the aid in order to get armaments and build an infrastructure to further attack the Jews (and even some Arabs) of Israel.
During the 1960s, those Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank rode the waves of anti-colonialism and national self-determination and became, “the Palestinians.” Thus, you might say they became a nation, but it was a nation with no prior national history. And of course, not only is Israel not trying to destroy the Gazans as a whole, but the Gazans have never to my knowledge declared themselves a separate nation from the West Bank Arabs, and there is no war against the West Bank Arabs at the moment, much less a genocide.
The Gazans are not an ethnicity, either. They are indistinguishable genetically from many of their Arab neighbors such as Jordan, plus Egypt (which is not Arab). The Gazans are almost entirely Muslim, of course, but there are close to two billion Muslims in the world and there is no attempt whatsoever by Israel to harm any of them. Lastly, Israel itself has a population that is about 20% Arab, and those people enjoy citizenship and membership in the Knesset. It is interesting that Israel’s Arab population has for the most part declared itself on Israel’s side in this particular conflict; they know they have it much better in Israel than the Arabs who live in Gaza or the West Bank.
So the charge of genocide against Israel is literally absurd.
However, it is psychologically satisfying to the accusers as well as politically expedient. As Brendan O’Neill writes [emphasis mine]:
Since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October, the extent to which the Holocaust has become everybody’s plaything, a de-Jewified event we can all claim a connection with, has become terrifyingly clear. Witness the talk of a ‘Shoah’ in Gaza, as Al Jazeera referred to it. ‘Gaza Holocaust’ has trended on X. Masha Gessen infamously likened Gaza to a Holocaust-era Jewish ghetto in an essay for the New Yorker. ‘The ghetto is being liquidated’, he said, as if Israel’s war on Hamas were more akin to the Nazis’ transportation of ghetto Jews to the ovens than, say, Britain and America’s war on ISIS. On anti-Israel demos, Israelophobes gleefully wave placards accusing the Jewish State of carrying out the kind of genocide its own people once suffered.
South Africa’s cheap stunt of dragging Israel to the International Court of Justice to answer charges of ‘genocide’ provoked yet more spasms of Holocaust relativism. The court’s ruling – that Israel must take all necessary steps to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza – has given real ‘meaning to “Never Again”’, crowed a South African official. This use of post-Holocaust terminology to damn the Jewish State in the here and now speaks to how unanchored from history the Holocaust has become. It confirms the extent to which the Holocaust has been abstracted from its own historical circumstances – those circumstances being the Nazis’ efforts to vaporise every Jew on Earth – and reduced to a catch-all moral gesture anyone can make.
In part, the use of words like ‘Shoah’, ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Never Again’ against Israel is just Jew-baiting. There are some people out there who relish the pain it inflicts on the descendants of the Jews who were gassed by the Nazis to imply that they are guilty of similar crimes today. To say ‘Never Again’ about Israel’s war on the army of anti-Semites that butchered more than a thousand Jews on 7 October is not a considered political critique – it’s racist gloating, Jew-taunting. Yet there is more at play, too. That the Holocaust can be weaponised against the Jews themselves is a testament to its wholesale extraction from historical reality and its transformation into a general tool of political posturing.
Nor is this limited to post-10/7. It’s been going on for many many decades. It is facilitated by the younger generations’ ignorance of history, which allows them to be easily manipulated by slogans and the cherry-picking of events. It has been encouraged by the international community (see Durban 2001) and in particular the UN, which might be renamed “The United Nations Against Israel,” so obsessed is it with the tiny country it originally helped birth. The USSR was part of the planning for the anti-Israel propaganda (I wrote this post on the subject), which was furthered by the left in Europe and in the US beginning in the late 1960s and continuing to the present day.
No, it’s not new. But it seems to be reaching a fever pitch, post 10/7.
NOTE: Please read this early post of mine about why the Holocaust in WWII was unique.
