The war of words

It is grating to hear some politicians and podcasters falsely say Israel committed “genocide” because it fought a legal and just defensive war in response to the Hamas attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. It is a particularly cruel canard in light of the 6 million Jews exterminated by the Nazis in the Holocaust, which prompted the legal codification of the crime of genocide itself.

The war of words against Israel began the day after Oct. 7, before Israel began its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza. Immediately, Hamas supporters began to hurl a veritable word salad of libelous accusations against Israel and Jews, including the genocide lie.

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This past Shabbat, I read Isaiah 54:17 from the Haftorah: “No weapon forged against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and this is their vindication from me, declares the Lord.”

I couldn’t help but reflect on the verse’s meaning. Isaiah seemed to be talking about our times. A time when Iron Dome miraculously intercepted weapons fashioned against us, and a war of words was declared against us, in which we will eventually be vindicated.

Indeed, the latest revelations about Gaza serve as a testament to the triumph of truth over baseless accusations. For example, UNICEF’s own figures contradicted claims of widespread malnutrition among children in Gaza, highlighting a lower rate compared to other Arab countries. Moreover, U.N. representatives acknowledged that food deliveries have been hijacked by Hamas and its allies, not blocked by Israel. This demonstrates that our adversaries’ defamatory war of words will ultimately fail.

The legal term “genocide” has a precise meaning under international law. It is not a trite term to be bandied about by dilettantes or wielded as a weapon by agenda-driven genocidal terrorists and their supporters.

The threshold requirement is that there must be specific intent and a premeditated plan to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Genocidal intent must be the sole reasonable inference drawn from the commission of prohibited acts, and it must be conclusively established through concrete evidence, not speculation. Even severe civilian harm does not constitute genocide unless those threshold standards are met.

Israel has no such genocidal intent, and the facts prove it. If the Israel Defense Forces had intended to wipe out Gaza, they could have done so with a massive bombing campaign in a short period of time, with few or no casualties.

Instead, it took extraordinary and unprecedented steps to limit harm to civilians in one of the worst urban warfare scenarios ever encountered. This included using text messages, phone calls, leaflets and broadcasts to warn civilians before attacks and opening safe corridors to permit civilians to leave combat areas. Israel also enabled and aided in the provision of medical supplies (such as polio vaccines), food, water and power.

At the same time, Hamas was doing everything it could to increase the number of civilians killed to produce poisonous headlines that wrongly blamed Israel. Hamas and cohorts were also stealing and otherwise interrupting the flow of food to Gazans and actually murdering Gazans themselves.

In point of fact, Israel is not even charged with genocide in pending International Criminal Court proceedings, and the prosecutor admitted no evidence of genocide had been found. In separate proceedings brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice, Joan Donoghue, the former president of the court, made an unusual decision on Jan. 26, 2024, when the court delivered its findings.

She took the step of correcting widespread misreporting on the ICJ’s ruling on Gaza, noting that the court took jurisdiction of the case: “But it did not decide—and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media—it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.”

In sum and substance, there has been no finding of genocide regarding Israel for good reason.

In fact, Israel can be considered the anti-genocide force, while Hamas is the genocidal one. Hamas is a classic case of wrongdoers projecting their own dreadful sins onto others.

The Hamas Covenant is overtly genocidal and antisemitic. The group’s avowed goal, enshrined in its charter, is the destruction of Israel. Indeed, Hamas officials have expressly vowed to replicate Oct. 7-like attacks until Israel is completely eradicated. The terrorist organization espouses antisemitic and genocidal doctrines directed against Jews generally. It follows an ongoing plan to eliminate the Jewish people, and then destroy America and the West.

Israel conducted an exemplary, just and moral war to save kidnapped hostages and defend itself against Hamas’s genocidal platform of aggression.

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