No There Is Not A "Genocide" In Gaza

The accusation that Israel is committing a “genocide” in Gaza has become pervasive on the Left, and particularly in academia. I think that the accusation is absurd, so much so that until now I haven’t thought it worthy of a response. However, the accusation has recently arrived on my own website. In the comment thread on the prior post, one of the commenters (regular readers can guess who) has leveled against President Trump the charge that he “is sending weapons to Israel for the genocide in Gaza.” Really? It’s time for a response.

In my opinion, what’s going on in Gaza is not a genocide, but a war. Deaths in war are not a genocide. On October 7, 2023, the governing entity of Gaza, Hamas, conducted an unprovoked attack on Israel, killing approximately 1,200 people, and taking some 250 hostages. Israel has responded with a military action. This is a classic war. The norm in war is that the parties fight until one of the parties surrenders, or there is an armistice. When the parties are fighting, the whole idea is to kill as many of the enemy as possible. Hamas could end the war by surrendering. It has not done so. Moreover, it continues to hold hostages. Therefore, the normal expectation of war would be that Israel will continue to kill as many of the enemy as possible until there is a surrender.

You may disagree with my characterization that the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel was “unprovoked.” It doesn’t matter. Assume that the attack was provoked. This is still a war. In war, it is entirely the norm that a party that has been attacked tries to kill as many of the enemy as it can until the enemy surrenders.

Is there any other example of the term “genocide” being applied to a full-scale military response to an armed attack by an enemy state actor that has not surrendered? If there is, I don’t know of it.

Consider, for example, the Russia/Ukraine war. In this case I would say that Russia’s attack and invasion were unprovoked. The Russian version of events of course differs, and accuses Ukrainian of provocations that caused the conflict. But again, even if Russia’s invasion was completely unprovoked, the conflict is still a war between enemy state actors, where neither has surrendered. Unlike Israel, which makes extensive efforts to minimize civilian casualties, Russia regularly sends drones to bomb civilian targets and residential buildings in Ukrainian cities. But does anyone call Russia’s conduct toward Ukraine a “genocide”? Not that I’ve seen. Contrast this with the conduct of the Soviet Union toward Ukraine in the 1930s, when it imposed an intentional famine in which millions of innocents starved to death. There was no war going on; Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. That was a genocide.

Or consider World War II. Today that conflict is quickly fading out of living human memory. But it provides some obvious guideposts to distinguish between “genocide” and deaths from combat in war.

During World War II, Hitler and his minions engineered the deaths of some 6 million Jews and others, selected largely by racial and ethnic criteria, who were noncombatants and residents of either Germany or conquered territories. That is the classic “genocide.”

But there were far more deaths from fighting in the war. Here is a quote from a famous speech given by U.S. General George Patton to the Sixth Armored Division of the U.S. army (under his command) on May 31, 1944 (a few days before D-Day and the Normandy beach invasion):

We’ll win this war, but we’ll win it only by fighting and showing the Germans that we’ve got more guts than they have or ever will have. We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to rip out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking-basket.

(Quoted in Michael Walsh’s recent book A Rage to Conquer.)

In other words, with a war going on, we are going to kill the enemy, and as effectively as possible. And Patton was only talking about killing enemy soldiers. The U.S. and allied war effort was by no means limited to killing soldiers. For example, in 1943 and 1944 the U.S. and England carried out saturation bombing campaigns directed at German cities like Dresden, Bremen, Essen and even Berlin itself. There were many military targets, but these campaigns essentially leveled the cities, with very large numbers of civilian casualties. Indeed, a large part of the reason for these campaigns was the attempt to undermine civilian support for the Nazi regime. Nobody thought that the U.S. or England were under any obligation to deliver food aid to the suffering German civilians.

And then there were the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in these bombings. Shortly thereafter, Japan surrendered unconditionally, at which point the indiscriminate killings ended immediately.

I have no idea how it is that new rules seem to have emerged, applicable only to Israel (or maybe to only Israel and the United States) whereby any civilian casualties in war are now deemed “genocide.” The use of the term seems to be directed at appealing to soft-minded and historically ignorant students and academics in Western countries. But endless repetition of an inapplicable term cannot change a classic war into something else.

Hamas can end the deaths in Gaza by the simple expedient of unconditional surrender. Until then, it can expect large numbers of deaths, many of them civilians.