There are few things that so anger me as the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza today

PHOTO: ABED RAHIM KHATIB/FLASH90

I

assume that my custom of immersing myself in Holocaust literature on Tishah B’Av is widely shared. While that experience may not help me to fully understand what was lost with the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash, at least it puts me in touch with the consequences of that destruction and the history of our long exile.

And because I have read so many Holocaust memoirs, as well as a good deal of the scholarly literature, such as the two volumes of Rebbetzin Esther Farbstein’s Hidden in Thunder, there are few things that so anger me as the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza today. Do any of those making the charge have even a glancing knowledge of what was done by the Nazis and many willing collaborators throughout Eastern Europe to the Jews of Europe?

Of the Jewish populations of smaller towns executed in mass graves they were forced to dig themselves? Of the train cars from larger Jewish centers, in which it was nearly impossible to draw a breath of the air rancid with the smell of human refuse, much less to lie down or even sit, headed toward the death camps in which as many as 10,000 Jews a day were gassed? Of the sadistic tortures conceived by the SS commandants — e.g., the four-hour early-morning roll calls in freezing weather, with only the most threadbare uniforms for protection, and under the ever-present threat of a clubbing or a shot in the head for the slightest untoward movement?

Surely those flinging the charge of genocide know nothing of the systematic destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis, or they could not employ the term “genocide” first used by the Jewish jurist and Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin to describe the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group” with reference to Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. Are Palestinians in Gaza being rounded up and slaughtered in cold blood?

Omer Bartov, an Israeli-born-and-raised professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, and the author of respected works on the German army in World War II, is familiar with Hitler’s goal of killing every single Jew and the relentless, industrial efficiency with which it was pursued. Notwithstanding, he published in the New York Times last week a long guest essay titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” (The title is appropriately taken from Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of obscenity, “I know it when I see it,” one of the most widely ridiculed lines ever published by a US Supreme Court justice.)

BARTOV’S PIECE will be widely cited, and therefore it is important to expose what a shoddy piece of goods it is. Consider first the absolute distinction between Israel’s actions in Gaza and those of the Nazis under Hitler. Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, not vice versa. The over 1,200 Jews killed that day alone, leaving aside the women violated and hostages taken, were the equivalent, in terms of the percentage of Israelis killed, of at least a dozen 9/11s.

In addition, Israel had no choice but to remove Hamas from power, either militarily or otherwise. The threat of missiles from Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north caused over 70,000 Israelis to abandon their homes on a long-term basis.

Finally, Hamas could have ended Israel’s military actions in Gaza at any time by simply returning the hostages and leaving Gaza.

By contrast, Jews in Germany and beyond posed no threat to Germany, except in Hitler’s fevered ideology, and never attacked Germany. Moreover, they had no ability to bring Hitler’s plan of extermination of the Jews to a halt.

THE CHARGE OF GENOCIDE first and foremost revolves around intent. But Bartov makes scant effort to establish Israeli intent beyond quoting one intemperate statement by a deputy speaker of the Knesset in the immediate wake of October 7 and an ambiguous reference by Netanyahu to Amalek, which might have referred to no more than the duty to remember what Hamas did on that day. In any event, Hamas is a political-military organization, not a race or religion.

If Bartov wants official statements of genocidal intent, he need look no farther than the Hamas charter, which calls upon every Muslim to seek out and kill Jews wherever they are to be found. Or that of secretary-general of the Arab League on the eve of Israel’s War of Independence: “This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.” The Mufti of Jerusalem declared that the Arabs would “continue to fight until the Zionists are eliminated, and the whole of Palestine is a purely Arab state.”

During a lull in the fighting in 1948, Ben-Gurion told the cabinet that if fighting resumes, “It will be a war of life or death for us, not for them. If we win, we won’t annihilate the Egyptian people or the Syrian people, but if we fail and lose — they’ll exterminate us.” And indeed, in every place that Arab fighters prevailed, such as the Gush Etzion bloc, not a single Jew remained alive.

Israel has never harbored a genocidal intent toward Palestinians. In the quarter century from 1967 to 1993 when Israel governed the West Bank, Palestinian life expectancy rose from 48 to 72 — an increase of 50 percent — and infant mortality dropped 75 percent. Literacy rates increased far above those of any neighboring Arab country. A 50 percent increase in life expectancy is a very strange sort of genocide.

And Israel has no intent to wipe out Palestinians entirely or in part today. Bartov cites the large-scale destruction of Gazan “civilian” structures — hospitals, schools, and mosques — as evidence that Israel seeks to render Gaza uninhabitable. Yet the reason Israel has struck those targets is that they serve as weapons caches and Hamas headquarters, in addition to their civilian uses. The use of UNRWA schools and Gazan hospitals for military purposes has been extensively documented and filmed. Under the Geneva Convention, the deliberate placing of military assets in civilian areas is a violation of international law, not the efforts of opposing forces to remove those assets.

The widespread destruction of homes and apartment buildings is almost entirely a function of the fact Hamas has deeply embedded itself within the civilian population and refused to observe the “rule of distinction” between civilians and combatants. There is scarcely a building or home in Gaza in which Israeli soldiers have not found a shaft leading to an underground tunnel.

Even weaker is Bartov’s argument from the authority of himself and other professors of genocide scholars, not to mention the stalwarts of the “human rights” community — the UN, Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese, and Human Rights Watch. The UN General Assembly passes more anti-Israel resolutions annually than those with respect to all the other nations on the face of the earth. It even condemned Israel for signing a peace treaty with Egypt, and then UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim castigated Israel for the 1976 rescue of over 100 hostages from Entebbe.

Albanese harbors a fanatical hatred of Israel. She refers to terrorists as “human rights defenders,” has compared Hamas in Gaza to Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, supports the BDS movement, and has accused the US government of being controlled by the Jewish Lobby.

Human Rights Watch’s founder, Robert Bernstein, publicly resigned from the organization and accused it of “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.” For instance, HRW accused Israeli of “indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks” in Jenin in 2002, despite the fact that its own report determined only 56 Palestinians were killed, of whom at least 27 were members of armed Palestinian groups. (Major international news sources had reported 5,000 Palestinians killed, and that the stench of death hung so strong in the air of Jenin that it was nearly impossible to breath — both complete fabrications.)

Israel lost 23 soldiers in Jenin, including 13 reservists who were killed in a booby-trapped house that any other army in the world have leveled from the outside rather than entering. As a point of comparison, the US lost only two soldiers in the months-long battle for Mosul, a city nearly the size of Philadelphia, because it confined itself to aerial bombings, not fighting house to house, as Israel did in Jenin.

Equally tendentious is Bartov’s reliance on the casualty figures of the Hamas Ministry of Health. That agency has no credibility. On October 17, 2023, it claimed 500 civilians were killed when Israel bombed Al-Ahli Hospital. But the actual number killed was 50, and the explosion in the hospital parking lot, not in the hospital itself, was caused by a malfunctioning missile fired by Islamic Jihad.

The ministry’s casualty figures have long since been shown to be statistically unsupportable, unless Israel found some magic formula for killing only women and children. If one subtracts the number of admitted Hamas fighters killed from the total casualties claimed as of February 19, 2024, the number of dead women and children would have been 19,500 and civilian men a mere 3,500. As of April 6, 2024, the Hamas Ministry of Health acknowledged it had incomplete data on fully one-third of the deaths it claimed up until that point.

Every civilian killed in warfare is a tragedy. But even civilian deaths in the thousands do not justify accusations of genocide. Crucially, Hamas, not Israel, bears responsibility for civilian deaths caused by its decision to embed all its military assets in the middle of Gaza’s civilian population. Hamas spokespeople have stated on numerous occasions that its tunnels are for the protection of its fighters alone, and that the international community is obligated to protect civilians above, even as those civilians serve as human shields to shield the tunnel infrastructure.

Hamas’s deployment of Gaza’s civilian population is the ultimate in cynicism: It knows that the more civilians killed by Israel’s attempts to destroy the tunnels, the greater will be the world outcry and international pressure on Israel to cease and desist short of attaining its war aims. Every dead Gazan is a bonus for Hamas.

Bartov mocks Israel’s claim to be “the most moral army in the world.” But that is the considered judgment of the leading experts on modern urban warfare (as opposed to professors of genocide studies): Col. Richard Kemp, former high commander of British Expeditionary Forces in Afghanistan; Major John Spencer, director of the Urban Warfare Project at West Point’s Modern War Institute; and Andrew Fox, lecturer at Britain’s Sandhurst Military Academy, who served three tours of duty in Afghanistan. All three have been embedded with Israeli combat units multiple times.

The best proof of genocidal intent or the lack thereof is a comparison of the IDF’s actions in Gaza with those of other Western armies. Spencer has stressed repeatedly that no military has ever faced anything like the labyrinth of 350 to 450 miles of tunnels used by Hamas in Gaza, which cost over $1 billion to build. Yet despite the challenge created by Hamas, and for which Hamas is responsible, the ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths achieved by the IDF in Gaza is lower than any other army has ever achieved in urban warfare. Kemp has said repeatedly that Israel has done more than any other army in history to minimize civilian casualties, including moving civilians from anticipated areas of conflict in Gaza for their own safety.

A comparison of Israel’s actions in Gaza to that of American and allied troops in the battle against ISIS in Iraq commenced by President Obama in 2014 is instructive. According to the Rand Corporation, Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, was “effectively destroyed.” The Associated Press counted 9,606 people killed in the central morgue. But Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, a native of Mosul, put the figure at 40,000. Ramadi, a city of 400,000, was reduced to rubble.

Yet in Mosul, allied forces faced far fewer ISIS fighters, about 9,000 in total, than the tens of thousands under Hamas’s banner in Gaza. In addition, allied forces did not have to deal with the elaborate tunnel system of Gaza. Yet American and Iraqi forces, relying almost exclusively on air power, produced a ratio of civilian deaths to those of ISIS fighters far higher than that experienced by civilians in Gaza.

Israel has been repeatedly criticized for not supplying more humanitarian aid to Gaza. Yet since the beginning of the war, it has supplied over two million tons of food, and would have supplied more had Hamas not seized the food delivered and used its control over food supplies to cement its hold on the civilian population. Until today, Hamas forces fire upon food convoys under the auspices of international relief organizations.

Israel became the first nation in history to feed its enemies in time of war. But it was under no obligation to do so. The US Department of Defense Law War Manual states specifically, “It is a legitimate method of war to starve enemy forces.” And in Iraq, US forces working together with Iraqi troops besieged the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, allowing no food, water, or fuel to enter.

Perhaps Professor Bartov can explain how the IDF could, in fact, be the most moral army in the history of warfare, and guilty of genocide or the intention to commit genocide at the same time? Will he soon be calling for former president Obama to be dragged before the International Criminal Court and charged with war crimes?

Uri Kaufman is the author of Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East, selected by the Financial Times as one of best history books of 2023. He has recently published American Intifada: Israel, the Gaza War, and the New Antisemitism (Regnery Press), upon which this column draws heavily.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1071. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)