Debunking the Gaza ‘genocide’ blood libel won’t dissuade Israel-haters

To believe the genocide charge, every war in history must be labeled as genocide, draining the word coined to describe the Holocaust of any real meaning.

By Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS

The effort to discredit and delegitimize Israel is a project that never allows the facts to get in the way of a fictitious “genocide” narrative.

That’s something that is made clear not so much by efforts by the Jewish state’s defenders as it is by that of its critics like The New York Times.

But even if the worst smears of Israel are debunked by those who seek to brand its soldiers and leaders as war criminals, don’t expect that to change many minds.

This was amply demonstrated by a major investigative piece published this week by the Times that required the efforts of seven of its reporters who claim to have interviewed “100 soldiers and officials in Israel, dozens of victims of the strikes in Gaza, and experts on the rules of armed conflict.”

While the headline promised scandalous findings that might bolster the bogus claim that the Israel Defense Forces were indeed carrying out illegal or even criminal strikes on Palestinian Arabs in Gaza.

But the entire article could be summed up in a single sentence. After Hamas terrorists and other Palestinians attacked the Jewish state on Oct. 7, 2023, the IDF responded with greater force and under slightly looser rules of engagement against its foes than it had before that event.

That’s it.

All of the effort and reporting that went into the feature did nothing more than establish the following painfully obvious fact.

Once Hamas launched the current war by breaching the border between Gaza and Israel—and engaging in an orgy of murder, torture, rape, kidnapping, and wanton destruction—Israel’s military adopted different and more aggressive tactics than it had before its foes ended the ceasefire that existed on Oct. 6, 2023.

The truth about the IDF

Those differences amounted to loosening the rules of engagement that would allow strikes on Hamas leaders that might not have been allowed during a period of relative quiet.

That meant that attacks on enemies responsible for not just starting a war but the barbaric crimes of Oct. 7 were permitted, even if up to 20 civilians were present.

That allowed the IDF to take out these criminals in their own homes, as opposed to previously when they could only be targeted if they were out in the open with few people around them.

Inevitably, that has led to higher civilian casualties. Then again, if Hamas operatives didn’t want civilians to be endangered, they would avoid using them as human shields.

The terrorist group admits to actively seeking not just to hide among and behind non-combatants but to increase the number of those killed and wounded for propaganda and public relations purposes.

And, as the Times also reported, when the IDF blundered, officers responsible for mistakes carried out in the heat of an ongoing battle were rightly disciplined.

To claim that Israel’s loosened rules are unjustified requires one to accept the idea that terrorists waging an active war with blood on their hands ought to have the impunity to commit as many crimes as they like so long as they keep their family and friends around them.

The genocide claim is again given the lie by the Times reporting, which notes that even with these “loosened rules,” the process by which Israeli commanders are able to order strikes on Hamas targets is still rigorous and far from indiscriminate or intended to mass casualties.

This is something backed up by experts on the laws of war like West Point’s John Spencer and Britain’s Col. Richard Kemp.

Indeed, the only real findings back up reports from both Israeli and Palestinian sources that 80% of the casualties in the Gaza Strip have been suffered by Hamas fighters and their relatives.

That means the claim that Israel was deliberately targeting civilians in order to supposedly destroy the Palestinian population is an obvious falsehood.

This doesn’t even take into account that the total number of casualties provided to journalists by Hamas sources like the Gaza Ministry of Health, which have been uncritically accepted and broadcast around the world, has been debunked by those who study statistics.

None of this violates commonly accepted notions about what is or isn’t now permitted under international law during a war, which, as the Times conceded, consists of loosely defined concepts and rules.

The upshot of all this reporting is the entirely unremarkable conclusion that when terrorist groups start wars, more of the people they purport to represent and use as pawns are likely to be hurt.

Equally unremarkable is the fact that nations involved in wars in which their civilians have been deliberately targeted for barbarous war crimes by terrorists are bound to be less restrained in their efforts to eradicate their enemies than in times of relative peace.

So, while the headline and the framing of the story may have sounded like fodder for those determined to demonize the Jewish state and its post-Oct. 7 efforts to destroy Hamas, the result of all that research and writing was so slender that one wonders why the newspaper bothered to explore the subject in the first place.

The reason for a food shortage

The same is true of its efforts to back up the claim that Israel is deliberately starving Gazans since the war began—another of the main planks in the attempt to justify the use of the term “genocide” to describe Israeli tactics.

A Times article published days before its report on Israeli rules of engagement provided some interesting details about the delivery of food to Gaza.

Contrary to the claims that Israel is preventing humanitarian aid from reaching the coastal enclave, the Times confirmed Israel’s arguments that the fault lies with the Palestinians rather than its actions, albeit while framing it in the most negative manner possible.

As the newspaper told its readers, the primary obstacle to getting food to Gazans is Palestinian.

Hamas has been brazenly stealing aid intended for civilians and reserving it for its own use, with some of the thefts caught on film. Those shipments that were not taken by the terrorists who ruled Gaza before Oct. 7 are now being stolen by criminal gangs that operate in areas where Hamas is no longer active.

This is happening because the United Nations and its aid agencies have systematically refused to allow the IDF to guard the route and trucks through which food is distributed.

That is why as many as 800 truckloads of food remain at a standstill in Israel at any given time since the various international aid agencies are afraid to send them into Gaza.

The only secure route for food delivery is the one that Israel has supervised along the route from Egypt into Gaza.

So, again, the mainstream Western media that is hostile to Israel is providing reporting that gives the lie to the genocide narrative.

This means that much of the ammunition that Israel’s defenders need to refute what amounts to a modern blood libel is being offered up by media sources whose coverage is consistently skewed against the Jewish state.

There is no genocide happening in Gaza. The war that Hamas started and continues to fight by refusing to free the Israeli hostages it took from their homes and a young person’s musical festival on Oct. 7 has indeed also taken many Palestinian lives.

But about half of the fatalities have been Hamas fighters and operatives, and many of the civilians were those directly connected to them.

Israel’s goal has been to defeat and destroy Hamas, not the Palestinians as a whole—who, even if you believe the terrorists’ statistics, have lost only a tiny percentage of the 2.1 million people believed to be in Gaza before Oct. 7.

To believe the genocide charge, every war in history must be labeled as a genocide. That drains a word coined to describe the Holocaust of any real meaning.

That doesn’t even take into account that the explicitly stated goal of Hamas is the destruction of Israel and its population—the Oct. 7 atrocities were merely a trailer for what it wanted to do to the rest of the Jewish state.

Ideology over facts

These are findings that should be trumpeted to as wide an audience as possible. Yet even as outlets like the Times undermine their own editorial position with this sort of reporting, fair-minded observers should temper their expectation that this will help turn the tide in the information war being fought about the conflict.

That’s because those journalists, international “human rights” activists and politicians who continue to assert that what is going on in Gaza is a genocide of Palestinians don’t care about what is actually happening there.

Even as they hyped Hamas’s misleading casualty numbers, they have not bothered to answer or take into account coverage that makes it clear what is happening is a war but not an ethnic cleansing.

Why?

The answer is that once the false narrative implicit in critical race theory and intersectional ideology is accepted and applied to the Middle East—where Israel and the Jews are falsely labeled as “white” oppressors—it doesn’t matter what either side actually does.

Every institution that adheres to the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that is used as a formula to justify discrimination against Jews and Israelis is the problem—not just the lies told by Hamas.

As best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates asserted in his ignorant pro-Hamas screed The Message, which was rapturously received by the mainstream media, the facts about Palestinian terrorism, Hamas intentions, and the many Israeli efforts to achieve a compromise peace that would have created a Palestinian state that the Palestinians rejected, don’t matter.

Such people believe Israel is in the wrong and has no right to exist or defend itself—ever. What either side does is therefore of no consequence. The Times and other left-wing outlets can publish daily articles debunking the genocide claim, and it would make no difference to those who throw the term around to drain its actual meaning.

This doesn’t mean that supporters of Israel should not continue to point out these facts and make the argument that its cause is just and its tactics defensible (and legal).

But unless society is also prepared to attack the toxic woke ideologies that are the foundation of the baseless genocide charge, then it won’t matter how effective any arguments might be.

The target of fair-minded observers shouldn’t only be the flimsy and easily disproved libelous assertions about Israel but the entire edifice of woke ideology, which allows both the ignorant and those with malevolent antisemitic intentions to engage in fact-free smears of the Jewish state.

Without tackling these ideologies, the lies about the Middle East will continue to proliferate, regardless of how often they are disproved.

aidGenocideHamasIDFOct 7th