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You may believe that Israel’s response to October 7 is disproportionate. You may even believe that, on some level, the IDF is guilty of war crimes. But to accuse Israel of committing genocide is as preposterous as it is scandalous. Yet the word “genocide” is virtually ubiquitous these days, the most common description of Israel’s allegedly abdominal acts.
According to the Britannica website, genocide is “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race.”
The worst genocide in history was the Holocaust, where Hitler slaughtered 6 million out of 9 million European Jews in his attempt to wipe them off the map. This included the extermination of 3 million out of 3.3 million Polish Jews – more than 9 out of every 10.
In Cambodia, Pol Pot exterminated almost a quarter of his country, targeting specific parts of the population deemed unworthy to live.
How, then, can Israel be charged with practicing genocide against the Palestinians, specifically against the Palestinians of Gaza?
The population of Gaza is roughly 2.1 million, and if the figures released by Hamas are to be taken at face value, then roughly 17,000 Gazans have been killed by the IDF since Israel began its military operations in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre.That amounts to less than 1 percent of the total population.
Even if all those killed were civilians and none of them combatants, that would not constitute anything remotely near to “genocide.” Not in the slightest. To the contrary, these numberswould be typical of civilian casualties in war –tragic, agonizing, heartbreaking – but nothing comparable to genocide in the slightest.
To be sure, these are human lives, each of inestimable value, and we should mourn the loss of every one of them. I am not minimizing these deaths in the slightest, especially those of women and children. But to call such losses “genocide” is to mock the very meaning of the word and the suffering it represents.
When you add in the fact that the IDF goes to unusual lengths to avoid civilian casualties, including dropping hundreds of thousands of leaflets warning civilians to flee, along with tens of thousands of automated texts and calls, the cry of “genocide” becomes all the more preposterous.
The reality is that, if the IDF wanted to slaughter most of the population of Gaza, it could do so in a matter of days, if not hours, with virtually no Israeli losses. This alone should serve as a stark rebuke to those who dare use the “genocide” word.
As for the broader charge of Israel’s alleged genocide (or ethnic cleansing) of the Palestinians, consider the numerical growth of the Arab (= Palestinian) population within Israel proper, along with in the West Bank and Gaza.
The number of Arabs who remained in Israel after the War of Independence has grown from 200,000 in 1948 to more than 2 million today, representing an increase of more than 1,000 percent. This is “genocide”? Seriously?
You might say, “We’re not talking about all Palestinians. We’re talking about the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. That’s where the genocide is taking place.”
Let’s look at those numbers too.
Using the most common estimates, the Palestinian population of the West Bank in 1967, when Israel occupied it after the Six Day War, was slightly under 600,000. Today, the Palestinian population of the West Bank is roughly 2.5 million, representing an increase of better than 400 percent.
As for Gaza, the Palestinian population when Israel unilaterally withdrew from the region in 2005 was roughly 1.3 million. Today, as noted earlier, it has grown to 2.1 million, representing an increase of a little about 60 percent in less than 20 years.
So, the Arab (Palestinian) Israeli population has grown by more than 1,000 percent since 1948, the Palestinian population of the West Bank has grown by more than more than 400 percent since 1967, and the Palestinian population of Gaza has grown by better than 60 percent since 2005.
This is supposed to be “genocide”? This is what “ethnic cleansing” looks like? The dramatic growth of a people equals their “genocide”?
In a previous article, I mentioned the interaction between a mother and her 15-year-old daughter after her daughter said that they should not eat at McDonald’s because of the company’s alleged support of Israel.
The mother said, “Tell me what Israel is doing wrong without using the word genocide.”
“But it is genocide,” her daughter replied.
The same charge was raised when I recently interacted with university students from Gaza while in India. And that same charge is repeated day and night, unthinkingly and incessantly, raised against the very people who suffered the worst genocide in human history, while university presidents cannot state that the call for the genocide of the Jews constitutes bullying and harassment.
This is a scandal.
People love to fight injustice and clearly the hatred against Jews is unjust when examined. But in order to examine it and that means putting some effort into looking beyond the legacy media that loves muslims and hates all other religions.
People don’t look behind the headlines, the lockdown and vaccine hysteria is enough to prove this. Some people are still getting injected with the dangerous mRNA.
The media are loyal to their paymasters. So are the minions of academia. The world has funded global jihad by buying arab oil. End this.
Mere facts will never change the minds of haters. They just have to hate Jews for the criminal act of living in their own sovereign country
Israel has been making the same mistakes over and over again. She should never try to please Jew hating western world. On Oct 8 she should have gone and turned the godforsaken place called Gaza to dust. If it was acceptable for America to turn Dresden of Hiroshima to dust. It should be acceptable for Israel to do the same to Gaza. Is that simple.
Why even argue that Israel isn’t committing genocide? Had Israel wanted it could have dropped neutron bombs on Gaza and the PA areas and killed all their inhabitants without suffering a single casualty. But it didn’t and wouldn’t. People either already know that or call the war Hamas forced on Israel Israeli genocidal irrespective of fact. People believing the latter are immune to reality and cannot be convinced otherwise. It’s like them calling Israel an “apartheid state” when it is objectively the most diverse state in the Middle East with full rights for all its citizens, including its 20% Arab population.
As usual, the left says what their itching ears want to hear, not what is truth or reality. Hitler blamed the Jews for everything that was wrong too, including trying to keep the church from speaking out about the plotting of extinction of the Jews.
If we called the wiping out of the entire population of Gaza genocide, would still be incorrect. Gazans are Arabs. (Please, let’s dispense with the “Palestinian’ fiction) They still would comprise 462.58 million people. With 8 million born yearly.
Israel has no intention of killing all the Arabs. Just the murderous ones that enter its borders. That’s not genocide. That’s a public service.
fakestinians and 2 state solution , 2 fictions that the west and the imbecile that is in residence in the crack house continue to push . you cant fix stupid , you can only medicate it . at the moment even though feckless joe is medicated he is still spouting stupid , pretty much his lifetime modus operandi . 81 million supposedly voted for this numbskull !! you get the politicians you deserve and in this case more than you bargained for , enjoy .!!
That’s a Bill Clinton trick……accuse the other side of doing what you’re doing.
Didn’t mean to make a joke out of this, but we know the media will not correct the record.
You’re correct. Genocide is what was done to Jews infamously. Therefore it must be used against them as an accusation. I have even heard a whining “ 6 million” referring to how many poor little Gaza people and West Bank people could be killed by those big bad Jews (sarcasm).
That msm tag line is said to erase 1. Number of Jews killed in WWII Holocaust AND 2. Number of Jews in Israel today. Catchy number, eh?
Personally I think they’ve not been forceful enough. NO humanitarian pauses. NO ceasefires. NO ‘prisoner’ exchanges. KILL all the Hamas without fail. Do not accept any ‘terms’ or ‘deals’ with terrorists. If they refuse to release hostages, too bad for the inhabitants of Hamasville (i.e., Gaza). The people of Gaza VOTED for Hamas, knowing what they promised they’d do, which was to erase Israel off of the map and kill all Jews worldwide.
Yes! Yes! Yes! Wipe out palestinians, hamas, islams, all the Jew haters around Israel and abroad!