Genocide in Gaza?

Of course, the situation in Gaza is dynamic, and due to actions on the part of the Israeli government and its military, much of the population there is now on the verge of mass starvation. At the start of Hitler’s reign, which killed some six million Jews, the Jewish population of Europe was approximately 9.5 million. That was 60 percent of the Jewish population in the world at the time, but percentages do not tell the whole story, which revolves around basic intent and not just how much of a genocidal mission has been accomplished. In an opinion piece in the July 15 New York Times titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,” Omer Bartov, the Brown University professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, who is Jewish, wrote that right at the beginning of its retaliation against Hamas, he thought Israel was committing war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity; but in May 2024, when the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, compelled some one million Palestinians (who had fled south to the city of Rafah, the only part of Gaza left relatively unscathed) to trek to a beach area with virtually no shelter, and proceeded to raze the city almost to the ground, he realized that the pattern of IDF operations was “consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had urged Israeli citizens after October 7 to “remember what Amalek did to you,” a statement many surmised as referring to a passage in the Bible calling for the Israelites to “kill alike men and women, infants, and sucklings” of an ancient enemy group. Government and military officials, Bartov related, said they were fighting “human animals,” and the deputy speaker of Parliament asserted on X that “Israel’s task must be ‘erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.’” Bartov wrote, “I believe the goal was—and remains today—to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.” Bartov summarized: “My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”

A week after Bartov’s piece appeared, the Times published an article by Opinion columnist Bret Stephens titled “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza.” He offered this riposte to Bartov (without mentioning his name and expertise on the subject): “It may seem harsh to say, but there is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: … if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans—why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly? Why not, say, hundreds of thousands of deaths, as opposed to the nearly 60,000 that Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry … has cited so far in nearly two years of war?” A sensible riposte to that would be: A system of genocide is not built in a day, or two years. Hitler began creating concentration camps in Germany upon taking office in 1933, but it wasn’t until eight years later (the year of Churchill’s statement on the matter) that the systematic mass executions of Jews and other minority outcasts commenced.