No, winning a war is not genocide.
Increasingly, people cannot seem to tell the difference between military operations and genocide, especially when it comes to Israel.
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This is a guest essay written by Jamie Paul.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
It has been a tumultuous six months in the Middle East.
After the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, 2023, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in addition to raping, incinerating, mutilating, and kidnapping hundreds, the world watched in horror.
Yes, there were many on the Islamic right and the Western left who found the modern-day pogrom cause for celebration — or, as a Cornell University professor put it to a cheering crowd of students, “exhilarating” — but they were a clear minority. Israel was showered with a rare deluge of international sympathy, at least until they began fighting back.
In the months since, Israel has taken the battle to Hamas, who operate embedded within civilian population centers like hospitals and schools, and in extensive underground tunnel networks that run beneath residential neighborhoods.
As Palestinian civilians in the thousands have been caught in the crossfire, Israel’s rare public relations honeymoon quickly evaporated. From the moment they started defending themselves, a growing chorus of critics has taken to describing Israel’s retaliatory strikes in the ensuing war as “genocide.”
A January 2024 poll found that over a third of U.S. adults and nearly half of 18 to 29-year-olds thought that Israel was perpetrating a Palestinian genocide.1 In another survey taken a week later, these figures jumped to half of U.S. adults and over two-thirds of young people.2
What we are seeing here is a widening disconnect with reality. The problem is not that the Israelis are committing genocide, but that they are winning the war. Increasingly, people cannot seem to tell the difference between the two, especially when it comes to Israel.
U.S. federal law defines genocide as “violent attacks with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.”3 Definitions vary slightly from source to source, and many legal scholars and historians disagree about its precise meaning, but broadly speaking, genocide refers to mass killing done with the intent to wipe out a particular people.
Let’s be clear: Israel is not committing genocide based on any understanding of the term prior to the past five minutes, but genocide apparently ain’t what it used to be. “Genocide,” it seems, has gone the way of “white supremacy,” “Nazi,” “racism,” and “groomer.” It has been overused, misapplied, and wolf-cried for cheap political effect to the point of losing all meaning.
“Genocide” was coined during the Holocaust as a way to distinguish crimes of such unimaginable magnitude from other kinds of atrocities. The sad irony is that while two-thirds of young adults think Israel is guilty of genocide, a December 2023 poll found that 20 percent of this same cohort thinks the Holocaust is a myth, and 30 percent are not sure.4
That’s right, most young people believe Israel is committing genocide, and half also agree or “neither agree nor disagree” that the event which inspired the creation of the term — and perhaps the most clear-cut example of genocide in all of human history — is a myth. The double standard imposed on Jews may never be more neatly expressed in numbers.
A 2020 survey of American adults under 40 found that 63 percent did not know that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and 11 percent believed that Jews had caused the Holocaust.5 And it is not just the U.S. Nearly a quarter of Dutch people born after 1980 said the Holocaust was either a myth or exaggerated in a 2023 poll.6 There is a point at which ignorance and moral certitude combine to become truly dangerous, and we have blown past that line leaving a sizzling vapor trail.
With that being said, the mounting death toll of the Israel-Hamas war is concerning. According to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, an unreliable source that has already been caught lying and propagandizing, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed.
The true number may be substantially lower, not only due to exaggeration, but because the Gaza Health Ministry, in the words of the Associated Press, “never distinguishes between civilians and combatants” when providing casualty counts.7
Given the overall scale of destruction evident in available photos and footage, however, it is obvious that civilian deaths have easily reached into four- and likely five-digit figures.
Tragic though this loss of life is, it is the inevitable outcome of fighting an enemy who uses human shields in one of the most densely populated places in the world. As the political scientist and national security strategist Barry Posen wrote:
“When war is fought among civilians, civilians are killed. […] Fighting among civilians, especially in urban areas, always means hell on earth for the civilians who may be trapped there.”8
To put things in context, in World War II, Allied Forces bombing in populated areas ahead of the Battle of Normandy killed about 20,000 French civilians. More recently, as Posen notes, the 2016-2017 U.S.-led campaigns to destroy the Islamic State in Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria — two cities that had a combined estimated population of 1.8 million — killed between 13,100 and 15,100 civilians. Gaza, by contrast, has an approximate population of 2.2 million.
Though the war has come at a heavy human cost, Israel seems to be winning it, much to the chagrin of their critics. According to official Israeli sources, 12,000 Hamas fighters have been killed (close to half of their total fighting force), 18 of the 24 Hamas battalions have been defeated, and Hamas’ vast underground tunnel complex is being systematically collapsed and destroyed.
Israel appears determined to see this war through, which is only rational. A majority of Israeli Jews in a recent survey believe that Israel will win the war, and a plurality of Israelis favor defeating Hamas over prioritizing the return of hostages.9
The belief — or hope — from many in the pro-Palestinian camp is that Israel, as an outside, occupying, settler-colonialist force, will tire of their campaign and lose the will to continue amid climbing death, international condemnation, and perhaps economic penalties.
But this analysis is based on a false premise. Israel is not King George in the American colonies. Israel is not Napoleon in Russia, or the Soviets in Afghanistan, or the U.S. in Vietnam. The Israelis are not invaders fighting a war on foreign soil; they are a people fighting a war in defense of their home. They have the far stronger military, and the kind of resolve no aggressor could ever muster.
They are not fighting to conquer new territory, much less exterminate a race of people; they are fighting to protect their families from a terrorist regime that has both told and shown the world what they would do to the Israeli people given the means.
Israel, like all nations, has the right to defend itself. Yet many wring their hands over the fact that the Israeli response has not been “proportionate.” It is true: Israel’s retaliation has not been proportionate — and a good thing, too.
A proportionate response would include intentionally targeting civilians instead of combatants, gang raping women and girls, brutalizing infants, burning families alive, tearing people limb from limb, and parading their mutilated corpses through the streets. That would be a “proportionate” response.
Thankfully, Israel lives by a 21st-century code of conduct, not a 7th-century one. Israel will continue to issue warnings online and over the airwaves. They will continue to drop leaflets. They will continue to time or delay attacks to give civilians additional hours or even days to flee. They will continue to prosecute their own soldiers who commit crimes, while Hamas pays stipends to the families of jihadists.
But the Israelis will not let the fathomless cynicism of Hamas, nor the overwhelming moral confusion of the global community dissuade them from destroying Hamas’ ability to slaughter and terrorize their people — international opinion be damned.
There is, at the end of the day, only one relationship that Israel cannot afford to lose: the United States. And they are in no danger of doing so. The U.S. is and will remain a staunch ally.
The career government officials who comprise the dreaded “establishment” will have Israel’s back, no matter how fervidly the isolationist Charles Lindbergh impersonators on the populist right and the Playskool revolutionaries on the “Bin Laden was right” decolonial left join hands to shriek in perfect horseshoe unison.
How much, realistically, could Israel care what college students and Muslim immigrants screech into megaphones while they “live action role-playing game” around the cordoned-off streets of Western cities? How likely is it that impassioned denunciations from Ireland’s UN representative has them second guessing themselves? Or imbecilic remarks from President Lula of Brazil, who doubled down on comparing Israel to Nazi Germany?
This entire farce of smearing Israel’s military actions as “genocide” is part of the broader strategy to delegitimize Israel on the world stage and advance the ongoing pro-Hamas public relations war against them — and that is a war Israel cannot and will not win. Many Western critics are simply misinformed, naively ignorant about the nature of war, and woefully bereft of anything resembling knowledge of history or geopolitics.
But there are many who know better, who willfully hold Israel to an impossible double standard, and who single them out as the only country not allowed to defend itself or win a war. Many Muslim partisans side unconditionally with their co-religionists.
And many in the Global South, under the influence of America’s most pernicious export — identitarian culture wars — are prone to see in Israel an echo of their own bitter memories of Western colonialism. But Israel is approaching a breaking point where the sentiments and demands of the international community can no longer be taken seriously.
If Israel listened to what their critics around the globe increasingly want — the cessation of self-defense and the abolition of their own nation “from the river to the sea” — they would be signing their own death warrant.
If Hamas surrendered, this conflict would be over. If Israel surrendered, however, the attacks would continue.
And if Israel were abolished, every last Jew in the Middle East would be killed or expelled. Israelis know this in their bones. No nation is just going to lie down and die to appease public opinion.
The Israelis will win this war.
They will not kill antisemitism or “anti-Zionism” or the resentment and fury caused by the many bystanders tragically caught in the crossfire. They cannot kill ideas. Nobody can.
But they will show the world that while you can hate the Jews, you cannot bully them. Not anymore.
“January 21 - 23, 2024 - 1664 U.S. Adult Citizens.” The Economist/YouGov Poll.
“Toplines.” University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“19. Genocide (18 U.S.C. 1091).” U.S. Department of Justice.
“December 2 - 5, 2023 - 1500 U.S. Adult Citizens.” The Economist/YouGov Poll.
“Nearly two-thirds of US young adults unaware 6m Jews killed in the Holocaust.” The Guardian.
“Almost a quarter of young Dutch deny Holocaust or think it's exaggerated-survey.” Reuters.
“What is Gaza’s Ministry of Health and how does it calculate the war’s death toll?” Associated Press.
“The Devastation of Gaza Was Inevitable.” Foreign Policy.
“Israeli Society Index- February 2024.” The Jewish People Policy Institute.
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This was a wonderful piece. Israel must keep going. The West has not been subjected to a real war since the last World War. Younger people have no understanding of what war really means. They put out these meaningless platitudes that have no reality with war. I recently saw a clip of a young, so called Palestinian woman at a debating event at a university. She predictably accused Israel of genocide because they were bombing and killing so many civilians. Her opponent asked her if the British were guilty of the same crime when they bombed and obliterated Dresden in the last war. She just kept repeating that they were not killing civilians. I have to ask what her opinion would have been on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. War is War! It is convenient for people to turn a blind eye.
The problem with Governments in Western countries is they are terrified of their violent and now large Muslim population. While only a small proportion of each community has engaged in protest there's wide support for their hatefilled views. On the streets of London last weekend a counter protester holding a "Hamas is a terrorist organisation" was violently tackled to the ground and arrested by the Met police for "inflaming public tensions" or in other words upsetting the hate mob. How long will it take for Western leaders to say enough is enough. No more anti Jewish hate mob protests? When Jews have been murdered on Western soil?