Days after Amnesty International issued its absurd report accusing Israel of "apartheid," I wrote that the exact same playbook could be used to falsely accuse Israel of genocide as well.
The "apartheid" slander really started to gain steam at the infamously antisemitic 2001 UN-sponsored World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance NGO Forum, which launched an NGO strategy of isolating Israel through boycotts, legal attacks and accusations of apartheid. First there were annual "apartheid week" events on colleges, where modern antisemites linked the words "Israel" and "apartheid" in the minds of a generation of college students. Once that took hold, first fringe and the mainstream NGOs like HRW and Amnesty pretended that where there's smoke, there must be fire, so they twisted the definition of "apartheid" just to fit Israel and issued large reports filled with false examples and lies to "prove" their pre-determined conclusion.
Even the most articulate Israel-haters cannot defend the definition when challenged by someone outside their bubble of hate. Their strategy is to repeat the lie often enough that everyone assumes it must be true, because the average person doesn't want to believe that prestigious human rights defenders are obsessed antisemitic liars.
My prediction that the same thing would happen with "genocide" is coming true. But this time, it has accelerated from 20 years to two months.
"Genocide" has been the theme of countless anti-Israel demonstrations so far, and now Ishaan Tharoor is doing his job by making the antisemitic slander part of everyday conversation, using classic propaganda methods, in his "Today's worldview" column in the Washington Post.
Let's take this apart:
In protests around the world, in the corridors of the United Nations and in the angry chambers of social media, one word is getting louder and louder: genocide. That’s what critics of Israel’s offensive against the Islamist group Hamas say the Jewish state is doing in its ravaging of the Gaza Strip, which is home to some 2.3 million Palestinians. Over the weekend, demonstrators slathered a White House gate in red paint, in a message to the Biden administration about the perceived blood on its hands for its staunch support for Israel. In condemning Israel’s actions, governments in Brazil, South Africa and Colombia, among others, have all explicitly invoked “genocide” to explain their outrage.
Just because professional Israel haters use the word does not give it validity. But Tharoor wants to, by suggesting that "genocide" is Israeli policy by quoting angry (and sometimes profoundly stupid) Israeli officials livid about the October 7 massacre - and purposefully lying about President Herzog's statement: "The Israeli president suggested that civilians in the Hamas-controlled territory are not 'innocent'," Tharoor says, yet in the very event where Herzog said that Gazans were partially responsible for Hamas being in power - an undoubtedly true statement - he explicitly said “Of course there are many, many innocent Palestinians."
However, the ill-considered statements of some Israeli officials are not government policy, and they are not IDF policy. Pretending that the idiotic Amichai Eliyahu statement that Israel could drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza has any relationship with Israeli policy is rhetoric but has no basis in reality - yet that is Tharoor's main argument.
Because he never defines "genocide" he never gives the reader the opportunity to judge whether the definition fits. As with apartheid, genocide has a legal definition: specific "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."
There is no Israeli intent, and no evidence of any such intent, to destroy Palestinians as a people. And Tharoor knows this.
So he plays loose and fast by hinting that Israel's seeming loosening of its rules of engagement compared to previous Gaza wars indicates intent:
Israel contends that it takes steps to limit civilian casualties and targets only militant positions, though that claim is difficult to square against a catalogue of Israeli strikes on crowded civilian neighborhoods, hospitals and U.N. facilities. “Although Israeli officials insist that each strike is subject to legal approval, experts say the rules of engagement, which are classified, appear to include a higher threshold for civilian casualties than in previous rounds of fighting,” my colleagues reported.
Indeed, there is a difference between this war and previous wars. Previously, the goal was to deter Hamas. Now, the goal is to destroy Hamas. That is a valid and legal military goal.
Hamas is hiding its entire organization - weapons, command and control, communications, leadership - in hundreds of miles of tunnels underneath Gaza apartments, schools and hospitals. To achieve the legal military objective of destroying Hamas involves attacking those tunnels. No army is legally obligated to engage in hand to hand fighting on the enemy's turf, risking thousands of its own soldiers, in order to avoid civilian casualties. The only thing Israel can do is warn residents to get out of the way so it could attack Hamas' infrastructure.
If you recall, Israel did exactly that. For three weeks. Even though there are Hamas strongholds in the south of Gaza, Israel has largely avoided attacking there so Gaza civilians can be saved.
Once all the residents are warned, and given enough time to evacuate, the proportionality calculation changes. This is also international law. Otherwise, civilian human shields become a valid defense, which is nonsensical.
Israel is adhering to every aspect of international law to minimize civilian casualties while pursuing its primary military objective. No one has suggested a better way to destroy Hamas. Every civilian casualty from is Hamas' responsibility under international law.
The charge of genocide against Israel is doubly grotesque.
The subtext of Israel's critics is that Israel should not really destroy Hamas - even though Hamas' own goals are explicitly genocidal in its intent. Their slanders of "genocide" are meant to allow a truly genocidal group to keep trying forever.
And, of course, using the term "genocide" against Jews who were the victims of the Holocaust that spawned that term is pure antisemitism. Comparing the deaths in Gaza during a just and legal war with the purposeful destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis cannot be regarded as anything but Jew-hatred.
Ishaan Tharoor is knowingly playing his part - acting as a bridge between the fanatic anti-Israel protesters and the eventual 200 page reports by Amnesty and HRW that will declare Israel to be "genocidal." He is laying the groundwork so that people will associate Israel with genocide the way the antisemites of a decade ago did the same with "apartheid."
Both of those programs are aimed only at the Jewish state. And we all know why.
