The Genocide Convention defines genocide as "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."
"Intent" is a high bar. No one can read minds; unless the accused party specifically says that they intend to wipe out another people, all we have are actions that must be interpreted.
The only way for anyone to determine that Israel's intent in the current war is genocidal is if they already hate Jews.
By definition, if there are a preponderance of actions and statements that contradict the thesis that Israel intends to destroy all Palestinians or all Gazans, then the charge of genocide is false.
I will not get into all the counter-evidence - anyone can research that Israeli leaders have consistently said that their targets are Hamas and not Gaza civilians, that Israel has facilitated tens of thousands of truckloads of aid, that Israel has been careful to avoid civilian casualties, that Hamas deliberately places its military targets within and underneath apartments, schools, mosques and hospitals making avoiding all civilian casualties literally impossible and that many military experts have praised Israel for its efforts to avoid civilian casualties despite the unique challenges of fighting an enemy that depends on civilians to limit attacks.
However, the people tossing the word "genocide" around discount and ignore all the counterevidence that refutes the charge. They grab onto isolated, out of context statements and incidents and try to build them into an edifice of proof.
I'll give just one example.
A recently released UN report accuses Israel of using methods "consistent with genocide." The very first quote they use from an Israeli official as evidence is:
On 9 October, the Minister of Defence of Israel announced a “complete siege” of the Strip with no electricity, no food, no fuel and removed every restriction on Israeli forces so they could “eliminate everything.”
The implication is that Gallant ordered troops to eliminate everything in Gaza and starvation was one of the methods.
These were two different statements.
Israel has been facilitating aid into Gaza since October 21, 2023 - the entire war except for two weeks. Statements made within hours or days after the horrific attacks on October 7 demanding a siege were never meant to be long term policy, and those who pretend that they are are knowingly lying.
The second statement to "eliminate everything" refers only to Hamas and other terrorists. It comes from a YouTube video of Yoav Gallant speaking to troops on October 9. His full statement is,
Take off the gloves kill everyone who fights us, even if it is one terrorist. From the air from the land, with tanks and bulldozers all means. There are no compromises. It won't be the same again. And Hamas will not be. Eliminate everything, it will take time, it won't take a day, it won't take a week, it will take weeks and maybe months.
Gallant is specifically talking about terrorists, not Gaza.
And this is the very first example given by the UN as proof. It is clear that the UN is consciously twisting the truth to reach its predetermined "genocide" conclusion, and it is trying to obfuscate its sources by referring not to the original statement but laundering it through other documents - in this case, the ICJ accusations by South Africa - that twisted the original statement.
The only reason for people like the authors of this UN report to ignore the massive amounts of counterevidence is if they start off their thinking with the assumption that Jews are liars. To them, every piece of counterevidence is either a lie or a coverup by Israeli Jews. They do not spend nearly as much time soberly looking at all the facts as they do at attempting to rebut the facts that disagree with their antisemitic assumptions. Their inherent, preconceived bias does not admit anything but the conclusion that Israeli Jews are evil, corrupt, lying murderers.
Indeed, is not a conclusion - it is the basis for choosing what "evidence" they will highlight and which they will ignore or judge to be lies.
Only people who already believe Jews are inherently bad people - people who are antisemites - believe the genocide slander while discounting or even belittling all the evidence against it.
Which brings up the other part of the slander that proves its purveyors are antisemitic.
The word "genocide" has been only rarely applied since World War II, for good reason: because the bar for proof is so high.
The prototypical case that all agree on is the Holocaust, since it is undeniable. Gas chambers and crematoria and mountains of shoes and hair are hard to argue with.
No one used the term for the Syrian civil war that included chemical weapons attacks on civilians - up to half a million civilians killed. It wasn't used against Russia for killing over a million civilians in Afghanistan in the 1980s. It was not used for the estimated million civilians killed in the Iran-Iraq war which included targeting cities and also use of chemical weapons.
Those who accuse Israel of genocide, while never using the term for virtually any other war, revel in the deliciousness of accusing Jews of being on the same moral level as the Nazis. To them, victimhood is righteousness, and taking away the idea that Jews can be victims is a huge part of the slander.
It is not new - Israel has been accused of being like Nazi Germany since its rebirth. In 1949, the Saudi representative to the UN argued that Israel should not be admitted as a member state by saying the Zionists " committed atrocities not unlike those perpetrated by the Nazis."
Now, the word "genocide "is being repeated in a Nazi-like "big lie" fashion to turn the falsehood into a reality. Applying the word "genocide" to Israeli military actions when the term was never used for nearly all of the many other wars with many more civilian casualties since 1945 is pure antisemitism.
The "genocide" terms is being used deliberately to equate Jews with Nazis. There is no other reason. it is a form not only of Holocaust inversion but also Holocaust minimization.
It is pure Jew-hatred.
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