Thursday, October 01, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
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TIL That Taking Unprecedented Measures To Protect Noncombatants Is The Same As Genocide
Well, you live and learn, I guess.
Okay, it is not quite that simple: for most militaries, in most armed conflict situations, my original understanding holds. Where it differs: when Israel is involved. Then, according to experts in International Law, we must invoke whatever principle makes Israel look the worst.
Thus, in the example we mentioned at the outset, whereas evacuation of noncombatants from a combat zone forms an unremarkable step we expect any military to take before initiating hostilities in that area, once we discover that the party conducting or encouraging those evacuations is the IDF, that evacuation, even its merest attempt, constitutes genocidal ethnic cleansing.
I have been taking notes. The notes are embarrassing, because they look like the syllabus.
Warning before an attack: normally a precaution. Article 57. Feasible advance warning. I highlighted it in green. Green meant “this is how you stay inside the law.” When the warning is an Israeli phone call, a leaflet, a roof-knock, the highlight changes color. The warning becomes proof that the civilian population was identified as a population and then operated upon. Identification, which I had understood as the beginning of distinction, is refiled as the beginning of intent, a key element of determining that genocide has occurred.
"Distinction" itself changes. Elsewhere, a combatant embedded in a school is a problem the defender created and the attacker must still try to solve. The involvement if Jews somehow converts every nearby civilian into evidence against the attacker. The attacker’s effort to separate them is not credited as separation. It is credited as "sorting."
But again, only if we're talking about Israel.
Proportionality works the same way. I was taught to weigh concrete and direct military advantage against expected incidental harm. Tedious work. Lawyers pretend it is math so they can sleep. When the actor is not Israel, a bad ratio is a tragedy, a scandal, maybe, in rare cases, a war crime. When the actor is Israel, the ratio is not weighed. The existence of the civilian is the whole case. The military object is treated as a story the perpetrator tells in order to stand near the civilian.
I used to think “as such” in the Genocide Convention did some work. National, ethnical, racial or religious group as such. The phrase was there to stop people from renaming every ugly war. I wrote a whole outline on specific intent. I can still recite it. Recitation is now a form of denial. Intent, in the special file, is inferred from the fact that Israel knew there were Palestinians in Gaza and fought a war there anyway. Knowledge of geography becomes mens rea. And Israel has maps! Maps are inculpatory.
Aid is also reversible. A state that facilitates food, medicine, vaccination, and fuel is, in ordinary doctrine, not inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction. When it comes to Israel, facilitation is calibration: you keep enough people alive to prove you had them in your power. Restriction is the same crime at a different setting. There is no compliant setting.
I asked a professor whether the rule was simply lex specialis Israel. She said of course not, and then walked me through a chain of inferences that only fires when the defendant is the Jewish state. Siege law for everyone else. Collective punishment if the name on the brief is Israel. Human shields as a legal problem if the defender is a state we recognize as a state; human shields as a moral reproach to the attacker if the defender is Hamas.
I wrote “see also: whatever principle” in the margin. It is not a term of art yet. It will be.
