Note: This is significantly more rushed and less polished than my usual fare as I still remain debilitated by fertility. Criticism remains welcome, just be at least 7% nicer!
Besides baseline lack of time, one reason I never wrote about the genocide accusations against Israel is largely because I’ve always just assumed it was a performative shock slogan meant to galvanize activism. It happened before just a few years ago with a “trans genocide” being declared after something like 31 homicides within a year. I’m going to write very briefly (heh -Ed) on this subject, so apologies for any roughness or pancaked nuance.
1. Definitions Matter
One especially frustrating roadblock to analysing this claim is the startling lack of consensus about what the word actually means to everyone using it. It’s normally reasonable to assume we’re all using the same definition but the problem with heavily salient terminology (e.g. racism) is that many glom onto it for its impact rather than for its precision. “Genocide” becomes a proxy for “very very bad thing”. I mentioned before how someone once told me “genocides are anytime there is more civilians killed than combatants” which was such a bewildering and unique answer! For the remainder of this, I’m going to assume the legal understanding under IHL/ICJ, but it’s really important to insist on definitions at the very beginning because that’s the source of a lot of crosstalk on this issue.
2. Incoherent Theory
The first substantive issue you run into is the lack of a coherent theory about Israel’s motivations and objectives, especially within the context of October 7th. Hamas managed to indiscriminately massacre 1200 people within the span of less than 6 hours and it kidnapped 251 hostages. It has been extremely frustrating to extract a specific theory of mind for Israel because it requires so much triage. Some people have told me that Oct7 was a complete false flag attack (one guy here even posted screenshots from kibbutz footage as “proof” it was AI-generated), others believe that Israel knew about Oct7 but intentionally let it happen in order to take genocidal advantage of the casus belli, others believe that Israel was surprised but found Oct7 to be a convenient excuse to satisfy a pre-existing genocidal appetite, etc etc. This thinking keeps going down unfalsifiable territory because dead Palestinians are proof of genocidal intent, but lack of dead Palestinians can also be proof of genocidal intent because it just means Israel is either biding its time or intentionally slowing its extermination so that not too many people notice. Heads, genocide; tails, genocide.
There’s no denying that Israel had a legitimate military objective of retrieving the hostages and neutering Hamas’s military capabilities. However, lawful armed conflict will often look near identical to purposeful extermination campaigns, because both involve tremendous death and destruction. ICJ has dealt with this exact issue multiple times, and the standard it outlines is that genocidal intent must be the “only inference that could reasonably be drawn from the acts in question.”1
In other words, if there is a valid military objective being pursued and the acts in question are consistent with such objective, then it cannot be deemed genocide. This does not mean that genocides and wars are also mutually exclusive! Both can be happening and have happened at the same time, and the easiest cases to conclude genocide is when no live military objective exists, or when the claimed objective does not fit the conduct. But in the Gaza war, Hamas was actively fighting the IDF and actively holding on to its hostages. Concluding genocide is still possible, but it requires carefully scrutinizing the purported military objectives.
3. Hamas’ Martyrcide of Gaza
I stole this term from the The Golden Pill but more needs to be said about Hamas’s unusually sado-masochistic tactics.2 The general standard for assessing whether civilian casualties amount to a war crime (minor point but genocide is separate and distinct from violations of the laws on armed conflict) is the attacker took all feasible precautions to verify targets are not civilians, and to spare civilians as much as possible.3
First of all, absolutely nothing Hamas does can ever excuse or void Israel’s obligations regarding the laws of armed conflict. I have to emphasize this because some people like to pretend I argue the opposite. Instead, what Hamas’s action do affect however is how much they drastically narrow the field of what precautions are either feasible or even possible.
Human shields have almost always been used throughout history, but they were almost always captured enemy civilians or prisoners, which forces the other side to kill its own people to reach the target. There is absolutely no precedent in history for the scale at which Hamas has embraced this masochistic tactic. All of Hamas’s military infrastructure is either buried underground or embedded within civilian infrastructure, the largest tunnel network ever built by mankind is completely forbidden to civilians and exclusively reserved for military activities, Hamas has shiny military uniforms they only take out for parades but never ever for actual combat, Hamas actively threatens civilians to remain in place in the face of impending air strikes, and on and on and on.
I think one reason this gets glossed over or dismissed so much by Westerners is a complete disbelief that jihadis could ever possibly hold a different system of values than theirs. This warrants a much longer essay but I’ll just say that when I was Muslim, I actually literally 100% believed every aspect of my religion. I literally believed that djinns (invisible sentient species with free-will, created by Allah from fire) walked the earth, I literally believed that Muhammad flew to Jerusalem on a winged horse, and I literally believed in heaven and hell.
The logical conclusion of this belief system is that I actively hated living. If eternal bliss was potentially awaiting me after death, and if some pathways (such as martyrdom, or dying before puberty) provided a guaranteed shortcut, I couldn’t understand what was worth living for. I just thought “can we hurry up and get this over with?” This is a crucial disconnect that cannot be comprehended by Westerners, who want to assume that everyone on earth just wants democracy and gay prides and bacon. I’m here saying that the ecstacy you see displayed by mothers of martyrs is absolutely genuine, because they literally believe eternal bliss follows earthly martyrdom.
There’s no other military in history that has ever had to deal with such sadistic tactics at this scale, and this factor cannot be ignored when assessing what exactly is either “feasible” or “possible” within the context of urban modern warfare.
4. Combatant Ratio:
Believe it or not, Israel and Hamas used to regularly corroborate each other’s casualty figures. For example in the 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead, the IDF initially claimed 709 of the 1166 total casualties were combatants, a figure that was hotly disputed by other researchers and Hamas, who initially claimed having lost only 50 fighters. But then, in 2010, Hamas admitted that it lost more than 600 fighters.4
Hamas has gotten much more circumspect about revealing too much about its military capacity because they understand their most valuable strategic asset has always been the amount of civilian casualties it can advertise to the world. The directive issued since 2014 by Hamas has been to label anyone killed as an ‘innocent civilian’.5
Both Hamas and the IDF largely agree that around 71,000 have been killed in Gaza, of which 20,000 are claimed to be combatants by the IDF. To make my point here, I’m actually going to use worst casualty figures cited against Israel from the Gaza war, which is the claim that only 17% of the 70k dead were militants. This assertion is based on a fallacious analysis by +972 magazine that assumes that anyone not named as a militant within a classified IDF database must actually be a civilian...which is not how logic works.6 But whatever, there’s no time for a detailed analysis so let’s just assume the numbers are correct for now.
If IDF offensives were truly indiscriminate, combatants would make up the same share of the dead as they do of the population. For that share to be 17%, Gaza would need about 357,000 fighters (17% of 2.1 million). Every serious estimate of Hamas’s strength is 20k-30k or about 1 to 1.4% of the population. So combatants died at roughly 12 to 18 times the rate you’d expect if the killing were instead random. Put another way, a fighter had about a 1/3 chance of dying and everyone else about 1/50. And these are based on the worst cited figures!
5. Carpet of Bombing
Hamas has claimed the IDF has dropped around 100k tons of explosives (so let’s say they dropped anywhere from 200k to 400k individual bombs) and we know anywhere from 50% to 80% of all buildings in Gaza have been either damaged or completely destroyed. Yet despite all this, only 3.4% of the population has been killed?
We know that Hamas does not allow civilian use of its tunnels for safety, and we know they routinely force civilians to stay put in harm’s way, and we know countries treat Palestinians refugees uniquely from any other wartime refugee.7 Literally the only explanation for such a disparity is to credit the IDF’s warning efforts, such as texting residents, dropping pamphlets, and roof knocking bombs that detonate above a building.
Looping back in to what ICJ has to say about this, the opportunity presented to the perpetrator for committing genocide is a factor that must be considered. 8 More specifically, the number of victims in comparison to the opportunities available to the perpetrator to commit genocide is the factor that must be considered.9
There’s people that will pretend this means that only fully committed extermination efforts can count as genocide, but this is completely false and not a claim I would ever make.
It must be emphasized how much of a gargantuan strategic disadvantage this warning practice is for Israel. There’s no other military on earth that regularly warns its foes of impending strikes to this degree. Warnings obviously give Hamas militants time to flee, time to move their equipment, and insights into Israeli intelligence. And yet Israel continues doing this despite its huge downside, and it’s a practice that is completely inconsistent with genocidal intent.
There so much more wrong with the claim that Israel committed genocide. But the above should be more than enough to bury this theory in the garbage.
Another point worth expounding more at length later, but when there was a horrific war in Syria, nobody thought it was weird for millions of Syrian civilians to flee a warzone. When Russia invaded Ukraine, nobody thought it was unusual for millions of Ukrainian civilians to flee a warzone. But Palestinian refugees are literally the only demographic in the world that is expected to remain within an active war zone. Neighboring Arab countries refuse to offer them any sanctuary because Palestinian lives are considered subservient to the Palestinian cause.
If only we could get people to care about the facts. Seems...difficult.
Yasher koach, seriously.