(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)
In the court of trendy international opinion, a court consisting of Israel bashers and Jew haters of all stripes (including some Jews), Israel stands convicted of perpetrating a genocide against the people of Gaza.
Here’s how not to defend ourselves against such a libel, which not coincidentally is the approach that we have largely taken: it is to argue the facts and the evidence.
Facts and evidence are irrelevant when the charge itself is rooted in rancid bias, blatant Jew hatred, calculated and intentional lies, trendy witlessness, and mob pandering. The charge itself is meant to weaken our resolve and doubt the justice of our struggle for survival and is one of the primary tools in the arsenal of our enemies (hence, the genocide accusation first arose on October 8, weeks before Israel invaded Gaza in order to destroy Hamas, the ruling entity in Gaza, which had launched its massacre of Israel civilians on October 7).
Facts and evidence do not matter when the libel itself is meant to appeal to emotions, not logic or reason. Trying to counter an emotional argument with logic is doomed to fail, and each time we do so, we wonder anew why our counterclaims are not resonating.
We have responded, cogently but ineffectively, with facts. Our soldiers have routinely endangered their own lives – some have been killed and wounded – in order to avoid inflicting harm on Gazan civilians. Hamas as a regular tactic hides its weapons among civilians, hospitals, schools, and mosques and other locations generally held to be sacrosanct in any conflict. Hamas uses civilians as human shields and has deliberately killed their own civilians and counted them among the victims of Israeli attacks. Hamas has starved its own people, depriving them of aid (foolishly) provided by Israel during the war, and blaming Israel for the consequences. Hamas has staged obviously false scenarios of killed and wounded civilians (remember the NY Times’ cover picture of a “starving child,” whose bony frame was, in fact, entirely attributable to his cerebral palsy, which, surprise, was not caused by Israel,).
All true, but not really relevant to the information war, as is our emphasis on questioning whether “Gazan civilians” are really innocent. Suffice it to say that “civilians” who held our hostages in their apartments and starved them are not “innocent,” nor are children who were used by Hamas fighters to run weapons, food, and supplies between depots and hideouts. Children, yes; innocent, hardly. This too is immaterial to countering the rabidly vicious charge of genocide.
The most egregious example of a truth that misses the mark in this battle is constant reference to the “civilian-to-combatant ratio of casualties,” in which our conduct of this war grades out as the best in the history of urban conflict. G-d bless John Spencer and his erudition and articulation of this data, which serves the constructive purpose of reassuring ourselves of our morality but does not convince our detractors in the slightest. Indeed, when we trot out the “civilian-to-combatant ratio of casualties” in order to confute the claims of our slanderers, we have already lost the information battle because we are fighting on their battlefield. Does anyone know or care about the “civilian-to-combatant ratio of casualties” in Russia’s war against Ukraine? Turkey’s war against the Kurds?
In the battlefield of lies, truth is always at a disadvantage, and it could well be that truth is always at a disadvantage. As Mark Twain attested, “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” And perhaps the greatest of all the lies in this context is the purposeful distortion of the term “genocide,” coined in 1943 by the renowned Jewish international lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, to describe what the Nazis attempted to do to the Jewish people: “the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group.”
That is what the Holocaust was, and one reason the tendentious and malicious international community delights in indicting Israel is to minimize the Holocaust as a prelude to denying that it occurred or that it was unique. It is not by any definition what happened in Gaza or is happening in Gaza, but we also convince no one when we refer to the relatively low level of deaths in Gaza compared to real genocides that have occurred across the world – the Holocaust, the Holodomor, Cambodia, Rhwanda, and others.
So how then can we refute this blood libel rooted in emotion – the emotion of Jew hatred? By defusing their emotional argument. Israelis, Jews, Israeli diplomats and media types should respond to the genocide libel quite simply. Here is a sample response to the shrill sloganeer or perverted politician who utters this accusation:
“By your definition of genocide – the death of any civilians in war – every war is a genocide. In every war, civilians are killed, usually unintentionally, but dead, nonetheless. If so, then every country is guilty of genocide. The United States perpetrated genocides – by your definition – against American Indians, and against Germans and Japanese in World War II, as did Britain and all the Allied countries in the latter conflict as well. China, Japan, Russia (Russia is still at it in Ukraine), Germany, France, Spain, the Arab countries, and most African countries are all perpetrators of genocide. Turkey accuses us of genocide, having committed a real genocide against Armenians over a century ago. One would think they would know what a genocide is.”
“If every war is a genocide, then it behooves aggressors – like Hamas – to not start wars of aggression. But if they do start wars, they should not then cry “genocide,” or have their useful idiots in the West cry it, in order to avoid the condign consequences of their aggression and evil.”
“And if every war, by your definition, is a genocide, why do you obsess on Israel and its justified war of self-defense? Why not campaign against Russia, the United States, China, Turkey, and other perpetrators? Could you be motivated by, hmmm… Jew hatred? Is Israel, according to you, the only nation on earth that does not have the right to defend itself? Is Israel, according to you, the only nation on earth that has to justify its right to exist? Are Jews, according to you, inherently evil and so the more you defame, oppress, repress, torture, injure, and kill them, the better?”
“You know who thought that? The Nazis, who committed a real genocide. So put the placard down and take a good look in the mirror.”
And there the discussion with the spiteful scoundrel ends.
As for us, it is good to remind ourselves that none of this is new. As King David warned us, our history is replete with recurrent examples of enemies who wish to destroy us, with weapons and words: “For, lo, Your enemies are in an uproar; and those that hate You have lifted up their head. They conspire with cunning against Your people and take counsel against Your treasured ones. They have said, ‘Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation, that the name of Israel may no longer be remembered’” (Tehillim 83:3-5).
And their ancient and modern technique inspired this prayer: “G-d, deliver my soul from lying lips, from a deceitful tongue” (Tehillim 120:2).
Amen.
