Since Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, the Jewish State’s most vociferous critics have been busy. Their most egregious claim is that Israel is committing a genocide. As is so often the case with Israel, the crimes it is accused of are rooted in an inversion of the truth.
Israel’s critics must stop politicising and weaponising international law to spread blood libels
Genocide has been committed during this conflict: by Hamas terrorists who rampaged through southern Israel and massacred over 1,000 innocents, targeting Jews. They executed their barbaric atrocities in the hope this would inspire simultaneous attacks on Israel’s other borders. On that day, Yahya Sinwar’s terror army invaded Israel with a mission to kill as many Israelis as possible; their dream was that the “al-Aqsa Flood” would inspire other groups to join in and together bring about the final destruction of the Jewish state.
While these Palestinian terrorists failed and were not joined by other Iranian terror proxies on the 7 October invasion, they were able to count on support from Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the Islamic Republic of Iran in the subsequent months. They have also been supported by throngs of extremists in the West who took to the streets and university campuses to celebrate and encourage “the resistance”; support for the murder, rape, torture and kidnap in the civilian communities in the South of Israel. Despite repeated lip service about “Never Again”, genocidal acts against the Jews have unfolded to the tune of thunderous applause.
The 1951 Genocide Convention compels its signatories to prevent and punish genocide. There are surely few more compelling cases in that mission than Israel’s fight to punish and prevent the genocide of Jews that occurred on 7 October and which Hamas has threatened to repeat over and over again. The war against Hamas, in order to remove it from power in Gaza and prevent it from making good on these threats, demands the support of every signatory of that treaty.
Yet regrettably much of the world has chosen instead to ignore Hamas’s crimes while charging Israel with genocide. South Africa and Ireland (two of the countries most determined to see Israel as “born with original sin”) have obsessively pursued Israel through the International Court of Justice. Neither country seems quite so animated by any of the other major conflicts raging around the world. The reason why is simple: their stance arises from an obsessional focus on Israel and a pathological need to promote falsehoods about the Jewish state.
The genocide libel against Israel rests on a concerted mass-disinformation campaign that began shortly after October 7.
Israel has most recently been accused of attempting to starve Gaza into submission. The falseness of this allegation is laid bare by the 1,790,878 tonnes of aid facilitated into Gaza by Israel over the war. These supplies are sufficient to meet the needs of the civilian population of Gaza. The new initiative of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), backed by Israel and the United States, seeks to deliver aid without diversion by Hamas, because stolen aid funds its terror army. It is therefore unsurprising that Hamas has threatened its own people if they collect aid from the GHF. That many NGOs have also discouraged civilians from accessing this aid tells us much about their true agenda.
There is no doubt that Gaza is a miserable place to live today and that civilians have been killed in this conflict This is the reality of war; a war started by Hamas. Yet Israel’s relentless efforts to prevent civilian casualties have given rise to an unprecedentedly low civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio for urban armed conflict.
There is simply no basis to claim that Israel’s aim in this war is to wipe out the Palestinian population of Gaza. As one of the most powerful militaries in the world, it would have done so long ago if it so wished. All the evidence, including in relation to the provision of aid and the targeting of strikes, points in entirely the opposite direction.
Those who accuse Israel of genocide also conveniently ignore the definition of genocide, as recognised in international law. This requires the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such. Attributing such intent to Israel, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is the modern version of the ancient blood libel that Jews gleefully kill Christian children for their blood.
Whatever one may think of Israel’s prosecution of the war, the term genocide is a legal term, not a political one. Israel is not conducting a genocide in Gaza. Those who claim otherwise must stop politicising and weaponising international law to spread blood libels about the Jewish State.
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