Jeffrey Herf at the Times of Israel:
The genocide accusation should be understood as a central component of Hamas’ political warfare to win this war. It may be the first organization in human history which intentionally waged war in such a manner to multiply deaths of the people it is claiming to defend, in hopes that publicity of the resulting disaster will generate sympathy for its aims and opprobrium on Israel. In this effort, though it has failed abysmally as a ministate to provide a decent life for Gazans, it has proved successful in placing the blame on Israel.
The facts matter. The world press has been willing to accept the factual assertions of the Hamas Health Ministry, an organ of the terrorist organization. Such figures do not include the percentages of Hamas soldier’s vs civilians. Hamas’ control over the press allows it to send photos around the world that suggest that Israel is intentionally aiming at civilians.
If Israel was intent on a genocide in Gaza it would not have sent warnings to people to move away from areas of combat or places it was intending to attack. It would not be urging civilians to move to “humanitarian zones.” If Israel was committing genocide the number of people killed in Gaza would be far higher than the 60,000 or so listed by Hamas. 800,000 Tutsis were murdered within months. Various Nazi death camps murdered hundreds of thousands in less than year. The mobile killing squads of the Nazi regime, the Einsatzgruppen, murdered about a million Jews with bullets from spring 1941 to spring 1942. Similar speech and huge numbers took place in the Cambodian genocide. Even the 60,000-figure offered by Hamas—and we do not know if it is accurate—indicates that Israel’s efforts to reduce civilian casualties as much as possible while also waging war against Hamas has been very impressive, as tragic, and awful as the toll has been. But then it is far too often left unsaid that none of the people in Gaza would have died, been wounded or traumatized in Gaza if Hamas had not begun this war with acts of genocidal aggression.
Why the parallel between accusations of genocide and antisemitism?
Because they make an absurd accusation which is easily refuted by the facts, but which stirs the deepest conscious and unconscious hatreds about Judaism, the Jews, and Israel in Western culture. These hatreds are there in the old Christian lies about deicide, that the Jews murdered Jesus, and they are there in the conspiracy theories of Nazism and the far right, as well as of the far left. Such theories describe the Jews as enormously powerful, and wholly evil. The accusation that Israel commits genocide reawakens these ancient hatreds of Christianity, Communism, and Nazism, and draw as well on the Islamist extremist interpretation of Islam. The accusations of deicide, child murder, conspiracy to cause wars, and other libels have always been the precursor to attacks on the Jews. Antisemitism has at its core been a conspiracy theory that imputes power and evil to the Jews. The genocide accusation, brought into world—not just regional—politics by the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc in the 1960s and 1970s is the most important form of this much old antisemitic libel. The state of Israel, in defending its right to exist is a nightmare for antisemites. They believe that their lies about the Jews have become reality in the form of the state of Israel. The libel amounts to saying the Israel has no right to defend itself because it should not exist.
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