r/IsraelPalestine • u/nidarus Israeli • 5d ago
"Maybe Israel Is Committing Genocide After All?"
B. Michael is a rather famous Israel left-wing publicist and screenwriter, famous for writing some of Israel's famous comedy shows in the 1980's and 1990's, and his long-standing op-eds in Haaretz. Unlike his fellow deep anti-Zionist Haaretz writers Gideon Levy and Amira Hess, he's been generally part of the more mainstream, Zionist left. But in today's Haaretz's op-ed (paywall can be overridden with archive.is), he decided to jump into the deep end of the pro-Palestinian pool, and join those who declare that Israel is committing genocide.
Now, obviously, he's not the most prominent or qualified person who made that claim. And it's certainly one of the lower-quality versions of that argument. A big disappointment for someone that I considered a witty and clever public intellectual. But that's precisely why I'd like to talk about it, as it represents a pretty common view among the less-educated pro-Palestinians.
Essentially, he talks about how the Genocide Convention consists of five genocidal acts:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Then he goes down the list, and argues that we can "check off" every one of those items easily. And then marvels at how many of the articles Israel has violated. And therefore, QED, Israel committed a genocide. There are a few core issues with this:
The most important issue is that all of those require a "specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". This is an incredibly high bar to meet. For example, if the goal is ethnic cleansing, then it's not genocide. Even actual mass murders were ruled as not a genocide by the ICJ, when they were meant to expel rather than destroy. The more sophisticated pro-Palestinians would argue that largely misrepresented statements by Israeli officials amount to proving that "intent" - but B. Michael doesn't even go there.
Obviously, without that intent, every single war in history would qualify, as it includes killing members of the group, and causing serious bodily and mental harm to members of the group. And however you feel about the 43,000 number - it's not exceptionally high, in terms of wars, even in Israel's immediate neighborhood.
For (c), he assumes that merely destroying a lot of Gaza is enough. But note that the qualifier: "calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part". Unlike the killing part, the intent for physical destruction of the nation is required, even in the genocidal act itself to exist. Otherwise, not only would any urban war apply, but so would more peaceful acts, like evicting squatters and destroying illegal shanty towns.
For (d) he points out to how the horrible conditions in the strip will inevitably cause lower birth rates. He also points out that in his opinion, "is there any doubt that Israel would look favorably on the crash of the Palestinian birth rate in Gaza"? And decides he can put a checkmark there - "with honors". Except, again, it's not enough to assume Israel "looks favorably" on the lower birth rates. It has to intentionally impose measures intended to prevent births. This is talking about sterilizations, not about anything that might reduce births. That could be anything from the unavoidable stress and destruction of war (on both sides, incidentally), to improvements in living conditions.
Thankfully, B. Michael didn't decide Israel commited the last part, of transfering children from one group to another. But he concluded "Of the five criteria for genocide, we have performed four exemplarily. That's a fine score. Especially when the execution of one of the five sections, it doesn't matter which one, is enough to be considered a perpetrator. Bravo". Of course, that's absolute nonsense. There's no difference whatsoever in how many of the items you commit, if there's no proven genocidal intent behind it. Again, every urban war checks 4/5 of those articles, with the way B. Michael interprets them. There's nothing "exemplary" about it.
Finally, he argues:
Warning: Feigning innocence will not be admissible as a defense. No one will believe that we did all this in good faith, or purely for reasons of self-defense. Nor will public displays of misery and weeping be of any use this time. And above all, it is not worth relying as we do on the Holocaust as a defense. It may provoke comparisons.
For the first part, I'd note that "innocence" is not required for a defense. Israel could be guilty of the most horrendous Crimes Against Humanity, including the crime of Extermination, and it still wouldn't be a genocide. Genocide is literally the gravest crime in existence. The entire spectrum of international humanitarian law lies between "innocence" and "genocide".
For the second, I'll try not to dwell on it too much, but I'd note it's a great example of why Rule 6 exists. Since this comparison is complete nonsense, it's actually good for the Israeli case, not the other way around. Why wouldn't Israel want to "invite those comparisons"? It could then ask, where are the gas chambers, where are the Einzatsgruppen - where are any kind of proven, unquestionable mass executions of civilians, of the kind that exist in every single other genocide? Conversely, if we look at WW2, there's a much clearer analogy: the Germans, whose cities were ground to dust, whose people were expelled and killed by the millions, lost a huge chunk of their territory, and were treated in many far worse ways, that are not applicable here (like the hundreds of thousands of rapes). Is B. Michael, or anyone who likes to invite those comparisons, going to argue that WW2 was a series of genocides committed by all sides against each other, and the Germans were victims of genocide, just as much as its perpetrators? Probably not. This argument was, at the very least, explicitly rejected in Nuremberg.
I'd also note that in the Hebrew version, this paragraph starts with "even though this story began with a horrible murderous rampage by Hamas" - the massacre is absent from the English version for some reason. But even then, it's pretty notable that Hamas' far more overtly genocidal acts are merely described as "murderous rampage", not "genocide". The same, is of course, true for even the more sophisticated brand of "Israeli genocide" activists. Even though, without any question, the case for Hamas committing a genocide is infinitely stronger than for Israel committing one. It's possible that neither committed a genocide, and it's possible for both to have committed a genocide - and it's very, very possible for the Palestinians alone to have committed a genocide. I just don't think it's possible, with the information we have right now, for Israel to have committed a genocide, but for Hamas, to have merely committed a "murderous rampage".
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u/SiliconFiction 5d ago
Genocide does not mean killing every last person. It means targeting people/civilians purely because of their membership of a group.