Every day we see heart-rending images and read gut-wrenching stories from the Gaza Strip. Anyone who reacts to them callously is suffering from a severe deficiency in human empathy. The same holds true for anyone who overlooks, minimizes, or forgets what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023.
Pope Francis recently said war itself is a crime against humanity. I agree with the Pontiff. Unfortunately, armed conflict is sometimes necessary to prevent even worse, more unspeakable crimes against humanity. A prime example is the war against the Nazi regime in Germany.
A Deadly a Threat
To Jews in Israel and elsewhere, Hamas represents as deadly a threat as the Nazis did. Hamas does not want a two-state solution or a single binational state; it seeks the complete eradication of Israel and the mass murder of Jews. Its charter calls for both.
Not only that, Hamas and other fanatical Islamist groups aspire to worldwide domination by Islam, just as Hitler and the Nazis dreamed of ruling the entire planet.
In World War II, the Allies carried out innumerable indiscriminate bombing campaigns against German cities. Allied strategic raids are estimated to have taken the lives of up to 500,000 civilians in the Third Reich.
When Dresden was firebombed, civilians who jumped into the Elbe River to escape the flames perished in boiling water. The firebombing alone caused an estimated 25,000 deaths in the city. Elsewhere, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki snuffed out between 129,000 and 226,000 lives, most of them civilians.
As far as I know, no one has accused the Allies of committing genocide in Germany or Japan.
Is It Genocide?
Today, the term “genocide” is widely bandied about in relation to Israel’s war against Hamas. The validity of that term is almost never questioned. Yet for mass killings to be considered genocide, there must be intentionality.
In other words, Israel would need to deliberately kill Gazans for no other reason than to kill Gazans. That is not the case. Nor is it the case that Israel indiscriminately bombs Gaza. The IDF adheres to rigorous criteria for selecting specific targets in the crowded Strip.
The reason some 30,000 Gazans have died is that Israel is determined to prevent Hamas from ever launching more October 7-style attacks, something Hamas has openly stated it plans to do. (It should be noted that the 30,000 figure includes more than 10,000 terrorists.) There is enormous destruction in Gaza because Hamas has cynically embedded itself within the civilian population, including in and under hospitals and schools.
If Israel wanted to commit genocide, there would be hundreds of thousands of Gazan deaths today. Perhaps unique in the annals of warfare, Israel has urged civilians to leave specific areas to avoid being harmed. Not a good strategy for genocide. Yes, there have been incidents where civilians in designated “safe zones” were killed. War tends to be chaotic, sometimes with tragic unintended consequences.
Of course, from the very beginning of the conflict, Hamas could have surrendered and given up its weapons to save thousands of Palestinian lives. The terrorist organization clearly doesn’t give a whit about the Palestinians. Quite the contrary: Its calculus is the more civilian casualties, the more world opinion turns against Israel.
On the other hand, the barbaric Hamas attack on Israel — which truly was a genocide — was launched simply to kill as many Jews as possible. That’s what Hamas leaders instructed the terrorists to do. One Hamas member infamously called his mother on October 7 and bragged: “I just killed 10 Jews!” She congratulated him for his “achievement,” as did his father.
Never “From the River to the Sea!”
The hundreds of thousands of people who have marched to condemn Israel’s “genocide” and advocate for a permanent ceasefire might as well call for the destruction of Israel. (“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” means no Israel.) If not uprooted and destroyed, Hamas would eventually reconstitute itself and continue down its murderous path.
Israel is now confronted on several fronts by forces that seek its annihilation: terrorists in Gaza, Hezbollah in the north, Iran (close to obtaining nuclear weapons), Iranian-backed surrogates in Syria and Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen.
October 7 showed that Israel is not invincible. If the Jewish state fails to act forcefully to ensure its very existence, it does so at its own peril.
Long live Israel, long live the Jewish people!
— Lenny Giteck, Editor
Postscript: Having said all of that, I agree with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel — who thinks Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has lost his way” with regard to the war in Gaza. Furthermore, Schumer believes the time to hold new Israeli elections is now. I agree. Of course, that is up to the Israeli citizenry, but it’s evident that a great many of Israelis agree as well.
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