Who's Playing the Genocide Card in the Israel-Hamas War?

First, a caveat: I support an immediate ceasefire in the current fighting between Israel and Hamas. Hamas has already scored two major victories that cannot easily be taken away. The first was in exposing weaknesses in Israel’s defensive posture. The second was in putting the issue of Palestinian rights back on the front pages and on the evening news. And though Israel might yet win militarily, it cannot kill an idea, as many observers, including some in Israel, have noted.

There has been another political victory for the Palestinians in the current conflict, though I don’t know if it will hold. Critics of Israel have long been jealous of its claim to be a victim of the Holocaust, that is, representing the Jews who died in World War II and victims of anti-Semitism over the centuries just for being Jewish. Bringing up genocide and the Holocaust is simply viewed as a hoax in Muslim Arab countries because, as surveys have shown, most Muslim Arabs don’t believe it ever happened. Less well-known is that academics have their own kind of Holocaust denial – not in a claim that it never happened, but that the Jewish genocide is not relevant anymore, that it’s not worth talking about, and lots of other people in history have suffered, anyway. I recall the venomous Letters to the Editor when the University of Chicago Alumni magazine published an interview with the late faculty member Peter Novick, who had recently published “The Holocaust in American Life.” The editors later admitted that some of the Letters were unprintable. I recall attending a talk about the Middle East conflict and the Holocaust came up – I looked around at the audience and saw the sneers, the tightly clenched jaws, spit almost coming out of mouths, so much anger in the eyes of more than a few of the people present, who were mostly academics.

Now, however, critics of Israel seem to believe they have discovered how to take this genocide card away from the Jews. It is the Jews who are guilty of it, they claim! Tens of thousands of people have died in the current fighting – I will write nothing that minimizes this tragedy – but deaths in war are usually a question of specific national goals and policy decisions, a means to an end but not a war started just to kill other people. I wondered at first what definition of genocide the critics were using. There seems to be a kind of smugness in people I see on television who now feel free to accuse the greatest victim of genocide in modern times of committing genocide. Then I figured it out. The Palestinians and their allies would play this genocide card.

We all have a clear idea of what genocide is - the effort to exterminate an entire race of people, to kill as many of them as possible, extermination as an end itself. It will always be based on pure hate and claims of racial or ethnic superiority; it always includes intent. Political wars happen, and lots of people are killed to achieve desired ends, but that is not genocide. Yet esoteric and modern definitions of genocide, which include basically any actions that might lead to an actual genocide, are being used to stick Israel with the charge, certainly in part to stop the killing in Gaza and, now, Lebanon, but also to take away the genocide card from the Israelis, to deflect the notion that it is the Israelis fighting for their own survival as a people, to avoid acknowledging that it is the crisis that was launched on October 7, 2024, albeit a crisis in a decades old conflict that has had many crises, that was so shocking and offensive to an otherwise highly fractured body politic in Israel, and to avoid admitting that it is Hamas and Hezbollah that are arguably out to destroy an entire people.

Once upon a time in America our leaders spoke of Israel’s right to exist and the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. That was US policy in a nutshell, and it is at the core of every peace plan we’re ever floated or supported. What’s been missing in the last 365 days is anyone of note talking about this anymore.

A final note: An irony of stealing the Holocaust from the Jews is that after the Holocaust there were Jewish activists and intellectuals, among others, who sought to broaden the definition, to finger other culprits and protect other minorities by including alleged steps that could lead to a genocide – a possible first step, a suspect policy, but possibly meaning something else – and suggest that it’s equivalent to the Final Solution, all part of the same process.

Words have meanings, words are powerful, words have consequences.