If you are around my age (57), you grew up wondering how educated people in places like Nazi Germany, the USSR, Castro's Cuba, and so on, could believe and repeat laughably obvious lies, and, even worse, how so many in free Western countries could do so as well. So now I wonder no more. I've seen with my own eyes a coordinated decision last November by various bad actors to deem Israel's war on Hamas a "genocide," well before casualties were even in the high four figures. It started with various state actors, anti-Western and anti-Israel self-styled human rights organizations, and pro-Hamas propagandists on social media, and basically got repeated often enough that it's not the accepted description in wide swatches of public discussion. When this first started, and I challenged people on it, they would respond by saying things like, "well, it's not a genocide yet, but if you extrapolate the number of civilian deaths in the first month of the war to, say, a two-year war, it will look like a genocide then." Or, "This is only the beginning of the genocide. Eventually, Israel will take the opportunity to either kill or drive out every Gazan so they can settle Gaza with Jews." And they would back this up with particularly extreme statements from particular Israelis; none of whom, however, had any say in how the war was being conducted. In any event, none of the parade of horribles came true. The war in Gaza has been raging for almost a year. Despite fighting in close urban combat, despite their being no shelters for civilians built by Hamas, despite indeed Hamas wanting maximum civilian casualties, and despite Israel having the obvious capacity to kill just about every Gazan if it wanted to, over 99% of Gaza civilians are still alive. Depending on whom you believe, the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths is as low as a bit less than 1-1, or as high as 1.5-1 (I'm ignoring the letter to the editor of the Lancet, which simply made up an absurd figure for which there is exactly zero evidence). Either of these figures would be extraordinarily low for urban combat, especially given the factors noted above, and the fact that Egypt has closed its border, prevented Gazan civilians from seeking temporary refuge outside of Gaza. One may still think for a variety of reasons that the price paid by civilians is "too high," or that Israel could have taken even more care to protect civilians, or, for that matter, that Israel is a colonialist project that doesn't have the right to defend itself, so any civilian or even combatant death among Gazans is damning. But what you can't reasonably argue is that Israel is engaging in "genocide." That, however, has not stopped the genocide narrative from getting even more entrenched. I see three groups of genocide-narrative promoters. One are people, like the editors of the New Left Review (who admitted as much), who know that there is no genocide, but think it's good for anti-Israel propaganda purposes so they say it anyway. The second are people who are basically ignorant and innumerate, and just here that lots of people are being killed and sources they trust are saying its genocide, so it must be genocide. The third are people who don't really care what genocide means, they just know it's a powerful indictment of a country, so they've just decided by fiat that genocide means "lots of civilians suffering and some dying" without regard to intent or numbers. For example, someone on X insisted to me that "displacing people is genocide." Behind the scenes are a combination of hardcore anti-Israel fanatics, including state actors such as Iran and groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine, along with anti-Western NGOs who want to make it impossible for Israel to defend itself, and then use restraints placed on Israel to prevent NATO and the US from defending themselves. And it helps that both groups rely on deep undercurrents of antisemitism that traditionally sees Jews as a demonic force. But to get back to my original point, it's easily, objectively provable that Israel's actions don't amount to genocide, according to any of the ordinary or legal definitions of the term. Again, if Hamas surrendered tomorrow, you'd still have 99+% of the prewar civilian population of Gaza still living in Gaza, with Israel undoubtedly faciliating donor nations aiding in Gaza's rehabilitation. So if you ever wondered how educated people in, say, the 1930s, could believe that "a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy stabbed Germany in the back to ensure its defeat in World War I on behalf of the Rothschilds and other Jewish bankers," wonder no more. You are living in it now.
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