The 'genocide' slander against Israel

 Alan Dershowitz:

The latest in a long history of blood libels against the Jewish people is the recent lie that its nation-state is deliberately committing genocide against the civilians of Gaza.

The meaning of genocide is the intentional killing of a racial or ethnic group. The term was coined by a Polish-Jewish lawyer in 1944 to describe the Holocaust, which involved the deliberate murder of every Jew the Nazis could get their hands on.

Since that time there have been genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur and other places.

Israel’s military efforts to defend itself against a recurrence of the mass murders and kidnappings of October 7 do not even come close to constituting genocide or crimes against humanity. To the contrary, Israel has done more to protect the civilian population of Gaza than any country in the history of warfare.

This is especially so since it is Hamas that has caused the killing of so many civilians by using them as human shields, by stealing their food, medicine, and fuel, and by refusing to provide shelters for ordinary citizens.

On a broader perspective, the Muslim population of Gaza has expanded considerably since Israel’s occupation that began in 1967 and ended in 2005. The only loss of population has been among Christian Arabs, many of whom have been forced to flee as a result of Islamic persecution.

Even after it ended its occupation, Israel has treated numerous sick Gazans and provided relatively high-paying jobs to thousands of Gazans. Hardly what a nation intending to commit genocide would do.

The United States did not commit genocide in Iraq or Afghanistan, despite the many thousands of civilians who became collateral damage during its wars against ISIS and Al Qaeda. Nor did other Western countries that have fought urban wars, such as France in Algeria and Great Britain in the Middle East.

Hamas knew that by crossing into Israel and murdering, raping and kidnapping its civilians, it was signing a death warrant for many Gazan civilians whom Hamas intended to use as human shields.

The accusation of genocide against Israel is particularly malicious, since it was actual genocide against Jewish people by the Nazis that led to the coining of the term. In that respect, accusing Israel of genocide is a form of Holocaust denial.

Young people who hear the genocide libel against Israel and see that there are no gas chambers in Gaza may conclude that there were no gas chambers in Nazi-occupied Poland. And by equating legitimate self-defense measures with the building of gas chambers, these false accusers are diminishing the power of the term genocide.
...

It should also be clear that the collateral damage to Germans in World War II was never considered genocide even though allied bombing attacks probably destroyed many buildings in Germany where civilians were located just as the German bombing of London did in England.  It was the gas chambers in Germany and the death camps that were the real tools of genocide.  The slander against Israel is one of the tools of supporters of the Hamas death cult.