(Dobbs) Indict Hamas For Genocide, Not Israel

If Israel were trying to commit genocide, it would have done it by now.

The meaning of “genocide” is very specific: “Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” That definition was spelled out in 1948 by the U.N. “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” It was an outgrowth of the Holocaust. 

What it means is, genocide is a premeditated campaign of religious, racial, national, or ethnic cleansing. Russia under Joseph Stalin was guilty of genocide. Germany under Adolf Hitler was guilty of genocide. 

There are signs of genocide today in Syria, in China, in Sudan, in Myanmar. 

There aren’t in Israel. 

Yet last week South Africa, a signatory to the genocide convention, brought charges against Israel to the U.N.’s highest court, the International Court of Justice.

As columnist Bret Stephens wrote in The New York Times, “If Israel were trying to commit genocide, it wouldn’t be putting its soldiers at risk or allowing humanitarian relief to arrive from Egypt or withdrawing many of its forces from Gaza. It would simply be killing Palestinians everywhere, in vastly greater numbers, as Germans killed Jews or Hutus killed Tutsis.”

If Israel were trying to commit genocide, it wouldn’t have sent evacuation routes to Palestinians’ cell phones or dropped leaflets in Arabic warning civilians to flee from targeted neighborhoods. 

If Israel were trying to commit genocide, it wouldn’t have let thousands of trucks bring food and water from Egypt to at least slightly alleviate the suffering of Gaza’s refugees. If Israel were trying to commit genocide, it wouldn’t have struck a deal this past week to allow more medicine and humanitarian supplies to reach those civilians in exchange for medicines to be delivered to Israeli hostages. If Israel were trying to commit genocide, it would have done it by now, because Israel’s firepower could level every house and every human in Gaza.

But that didn’t stop South Africa from arguing to the International Court of Justice that Israel is guilty of genocide. Its accusation against the Jewish state? “It means to create conditions of death of the Palestinian people in Gaza, to die a slow death due to starvation and dehydration or to die quickly because of a bomb attack or sniper, but to die, nevertheless.”

This fails the test on several levels.

First. as indiscriminate as Israel’s attacks in Gaza sometimes have appeared to be, roughly 1% of Gaza’s Palestinian population has died— and maybe a third of those casualties have been combatants from Hamas. The civilian death toll— bigger than Ukraine’s after almost two years of war there— is something to be alarmed about, not something to be proud of and arguably it could have been much lower, but it hardly qualifies as genocide. 

Second, South Africa supports its charge by quoting chilling comments by Israel’s leaders. Early in the war, its Defense Minister promised that Gaza would get “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.” But that turned out to be more threat than fact. Electricity, food, water, and fuel have been allowed in. In November, when its Minister of Heritage was asked in a radio interview whether Israel might actually “drop what amounts to some kind a nuclear bomb on all of Gaza, flattening them, eliminating everybody there,” his answer was that since there were “no non-combatants in Gaza,” that was “one of the possibilities.” But Israel hasn’t nuked Gaza, and the minister was suspended from Israel’s cabinet.

And third, South Africa conveniently fails to note that Israel didn’t start this war. Hamas did. Its fighters raped and murdered and mutilated about 1,200 people, and kidnapped about 250 more (Israel has just issued a final figure of 253). 

If genocide is defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” then it’s Hamas that ought to be indicted, not Israel. 

The fact is, the death of Jews is enunciated in the founding charter of Hamas, the “Hamas Covenant” of 1988, which begins with the words, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” 

Article 7 of the charter is even more explicit: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him’.” 

As journalist Rob Eshman has put it, the Hamas charter “extols the killing of every Jew.”

Anti-Israel rallies since the start of the war have rung with the chant, “From the river to the sea.” The illusion should be lost on nobody. It’s a colloquial way of supporting the goals of Hamas by calling for pushing the Jews from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. 

If that is the intent of Hamas, then that is genocide.

A ruthless assault on Gaza, the destruction of half its buildings, severe shortages of food and medicine, the breakdown of medical care, the displacement of millions, and the disproportionate “collateral damage” of so many deaths, these are all distressing stains on Israel’s record in this war. But there’s a difference between the ferocity of war and the barbarity of genocide. 

It has to be repeated, Israel didn’t start this war, Hamas did. It’s clear from Hamas’s charter that if it could obliterate the Israeli state and everyone in it, it would. Genocide is its intent. It’s also clear that Israel’s intent, by what it’s doing and by what it’s not doing, is not to wipe out the Palestinian population. It is to wipe out Hamas. 

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.