Genocide or Just War?

18 min readMar 25, 2024

The Accusation of Genocide

As I write this in January of 2024, the entire global left is loudly calling Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide”. South Africa is taking the charge to the International Court of Justice, which is serious. Fortunately, it is possible to provide some objective perspective on this inflammatory charge.

The cited numbers of dead everyone uses come from Hamas, who have motivation to be dishonest and are almost certainly exaggerating. I am going to use their numbers anyway, which make for a worst case scenario for what I say below.

Go deeper: Strong reasons to dismiss the death toll statistics from Gaza

Genocide is a campaign to intentionally eradicate a population, directly or by indirect action. As I write this, out of the 2.3 million pre-war Gazan population, Hamas indicates 23,000 dead total, about 9,500 of which are Hamas combatants ( 7500 killed in Gaza and about 2000 killed in the October 7th raid ).

Does this indicate an ongoing attempt to eradicate the population?

That’s 9,500 combatants killed against 13,500 civilians killed, by Hamas’ own numbers. This is about a 1:1.4 ratio of dead combatants to civilians.

[ Update 3/8/2024: Hamas is now claiming 30,000 killed and Israel is claiming 13,000 of those are combatants, leaving 17,000 estimated civilian deaths. This shows stability in the high ratio of combatants to civilians, providing further evidence what is occurring is just war, which is horrible enough on its own, and not genocide. It is also further evidence of the fog of war, as the stability itself is evidence both governments are fudging the numbers they report to the public. Yet, the activists repeating “genocide” repeat the numbers with full faith, as do almost all media, so I will continue with them too.

Update 6/21/2024: The UN has recognized that the Hamas numbers were inflated and they have been adjusted down, as the growth in the overall casualty rate has continued to fall. Current estimates put the combatant to civilian ratio at about 1:1, which is effectively a miracle of discretion and restraint for the kind of urban warfare Israel is fighting in Gaza. ]

Again, these numbers come from Hamas and are almost certainly exaggerated, if not made up altogether, but let’s use them anyway as a worst case scenario for how Israel is conducting its part of the war.

A wide-ranging study of civilian war deaths from 1700 to 1987 by William Eckhardt states: On the average, half of the deaths caused by war happened to civilians, only some of whom were killed by famine associated with war…The civilian percentage share of war-related deaths remained at about 50% from century to century. (p. 97)

The average across all of recorded warfare is 1:1. In more recent conflicts it’s much higher — WW2 and Vietnam were 1:2. Afghanistan was 1:3. Iraq was 1:4. Chechnya was 1:43.

That means that despite Israel fighting in an extremely dense theater, against an enemy that is doing everything they can to maximize civilian casualties — Israel is killing only 0.4 above the historical average going back to 1700. They are well below what has been seen in recent modern wars like WW 2 or in places like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

That isn’t indicative of a genocide, by any rational shape or measure. It is war, which is by itself awful without being exaggerated and dramatized by political leftists. And it is a war that Hamas started by violating the preexisting ceasefire in place Oct 6th.

The Challenges of the War

From time to time, I hear people say things like, “Why does Israel have to destroy so much? Why is it killing babies? They have such a great military they should be able to send in some special forces units and get this done without so much killing.” It does not help that the US president plays both sides, providing military aid but also saying things like, “Israel’s war is over the top.”

Here is the truth about urban warfare in densely populated areas based on real life combat experiences.

For a moment, consider Russia’s attempt to take Grozny. Grozny was just a single city, with just 1,000 insurgents. There were 60,000 Russian soldiers. It should be easy, right? In reality, just to defeat those 1,000 guerillas, they spent two months. You might say, “But they are Russians … inferior, cruel, and orc’ish. The US is much better.”

The US surrounded the capital of the Islamic State, again a single city. It contained 3,000 enemies. The U.S. military had troops on the ground, experienced Kurd fighters helping, local allies, the luxury of a long siege, and total air control. They had all the time in the world. Just 3,000 enemies. Again, you might be thinking it would be easy. Probably they just sent in Delta Force and they wiped out… well, wait, no, they didn’t. It took a full military assault of combined forces, and 80% of the city destroyed over 4 months of fighting, according to the United Nations. That was to root out just 3,000 terrorists in a single city.

Israel is facing 30,000 urban defenders in more than seven cities, who are using human shields and hiding in hundreds of miles of underground networks, with more total kilometers underground than a metro system has in most large cities in the world, purposely built under civilian sites, prepared, designed and resourced for guerilla warfare specifically anticipating a fight with the IDF, while holding hundreds of hostages.

So, basically, fighting against Hamas is HARD. War is not a videogame. Military planners say to successfully attack a non-urban terrain, a fighting force should have about a 3–1 advantage of fighters to defenders. For an urban warfare offensive against a city which has had minimal time to prepare, a 4–1 to 6–1 troop advantage should be used because of the inherent advantages defenders have in urban environments. For cities like those in Gaza, which have spent years preparing for exactly this sort of fight, an attacking force might need a 10–1 ratio of fighters to defenders to mount a successful campaign.

According to military experts, you also expect a 50%-60% casualty rate when doing close quarters combat of this type.

So if the Hamas fighting force is about 30,000 strong, as the IDF believes, Israel using standard tactics will need at least 300,000 soldiers, and expect to lose about 150,000 of them. That’s a ridiculous number for the IDF to lose.

Israel is a tiny country with a small population. This sort of loss calculation is one of the same reasons why nukes were dropped on Japan in WW2 — because the cost to the allies of island hopping to beat the Japanese was really extensive.

So Israel significantly softens the blow through air campaigns first. Once they go in, if they are shot at from anywhere, they level the whole block.

It doesn’t make it moral, but you can understand the choice. The alternative would be devastating to the IDF’s ability to defend Israel against any other threat, including Hezbollah which is firing rockets at it every day, amassing on the border, and has created a situation where nearly 100,000 Israelis have had to abandon their homes and are internal refugees.

An Example of Israel’s Care Amid the Media’s Carelessness

Israel’s choice to use high capacity, non-precision dumb bombs in the early months of the war provide a clear, concrete example of how the media and politicians have aggressively misled the public about the war. Based on reporting of a CIA release evaluating the early months of the war, almost everyone believes Israel was “indiscriminately bombing” civilian targets with 2000 lb. “dumb bombs”. The inference most of the public draws is that Israel ( at best ) does not care who dies in its attacks or ( at worst ) was trying to kill as many Gazans as possible. The Go deeper link below navigates to a prototypical example of this sort of reporting.

Go deeper: CNN misleads its audience to believe the CIA found Israel was indiscriminately bombing Gaza with dumb bombs

This reporting worked by accurately citing the CIA’s determination about the amount of large “dumb bombs” Israel was using, while ignoring the portions of the report in which the CIA concludes Israel was doing the exact opposite of indiscriminate bombing.

How is that? The CIA’s overall conclusion was that Israel was delivering those bombs using a dive bombing technique which makes their targeting as accurate as if they were using smart bombs. CNN buried this conclusion in paragraph thirteen of their report and presented it as an anonymous opinion, even though it is an official view of the agency and widely acknowledged by military experts,

A US official told CNN that the US believes that the Israeli military is using the dumb bombs in conjunction with a tactic called “dive bombing,” or dropping a bomb while diving steeply in a fighter jet, which the official said makes the bombs more precise because it gets it closer to its target. The official said the US believes that an unguided munition dropped via dive-bombing is similarly precise to a guided munition.

They then undermined their own reporting of this US official by following it up with the opinion of another, named person who seemed to dismiss the tactic without actually doing so. In total, it is extraordinarily incomplete and misleading reporting designed to push a headline narrative which gets readers to the exact opposite conclusion of the truth.

What was Israel really doing in those early days? Their initial theory of the war was that they needed to use large bombs to collapse Hamas’s tunnels. They were using these “dumb bombs” because they were “bunker buster” quality bombs, which have much greater payload than smart bombs, which Israel hoped would damage or destroy tunnels underground and under buildings. Israel dropped the bombs using this precision method to make sure they landed precisely where they could do the most damage to tunnels, after warning people in buildings and in targeted areas to leave.

It was the exact opposite of indiscriminate bombing. The reporting has just been lies to the public, which have taken on a life of their own and are now common opinion.

How do we know this is really Israel’s objective? Israel has learned. After the first weeks of the war, Israel gradually became aware that Hamas’s tunnels were too deep and well-constructed, and the bombing campaign was not effective at collapsing them. Israel changed its tactics to sending in ground forces to fight for control of the tunnels directly, and to blow them up by laying mines. As Israel’s tactics have evolved, the casualty rates among Gazans have come down.

This tactical evolution is direct proof of Israel’s actual war aims, which is to destroy Hamas and their war infrastructure, not to kill as many Gazans as they can. This aspect of the war simply has gone unreported in Western mainstream media, which shows little if any interest in reporting on the war itself rather than piling on outrage at Israel through coverage of the humanitarian crisis.

Go deeper: How Israel has held back its fire and still avoided taking casualties

Go deeper: The chair of the Urban Warfare Institute at West Point on the unprecedented degree of difficulty faced by the IDF in Gaza

The Untold Story Is the War Itself

Israel has put up a page where the public can see some of the photos and videos of what Hamas did to Israelis and I’ve linked to it below. Hamas is the government of Gaza, so there is no ambiguity this was an act of war perpetrated by one government upon the people of a neighboring government. Israel’s government has an absolute moral obligation to protect its people by responding to war with war.

Go deeper: Photos and videos of Hamas’s act of war on October 7th

The charge that Israel is committing genocide rests not on Israeli actions, but on the proclamations of populist, loudmouth rightwing Israeli politicians playing to the anger of the populace after October 7th. Israel is a democracy, and if you are reading this from a country which is also a democracy, you will know that there are many voices and many loudmouths. Rightwing populists who speak in anger to the crowd exist in all of them.

What you probably do not know is Israel’s war is not being run solely by populists. Israel has a war council consisting of leaders from a cross-section of Israeli society and observers, including the opposition to Netanyahu’s government, to oversee and direct actions and strategies by the IDF. None of South Africa’s accusations, or the accusations of others, cite actions ordered or taken by the War Council.

[ Update on 6/25: Last week Israel’s War Council was disbanded after the opposition party member resigned, apparently in protest of Netanyahu’s reluctance to create a plan for after the war. The IDF shortly announced that the intense portion of operations in Gaza would be winding down within weeks, and that it would unilaterally implement a daily pause in fighting from 8 am to 7 pm every day to allow for the distribution of humanitarian aid. ]

In fact, here are the orders the Chief of the General Staff actually sent out to all the commanders of the IDF,

This is a long and just war — Every action is very important, and every localized achievement is part of achieving the goals of the war. This you must do with determination and professionalism. A long road requires a wide perspective beyond the immediate target. In every action we take, we must carefully clarify its goals and how we will best achieve them. We must think about how to act to keep the force strong over a long period of time and take a breath for running long distances, not for a sprint.
Values in combat — In the Torah portion Kedoshim, the commandment “Do not curse the deaf” appears. This is perplexing: why not curse if a deaf person cannot hear? The answer is simple — when you curse, you tarnish yourself. We act like human beings and, unlike our enemy, uphold our humanity. We must be careful not to use force where it is not required, to distinguish between a terrorist and one who is not, not to take what is not ours — a souvenir or parts of a weapon — and not to shoot revenge videos. We are not on a spree of killing, revenge, or genocide. We have come to defeat a cruel enemy, who deserves a bitter loss. We will not err and allow it an achievement in the international arena. A true soldier is one whose values do not waver in the face of a challenging reality, he is one whose values are firm and do not change according to the direction of the wind.
From the above, you can see the huge difference between populist rightwing politicians playing to the crowd in the immediate aftermath of a national tragedy, and the marching orders actually given to the commanders of the military.

These directives were not empty words. When the US State Department delivered its verdict on how Israel was conducting the Gaza war, the part which grabbed headlines in the press was the conclusion that it is “reasonable to suspect” Israel “may” have “crossed the line” in some instances in conducting the war ( but without specifics ) and also said there was no conclusive proof of such instances. This observation could be said about any large, complex military operation involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

The far more substantial conclusions of the report never saw the light of day in the world’s press rooms. For example, after describing the difficulties delivering humanitarian aid in a war zone, including confirming that Hamas was interfering with the effort, the State Department concludes,

While the USG has had deep concerns during the period since October 7 about action and inaction by Israel that contributed significantly to a lack of sustained and predictable delivery of needed assistance at scale, and the overall level reaching Palestinian civilians — while improved — remains insufficient, we do not -32- currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance within the meaning of section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act. This is an ongoing assessment and we will continue to monitor and respond to any challenges to the delivery of aid to Palestinian civilians in Gaza moving forward.

It also asserts there is no evidence of Israel intentionally targeting civilians in military operations. On how Israel actually is conducting operations, it writes,

The IDF coordinates closely with USCENTCOM, Security Cooperation Office, and Defense Attaché teams in Israel on IHL ( International Humanitarian Law ) in addition to frequent engagements on issues related to the conflict at the Secretary or Under Secretary levels. On numerous occasions and at various levels, IDF and Israel Ministry of Defense personnel have shared with U.S. counterparts descriptions of Israel’s efforts to implement IHL in their operations in Gaza. IDF officials have shared details about their targeting processes, including an extensive sensitive site list, legal advisors embedded in the target approval process, and investigation protocol for incidents of unanticipated collateral damage. The IDF has also shared images and videos demonstrating real-time capabilities to depict civilian population movement and has shared evidence of certain strikes that were aborted when civilians were observed in the target area.

Go deeper: The Wiki on the Israeli War Council

Go deeper video: The chair of the Urban Warfare Institute at West Point on Israel’s Compliance with International Law

Go deeper: Michael Walzer, the father of modern Just War theory, on the tragedy in Gaza

None of this is consistent with an intent to wipe out all or a substantial part of a whole people. So no, it’s not a “genocide”. This is a slander which is making the world dangerous for all Jewish people, everywhere. People die in war. It’s sad but it’s the reality of how war works. Unfortunately, the global left only comes out of the woodwork to decry this when Jewish people are involved.

Go deeper: Rising threats to Jews everywhere

A Common Sense Test

If you are not convinced already, here is a dead simple way to convince yourself. Ask yourself what you think would happen if Hamas surrendered tomorrow and released the hostages. What would Israel do? Would they just kill all the Gazans anyway, to complete the so-called genocide they supposedly intend? I think almost no one believes this. The war would stop and people would begin to argue about what the post-war period should look like.

If you agree, in your heart you know Israel is not planning a genocide. They are simply fighting a war.

As I write this in 2024, the only thing we know with much confidence about this war is that it will likely end before 2025 arrives. When it does, Hamas will have been effectively destroyed and the Palestinians will very obviously still exist. Those who have been screaming about genocide will move on to screaming about something else, trying to influence the post-war status quo. The big question is what will the people in the rest of the world do. Will they collectively blink, shake their heads, and realize they were being played all along?

Origin of Accusations

Out of curiosity, I have been researching when was the first time the anti-Israel left accused Israel of genocide against Palestinians. So far, the earliest I’ve found is 2010. In 2010, the Journal of Genocide Studies hosted a conversation between Martin Shaw and another prominent scholar of genocide, Omer Bartov, on whether the term “genocide” could be reasonably applied to the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, particularly the expulsion and killing of Arabs in 1948.

In 2010, people on the global left had already started searching for ways to accuse Israel of genocide, and were already discussing ways to make the charge seem to stick. The way academics works, journals tend to lag the conversation in the real world, so one can reliably infer the journal was platforming a conversation which had been happening outside the journals for at least several years.

No pun intended, but the global left has been dying to hang the “genocide” label on Israel for a long time. Let’s leave aside the mostly false claim that Palestinians were “expelled” in 1948. Although Israelis created some refugees due to tactical expulsions which occurred as part of the battles to secure supply lines and protect flanks, the historical record indicates most of them fled in panic, understandably, mostly due to rumors and the fact that their leaders and “elite” skedaddled at the first signs of trouble, leaving the rest of the population rudderless.

The journal discussion is basically an egghead exercise in whether there is some way to twist and torture and re-frame the idea of “genocide” enough. Barely any Palestinians were killed in 1948, relative to population, and hardly any civilians ( just a few hundred ) relative to what we usually see in civil wars. One of the big ideas they came up with in the 2010’s was an idea of “slow” genocide and “cultural” genocide, which is supposed to explain how the Palestinian population has grown exponentially while Israel was supposedly committing genocide against them, and the cultural institutions have strengthened and galvanized enough to spread across the Western world.

Since 1948, these people who the “genocide expert” wanted to say were already undergoing a genocide, had multiplied their population in the former Palestine by at least 7x, and strengthened their culture and institutions. Yet, the leftists were searching in 2010 for ways of describing things in such a way that it seemed like none of this mattered or wasn’t true.

The idea of “slow genocide” is a powerful way to do this because “slow genocide” is empirically indistinguishable from “no genocide” but a long ongoing conflict. Repeating the charge enough will work on the minds of some audiences to shift the burden of proof onto the accused to make them prove a negative ( an impossible task ). This is a highly effective trick of rhetoric.

Where did this false, “Stop the genocide in Gaza!” come from? It had been gestating. They were already saying it at least 14 years ago. The endless repetition of the charge in relation to the Gaza war is opportunistic propaganda. Nothing comes from nowhere. I’m sure I’ll find an earlier mention eventually.

The term “genocide” was first coined by a Jewish Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, attempting to describe what the Germans had done to the Polish Jews ( and Poles more generally ) in World War II. He was searching for a term to describe the systematic attempt to exterminate an entire people. He, and later the UN, countenanced means other than direct murder, such as forced sterilization or the removal and re-education of children along with the widespread destruction of the population’s ability to transmit its culture.

Israel’s actions towards Palestinians are nothing like that. This is just an effort to attack Israel’s legitimacy by hijacking moral language.

By using the term this way, the academic left and NGO social club deliver a ( perhaps intentional ) double wound to the Jewish people. They simultaneously level a false accusation at the Jewish homeland, while also undermining the special and severe meaning the inventor of the term intended, in which he was trying to capture the unusually specific evil of the Holocaust. Through this dilution of the word “genocide”, we once again have no good word for what the Holocaust was, because the word we had has been appropriated and diluted to such an immense extent it no longer conveys the magnitude of what happened.

This manipulation of moral terms is a liar’s game. They understand moral language can evoke the power of moral condemnation. They understand moral condemnation has great power. The leftist academic and NGO community feels they are the righteous and proper keepers of moral language for the rest of us, so they are continually refashioning it to drag along the embedded judgments to new descriptive areas, as a kind of politics. Because it is such a niche area, nobody even realizes they’re doing it, or how the world’s moral outrage is regularly manipulated by changing the meanings of terms while keeping the associated outrage.

We saw a similar linguistic exercise after Israel left Gaza in 2005. Once the Gazans held a free election and put Hamas in power, Israel properly implemented a blockade to protect itself and pressure Gaza into change. The human rights community immediately admitted Israel no longer controlled Gaza by the traditional definition of the term “control”, and so no longer occupied it by the traditional definition of the term “occupy” either.

The academic/NGO community responded by launching a tortured effort to redefine what “control” meant, for the specific purpose of being able to continue charging Israel with an “occupation”. The result was claiming since Gaza received 13% of its water from Israel, Israel “controlled” Gaza’s water supply; claiming since Israel cooperated with Egypt in Egypt’s own attempt to control its own border, Israel “controlled” the Gazan border with Egypt; claiming since Hamas never chose to spend funds to build electric plants to replace the 50% of electricity it gets from Israel, that Israel “controlled” Gaza’s electricity.

This was never the definition of “occupation” before. It ignored that Gaza held a free election, elected a despot who promised to destroy Israel, built rocket factories, and a vast underground network of tunnels for smuggling and guerilla warfare, all while overtly attacking Israel in a war of aggression, over and over.

Normally, in previous times, those things would be taken as evidence Israel did not control Gaza and was implementing defensive measures. But not under the new definition. The “international community” was not to take Gaza’s activities as meaningful signs of independence anymore, so the leftist community allowed themselves to claim Israel “occupied” Gaza.

The best way to understand how things have gone so badly is to read the chapters of this resource in order, from beginning to end, clicking on the Go deeper links as your time allows. It is an immersive experience and few people will get through unchanged, having learned the context of the conflict, including parts the United Nations does not want people to learn.

This essay is part of a larger resource for parents, teachers, students, concerned individuals, and anyone else who desires to contextualize the conflict and navigate the accusations against Israel and Palestinians.