No, Israel isn’t committing genocide

The battle to destroy Israel is not just fought with weapons. In the wider world, Hamas’s fellow travellers have been fighting to eradicate the Jewish state for many decades, and their chosen weapon is words.

In recent years the accusation they have alighted on is that Israel is an apartheid state. It’s a powerful weapon because the word is so poisonous. And the more it is repeated the more it becomes accepted as “fact”.

But since Israel began its response to Hamas’s October 7 massacre, another word has entered the “destroy Israel” lexicon: genocide. If apartheid is bad, genocide is of course a different order of magnitude.

If screaming “apartheid” has an impact in delegitimising the very basis of Israel’s existence, accusing it of genocide is a still more powerful weapon. So it has, likewise, been repeated until it has now become accepted as fact – such that it can be asserted without contradiction.

On yesterday’s Today programme, for example, a student referred to as “Issy” claimed that Israel had been found guilty by the International Court of Justice of a “plausible genocide”. The presenter, Amol Rajan, did not correct her. Given how often this lie is repeated, perhaps Rajan thought it a statement of fact.

But the ICJ’s presiding judge at the time of the Gaza ruling, Joan Donoghue, has made clear that the court made no such finding. Rather, the ICJ held that Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide in Gaza in theory.

Donoghue told the BBC’s own HardTalk programme that the court “didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible…[T]he shorthand that often appears which is that there is a plausible case of genocide isn’t what the court decided.”

Genocide is a specific crime, which is when certain acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

It has now become accepted as “fact” that Israel has killed over 30,000 people in Gaza, 70 per cent of whom are women and children. That these statistics are supplied by Hamas, via its health ministry, is sometimes mentioned as an afterthought. But that they are clearly correct is assumed as a given.

Yet when these figures are looked at in the context of analysis by some of the world’s leading statisticians, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that they have been seized upon primarily as a confirmation of Jewish blood lust – one of the most familiar of anti-Semitic tropes.

Data scientist Professor Abraham Wyner of the University of Pennsylvania appears to show that the civilian death toll is statistically impossible: “The daily totals increase too consistently to be real”, rising daily “with almost metronomical linearity”.

He writes that Hamas “assigned about 70 per cent of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.”

In some data sets, it would seem, men must have come back to life while on several days no men were apparently killed, only women.

As Prof Wyner claims, “the casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters”. Indeed, the actual ratio of civilian casualties to Hamas terrorists is “at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1”.

This matters not just because it matters to be correct, but because it exposes the accusation of genocide to be a lie. The legal standard for the death of civilians is “willful.” Far from there being evidence to support this, the facts show the opposite.

John Spencer, professor of Urban War Studies at West Point, argues that “Israel has done more to prevent civilian casualties in war than any military in history – above and beyond what international law requires and more than the US did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – setting a standard that will be both hard and potentially problematic to repeat.”

This includes, he claims. evacuating 70 to 90 per cent of civilians from cities before beginning a full ground invasion in conventional attacks that seek to destroy enemy defenders. The US did not do this in the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, the Vietnam Tet counter-offensive or the Korean War.

And the IDF’s Civilian Harm Mitigation Cell tracks the presence of civilians in real time uses that to drive its operations to minimise the risk of civilian casualties.

But this is war, and civilians die in war. Especially when one of the combatants deliberately embeds itself among civilians specifically to maximise the civilian death toll.

As always, novelist Howard Jacobson gets to the heart of the issue: “There is a sadistic triumphalism in charging Jews with genocide, as though those making it feel they have their man at last. The sadism resides, specifically, in attacking Jews where their memories of pain are keenest. By making them now the torturer and not the tortured, their assailants wrest their anguish from them, not only stealing their past but trampling on it.”

Added to that is the sick irony that there is indeed a wish for genocide – by Hamas, the terrorist group which massacred 1200 Israelis on October 7 and which is committed in its founding charter not just to the death of all Israelis but to the elimination of all Jews, everywhere.