Refuting the Common Campus Lies Told About Israel:

"Genocide" cumulative and episodic

[Check out my new novel, about how college used to be before they all went insane: Bright College Years!]

“People who believe absurdities will soon commit atrocities.” —commonly attributed to Voltaire

In a forthcoming monograph—“Setting the Record Straight: Refuting the Common Campus Lies Told About Israel”—I examine, and refute, many of the major lies regularly disseminated about Israel by its many anti-Israel detractors, and show that, in many cases, the reverse is true: not only does Israel do the opposite of what is alleged, but it is Israel’s enemies who are guilty of the charges.

These lies individually and collectively illustrate the strategy of “The Big Lie,” a strategy endorsed by Hitler and the Nazis, in which the propagandist deliberately tells and repeats lies so enormous that people not only are inclined to believe them—falsely thinking that no one could lie so baldly, so the lie must in fact be true—but even continue to believe them in the face of counterevidence demonstrating their falsehood.

The lies fit neatly into a single package we’ll call the False Narrative:

There once was a country called Palestine, existing from time immemorial, ruled by the Palestinians and home to a few Jews with whom they got along nicely. Then the Zionist Jews began arriving from Europe in the 20^th century, starting an ongoing “genocide” against Palestinians and expelling hundreds of thousands (“ethnic cleansing”) as part of their project of “settler-colonialism,” thus coming to “occupy” Palestinian land (in 1948 then more in 1967) and building “illegal settlements.” Palestinians who remained in Israel (and their descendants) are kept subjugated under “apartheid,” a political system that reflects and maintains “Jewish supremacy.” Those who were expelled to the “West Bank” (Judea/Samaria) now live under that crippling occupation, while those who were expelled to Gaza are kept in an “open air prison.” All of the above reveals that “Zionism is racism,” and so “resistance” to Zionism “by any means necessary” is entirely justified, including the rapes, torture, and massacre of October 7.

In this excerpt we look at the third lie in the False Narrative, alleging “genocide.”

Big Lie 3: “starting an ongoing genocide”

Anti-Israelists use the phrase “ongoing genocide” to suggest that in 1948, and over the decades, and now during the Hamas war ongoing as I write, Jews and Israel have been carrying out acts of genocide against the Arabs/Palestinians. It implies both specific episodes as well as an overall cumulative effect. Keep in mind that the term “genocide” means more than just that there have been many casualties over multiple military conflicts, which is true, in fact, for both sides. According to the 1948 International Genocide Convention, genocide constitutes “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”[1] Notice that “intent” is essential, and it involves targeting people on the basis of their membership in the relevant group. “Winning a war” against an army or a country is not considered “genocide,” even if there are significant civilian casualties, unless the war was motivated or guided by the intent to destroy that group. That fact alone takes most of the force out of the lie, not least because nearly every single war between the Arabs and the Jews beginning with 1948 was started by the Arabs. Jews have spent these decades defending themselves from genocidal attacks, not pursuing them.

That Jews were defending themselves from genocide is illustrated by one famous quote, among similar ones by many different Arab leaders. In 1947, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, the Secretary-General of the Arab League, warned that if the Jews were to try to establish a state, what would follow, by the Arabs, would be “a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.”[2] The Jews, when the Arabs launched first the civil war in late 1947 and then the multi-Arab army war in 1948, were not seeking a genocide against the Arabs; they accepted the U.N. partition proposal of 1947, and had the Arabs also accepted it there would simply have been peace between the two neighboring states. But the Arabs opted for war against the Jews instead, who, in response, therefore, were merely trying to avoid being the victims of a “Mongolian massacre.”

That settles the general question of “intent.”

Cumulative Genocide?

As for the “cumulative” charge of genocide, that is most easily refuted by looking at the numbers.

First, just for a sense of scale. Somewhere between five or six times as many people have died in the dozen years of the current Syrian Civil war than have died on both sides of the entire Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim Conflict in the 100-plus years since 1920, at least up to the current Israel-Hamas war.[3] On a list of global conflicts from the 20^th-century onwards, in terms of casualties, this one might well count as very minor.[4] All deaths are tragic, but excessive focus just on one conflict can skew one’s impression of it.

More directly: The Arab population in Israel in 1948 was about 156,000; in 2023 it was 2.08 million.[5] The Palestinian population in the territories of Judea/Samaria in 1960 was about 1.1 million; in 2020 it was about 5.1 million. The Palestinian population in Gaza in 1948 was about 250,000, while in 2024 it was about 2.2 million. In May of 2024 the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released a report stating that “the Palestinian world population was 14.63 million by the end of 2023, which means that the number of Palestinians in the world has doubled about 10 times since [1948],” or (more precisely) has increased by 1000%.[6]

To see these visually:

[7]

[8]

[9]

You’ll also notice in looking at the charts: both West Bank and Gaza Palestinian populations start to increase quite significantly in the decades after Israel captures those territories in 1967. This is because Israel built all sorts of infrastructure in those territories (including water and sewer), it modernized healthcare and built hospitals, established schools and universities, etc. Overall population, including life expectancy, quality of life, and various positive economic metrics, all grew and improved significantly.

If it isn’t obvious, extensive measures to improve both the quality and quantity of life are not the typical manifestations of “genocidal intent,” and mushrooming populations are not the typical consequence of “genocidal activity.”

This is what true genocide looks like:

[10]

From 1948 through at least 2023, then, the charge that Jews have been perpetrating genocide against the Palestinian Arabs is simply and obviously false.

The Reverse

To the contrary, the reverse is true: it is the other side that is actually guilty of the charge.

Palestinian Arabs sided with the Nazis in World War II, with their religious and political leader, the Mufti Amin al-Husseini, spending the war years in Berlin collaborating with the Nazis to bring the Final Solution to the Middle East. There are famous pictures of the Mufti chatting it up with Hitler, visiting a concentration camp with Himmler, and saluting Muslim Nazi soldiers.[11] The Nazis and the Palestinians literally shared the same Jewish-eliminationist agenda. Nor can the actual morbid effectiveness of the Holocaust be attributed to the Nazis and their European allies alone. For just one example, it was the widescale Arab riots and revolt the Mufti orchestrated in Palestine between 1936-1939 that led the British to issue the infamous 1939 White Paper ending their support for Zionism, not least by restricting Jewish immigration, at exactly the moment when the war began—a measure that sealed the fate of many European Jews in the Holocaust.[12] In short, Palestinian Arabs shared the Nazi eliminationist intent and contributed both directly and indirectly to the actual genocide known as the Holocaust. If anyone is responsible for genocidal intent and attempted genocide itself here, it is the Palestinian Arabs.

Note, too, the Mufti wasn’t merely the Palestinian Arab national leader but also the local representative of an organization, founded in Egypt, known as the Muslim Brotherhood.[13] The descendants of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine today call themselves the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, an organization that (as we’ll shortly see) carries on with that same genocidal intent.

The Hamas-Israel War

Speaking of Hamas, we turn now to the second part of the lie, namely that Israel is “committing genocide” in the current war in Gaza. This is an important and timely lie motivating the wave of angry anti-Israel protests sweeping campuses and cities across the globe. Who wouldn’t turn out to stop a genocide? To stop those evil Israelis from destroying Gaza and genociding those Gazans?

Tellingly, many of the anti-Israelists calling for “ceasefire” do so in statements that omit the role of Hamas in starting the war and its ongoing role in fighting the war, including rejecting many ceasefires along the way. One quite representative such statement was signed by some 15 student groups at Connecticut College, including condemnation of (for example) Israel’s bombing of hospitals and universities.[14] Yet the statement omits the war crime militarization of those sites by Hamas that by international law removes their protections, as well as any mention of Hamas altogether, including its genocidal aims and murderous actions. Note the neat trick: if you pretend Hamas does not exist, then Israel is just waltzing in and blowing things up for no reason. Since Hamas doesn’t exist it must only be civilians getting blown up. That does sort of look like genocide!

But Hamas does exist.

That Israel’s war on Hamas itself is justified is clear, based on the Hamas massacre of October 7 but also on the five wars Hamas has started since 2007, and the thousands of Israelis Hamas has murdered since launching with its openly genocidal charter in 1988.[15] Israel like any sovereign nation is justified in defending itself and its citizens from repeated efforts to perpetrate genocide against them, and trying to remove that perpetual threat altogether. We shall therefore focus on Israel’s manner of prosecuting that war.

We might start with some skepticism. Has there ever been a “genocide” where the alleged victim has turned down multiple ceasefire offers as Hamas has? One might think that when one’s people are being massacred one would be eager for a ceasefire almost under any terms. That Hamas seems in no hurry for one strongly suggests it does not see its people’s situation as particularly dire.[16]

Yes, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has killed many people in Gaza. But it is also true that if the IDF wanted to kill every person in Gaza today—commit genocide—it could. That it hasn’t suggests that it doesn’t want to. Contrast that with Hamas: its intention to murder as many Jews as possible on October 7 was limited only by its inability to do so, while Israel’s ability to murder all Gazans is limited only by its intentions not to do so.

The IDF had lost, by mid-May, some 250 of its soldiers in combat in Gaza. If it wanted to commit genocide it could just bomb relentlessly and indiscriminately from the air and spare its soldiers’ lives. Instead Israeli soldiers are dying in combat because this is a war, and Hamas is fighting back, and because Israel has no genocidal intent, even if civilians are dying incidentally. 

Every civilian casualty is surely a tragedy. But war is literally impossible without civilian casualties, and no one has ever just equated unavoidable civilian casualties with “genocide” except when it comes to the Jewish state. In fact it is demonstrable that what is occurring in Gaza is nothing resembling a “genocide.”

How many has the IDF actually killed? Into mid-May the “official” number was about 35,000 out of the about 2.2 million people in Gaza. The problem is that all casualty numbers come from Hamas itself, from the Gazan Ministry of Health (run and staffed by Hamas), which in turn gets them both from hospitals—fully infiltrated by Hamas, including physicians affiliated with Hamas—and from “trusted media sources,” by which they mean the Gaza Media Office, which is also Hamas. That a group that will torture, rape, mutilate, and behead might also lie about casualty numbers must surely be considered. Hamas has every incentive to lie: doing so furthers their propaganda war against Israel and fuels the global outrage against Israel’s military—leading even U.S. President Biden to demand Israel scale back its war due to the alleged “civilian casualties,” thus aiding Hamas’s war effort.

There have already been numerous cases where Hamas was simply caught lying. For just one, consider the widely reported October 17 explosion at the Al-Ahli hospital. Hamas immediately claimed there were 500 dead from an Israeli strike directly on the hospital. It turned out that only the parking lot was hit, not by Israel but by an errant Islamic Jihad missile, and that only maybe some dozens were killed.[17] (Some of many other examples: Hamas claimed 117 dead in the Al-Rashid Street stampede,[18] 70 dead in the Salah al-Din road explosion,[19] and 45 dead in the bombing of a Rafah refugee camp on May 26,[20] all incidents that Israel has denied, with evidence, being responsible for.)

There is also much evidence that Hamas’s numbers are, in general, faked.[21] To avoid getting caught in the weeds of the statistics, let me just cite an article by Abraham Wyner, Professor of Statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers.”[22] The anonymous blogger Elder of Ziyon, though presumably lacking the credentials of Wyner, has also done some important analyses: “‘Trusted media sources’: More Proof That Hamas Lies in its Gaza Casualty Statistics,”[23] “More Than Half, and Maybe as Many as 75%, of Gaza Deaths are Hamas Terrorists, Here’s Why,”[24] and “A Grim Milestone: The Number of Fictional Dead in Gaza passes 12,000,”[25] all of which strongly suggest that Hamas is making up numbers. In a report in mid-April, “Hamas-Run Gaza Health Ministry Admits to Flaws in Casualty Data,”[26] Hamas is quoted as admitting that not all of its casualty statistics—statistics that it had been publicizing for months, and which global media sources regularly quoted as if accurate—were in fact verifiable or accurate, and that the overall numbers could be as much as 30% lower than previously reported. Clearly, any numbers coming out of Gaza must be taken with a grain of salt, particularly when “genocide” is being alleged.

That point was only confirmed when, in mid-May, the U.N., which takes its numbers from Hamas, quietly released revised casualty figures in which they report only 25,000 “identified” (i.e. confirmed) casualties, and revised steeply downwards the numbers of “women and children.”[27] In early June, too, the Associated Press finally published its own analysis showing problems in previously reported numbers particularly concerning women and children.[28] All this suggests that the larger earlier numbers simply are not reliable, at the same time as it raises the question of just how credible the new numbers are. Remember, Hamas controls all the information and can generate any numbers they wish. Will they come out and acknowledge later, or after the war, that there were even fewer casualties after all?[29]

But suppose we grant, for the sake of argument, that even the earlier numbers are approximately accurate, even prior to the downward revision, of 35,000.[30]

Even so, the allegations of genocide are blatantly false.

Let’s begin with an observation. In the past twenty years alone there have been many conflicts in the world with significantly more casualties. In rough chronological order, from their starting dates, with some of the conflicts still ongoing, reported casualties or casualty ranges include: Afghanistan (212,000), Iraq from 2003-2011 (405,000-655,000), Darfur (300,000), Boko Haram (350,000), Syria (580,000-613,000), South Sudan (383,000), Iraq from 2013-17 (195,000), Yemen (377,000), Ethiopia (162,000-378,000), Russia-Ukraine (300,000),^[31] and, since 1996, the Democratic Republic of Congo (6,000,000).[32]  None of these make the alleged Gazan casualties any less tragic, but it does (a) provide the perspective of scale and (b) call into question the motives of the uncountably many anti-Israelists dominating so many campuses right now. Campuses have been largely quiet on every one of the conflicts above: certainly no months of rallies, protests, occupations of buildings, encampments, much less harassment of those who may have personal connections to the conflict, and only occasional invocations of the “genocide” label (even in cases which merit it!). But though this current conflict is producing just a fraction of the casualties, campuses have been disrupted with angry allegations of “genocide” from mid-October onward, before even Israel got underway on its response and the casualties started accruing. The “genocide” allegations preceded the actual response. One suspects this double standard of reaction has something to do with the fact that Israelis are involved. If so, that ought to make the very allegation of genocide suspect on its face.

To refute the charge, now, note first that the large bulk of the casualties came in the first two months of the war. Israel began bombing Gaza in mid-October, prior to its October 27 invasion. By mid-December Hamas was claiming 20,000 dead, so two months of war allegedly produced 20,000 dead; but then the next five months, to mid-May, only produced another 15,000 dead by the unrevised statistics, and as this article went to press, two months later in mid-July 2024, fewer than 4000 had been added by those same statistics. The rate of death has plummeted over the course of the war, in other words, from 10,000 per month to 3000 to under 2000. This is exactly the opposite of what one would expect, were there genocidal intent.

This chart shows the decline:

[33]

But more, and perhaps most, importantly, is the question of just who is dying.

It’s not “genocide” to kill enemy soldiers, combatants, militants, terrorists (whatever you want to call them), and Hamas conveniently doesn’t report any breakdown of “civilians vs. militants,” implying that the deaths are entirely civilian. But surely no one believes that in months of fighting the IDF has failed to kill a single Hamas fighter? Hamas members also often fight in civilian clothes—many videos document that fact—so when they are killed it’s simple to count them as “civilian.” In this way their war crime of failing to distinguish themselves from civilians efficiently also turns them into innocent civilian victims. Equally disturbing is their documented use of children as soldiers.[34] The U.N. counts as a “child” anyone under 18,[35] but that leaves room for many 16- or 17-year old combatants, or younger. How many of the “children” casualties in fact were combatants?

As of mid-May the IDF was estimating it had killed about 14,000 Hamas fighters out of the alleged 35,000 casualties at that time. If even close to accurate—and in past wars IDF figures generally proved reliable—their 1.5:1 civilian:militant ratio would be perhaps the lowest rate in all modern urban warfare. This is the case even before the revised figures drop the overall casualty numbers by 25%, sharply drop the alleged number of women and children victims, and thus reduce the civilian-militant ratio to an astonishing 0.67:1. These are ratios simply unheard of in modern warfare and, again, the exact opposite of genocide.[36]

This is not to say that there have not been many civilian casualties, each one of which is a tragedy. But context matters: civilians, tragically, die in all wars, especially in urban wars, so one must be wary of the person who just quotes the overall casualty numbers as if all are civilians and then condemns Israeli genocide. When you compare the IDF’s actions and efficiency in this war to all similar wars, you discover that in fact it is succeeding comparatively excellently in targeting militants and sparing civilians. This, too, in perhaps the most difficult urban conditions known to modern warfare, with the weaponization of hospitals, mosques, and schools, with hundreds of miles of tunnels used for military purposes beneath everything, arms stored everywhere, militants dressed in civilian clothes, and an enemy who does not follow international law.[37] Nor may we overlook the well documented fact that Hamas deliberately uses civilians as human shields, that, indeed, part of its explicit strategy is to sacrifice its civilians both to energize their fighters and to bring international pressure against Israel.[38] In that context, the achievements of the IDF look nothing short of brilliant, and brilliantly humane—and the blood of every innocent civilian, particularly in being sacrificed as a human shield, is entirely on Hamas.  

At the end of March, Jake Wallis Simons wrote, quoting John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the United States Military Academy at West Point, perhaps the world’s foremost authority on urban warfare:

Gaining exact data is impossible, but the true ratio, Spencer concluded [using mid-March data], is about 1 combatant to 1.5 civilians. By comparison, when Britain, the US and other allies destroyed Islamic State in Mosul in 2016-17, the ratio was about 1 to 2.5; and according to the UN and the EU, the global average is 1 to 9. “Given Hamas’s likely inflation of the death count, the real figure could be closer to 1 to 1,” Spencer wrote. “Either way, the number would be historically low for modern urban warfare.”[39]

These astonishing ratios conclusively refute the charge of genocide.

And yet the case gets even stronger for Israel—for Hamas’s numbers surely include many who were not killed by Israel.

They may include people who simply die of natural causes including old age, estimated to be approximately 500 per month or 3500 in the seven months up to mid-May and now 4500 through mid-July.[40] They include people killed by Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad rockets falling short, in Gaza,[41] where estimates put some 10-15% of the fired rockets in that category.[42] That would mean perhaps some 1500 such rockets by mid-May. It’s hard to know how many people have died in this way, but that would include those dozens killed at the Al-Ahli Hospital in mid-October.[43] They include people murdered by Hamas: many videos circulate of Hamas firing on its own people, to stop them from evacuating, to take over aid convoys, or to crush potential opposition. Most Israeli soldiers killed in recent months died from buildings or roads booby-trapped with explosives; how many unreported civilians have also fallen prey to these traps? All of these are reported as if innocent civilians “killed by Israel.” Remove them and just how small does the true number of civilian casualties shrink?

The Most Moral Army in the World

Whatever that number is, there’s a reason it is so astonishingly small: the many unprecedented measures the IDF takes to minimize civilian casualties even at the cost to its own soldiers’ lives. (People sometimes forget this is a war, and the other side, Hamas, both started the war with an army of as many as 40,000 trained fighters and is actively fighting back—having killed some 325 IDF soldiers as of mid-July 2024.)

For example: The IDF delayed its initial invasion of Gaza several weeks to give time for civilians to evacuate, and delayed the Rafah invasion as well. In Rafah in particular it managed to evacuate some one million civilians in under two weeks, despite many, including the United States, insisting that such a scale of evacuation would be impossible. It chose to invade Gaza instead of just carpetbombing, thus putting its soldiers at risk. It drops warning leaflets before bombing or entering combat zones—which also informs the enemy, who may now escape. It makes millions of warning phone calls, which involves maintaining a massive database at great expense of money and labor. It constantly creates safe zones and safe times and civilian evacuation routes. It sets up and runs numerous field hospitals. (It even treats injured captured Hamas terrorists in its own hospitals, sometimes on the same floor as the victims of Hamas terrorism!) And it has facilitated massive amounts of humanitarian aid, constructing various aid crossing points, building roads inside Gaza to distribute aid, and coordinating thousands of deliveries.¹ This humanitarian work comes again at tremendous cost and labor to itself, and sometimes at risk to its own soldiers, even while Hamas often steals the aid, firing on its own people as we noted. In early May, for just one example, Hamas fired rockets at the Kerem Shalom crossing killing four Israeli soldiers who were facilitating transfers of humanitarian aid. Within three days Israel repaired the crossing and reopened the flow of aid. Israeli soldiers die, in other words, to deliver humanitarian aid to their enemy, while the enemy attacks them for it. As well-known retired British officer Richard Kemp, who has extensive knowledge of the conflict, has put it, “Has any other army ever made such immense efforts to get aid in to hostile territory while fighting a war?”² I would ask the question even more broadly: Do any other countries supply their enemies at all or in any way during war? (Is Russia providing aid to Ukraine while attacking it? Is Ukraine expected to supply Russia while counterattacking? Why doesn’t anyone demand that Hamas and Hezbollah supply aid to the Israeli civilians they are attacking? Who else warns their enemies before attacking?)

The IDF is sometimes called “the most moral army in the world.” Its behavior in this war confirms that. Not to mention that every single one of the measures above alone refutes the claim of genocide. Indeed, contrary to committing genocide, Israel, as John Spencer also puts it, it is setting a “new standard” for urban warfare:

I've never known an army to take such measures to attend to the enemy's civilian population, especially while simultaneously combating the enemy in the very same buildings. In fact, by my analysis, Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history—above and beyond what international law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.[44]

All this happens while Hamas uses its citizens as human shields, uses hospitals, mosques, and schools to store weapons and fighters, builds hundreds of miles of military tunnels under literally every building, fires rockets from civilian areas and even safe zones toward Israeli civilians, and prevents people from moving out of harm’s way. Not to mention that Hamas started the war in the first place, after Israel left Gaza in 2005 to allow it to develop to its heart’s content.

The Reverse

The only people responsible for mass death in Gaza, then, and for genocide (against Jews), are Hamas—Hamas, the descendant of the same Muslim Brotherhood that contributed to the Nazis’ genocide of the Jews, the organization whose charter openly endorses the genocide of all Jews, who attempted an act of genocide on October 7, and who has openly and repeatedly declared its intentions to “repeat October 7” as many times as is necessary to remove the Jews. 

One very telling moment. Audio was released back in October of one of the Hamas men calling his parents on October 7 itself, in the home of a Jewish family he had just murdered, using the phone of the Jewish woman he had just murdered, to brag about his achievements.[45] Imagine, just for a moment, that his conversation had gone something like this: “Mom, it was painful and difficult, but we have taken the first steps toward the liberation of Palestine and for freedom and justice.” That would not change the evil status of what he, and they, had just accomplished, but it would at least allow one to pretend the movement was for something, for human rights, for freedom, for justice. Instead the (abbreviated) conversation went like this:

TERRORIST: Hello dad. Open your WhatsApp right now, and see all the killed. Look at how many I killed with my own hands, your son killed Jews!

FATHER: Allahu Akhbar, Allahu Akhbar. May God protect you.

TERRORIST: I am talking to you from the phone of a Jew, I killed her and her husband, I killed ten with my own hands.

FATHER: Allahu Akhbar.

TERRORIST: I killed ten. Ten! Ten with my own bare hands. Their blood is on my hands! Let me talk to Mom.

MOTHER: Oh, my son, may God protect you.

TERRORIST: I killed ten all by myself, mother! Mother, your son is a hero. (Talking to terrorists on the scene: Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill them!)

This young man was so, so proud of himself, sought his parents’ praise—for killing Jews, with his own hands, ten of them, look and see, I want to show you all the dead Jews, with my own hands! That is what Hamas is about: the glory and glee in mass murdering Jews, all the more delicious when you can do it “with your own hands.”

“Scholasticide” and “Cultural Genocide”

We close this section with a glance at these variant allegations. These recently coined expressions reflect academics’ efforts to accuse Israel of ever new war crimes. Genocide, period, isn’t enough; Israel is also accused of specifically targeting Gazan academics, students, educational institutions, cultural heritage sites, and so on, in a specific war on Palestinian history, identity, and through education, future. Petitions condemning Israel of these crimes earn thousands of signatures from academics around the world.[46]

Such charges, and invented crimes, are absurd on their face. Israel has literally no incentive to pursue these. It is engaged in war with Hamas; it would be a great waste of resources, not to mention a PR nightmare, were it to “target” professors or universities or archeological sites for their own sake. Israel also has complex mechanisms, and teams of lawyers, evaluating every potential military target, to ensure any candidate target is militarily-worthy and permissible by international law. Bombing academics and universities for their own sake would pass muster on neither count. Israel has enough problems with international legal and political institutions heavily biased against it to want to give its antagonists actually legitimate material to work with.

Of course universities and cultural sites have been destroyed in the war, sometimes as regrettable, if inevitable, collateral damage from the nature of war itself. But remember, too, that Hamas has militarized nearly the entire Gaza Strip. When these sites are used to store weapons or are occupied by Hamas fighters engaged in military activity they become legitimate military targets. Indeed many university students are themselves active members of Hamas’s military units. When they are targeted they are targeted for that, not for being students. If Israel were to grant refuge to fighters fortified in civilian sites, self-defense against Hamas would become impossible. And that is exactly what Israel’s enemies want.  

The ample evidence refuting the general charge of “genocide” above, combined with its prima facie absurdity, also refutes this charge.

Thus the Truth: The Jews, and Israel, have not, and never have been, perpetrators of “genocide,” not in 1948, not cumulatively, and not now in the current war against Hamas. The Palestinian population has only exploded since 1948, and in the current war Israel takes extraordinary measures to target only Hamas and minimize civilian casualties, setting “a new global standard” for urban warfare. To the contrary, the reverse is true: it is Hamas that openly endorses, and attempts to perpetrate, genocide against the Jews (“Look, Ma, I killed ten Jews!”).

Some resources

Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (2020)

Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University Press, 2010)

Jewish Virtual Library, “Jewish and Non-Jewish Population of Israel-Palestine 1517-” (https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-and-non-jewish-population-of-israel-palestine-1517-present)

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[1] https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide-convention.shtml.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azzam_Pasha_quotation. See also here for confirmation of the authenticity of the quote: https://www.meforum.org/3082/azzam-genocide-threat.

[3] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/total-casualties-arab-israeli-conflict; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Syrian_civil_war.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll.

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel.

[6] https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/site/512/default.aspx?tabID=512&lang=en&ItemID=5750&mid=3171&wversion=Staging.

[7] https://www.statista.com/chart/20645/palestine-and-israel-population-growth/.

[8]

https://twitter.com/AmyeC3/status/1715486996548943887

.

[9]

https://worldpopulation.theglobalgraph.com/p/palestine-population.html

.

[10] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Jewish-population-in-Europe-by-major-regions-1170-2009_fig1_293223019.

[11] https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-official-record-what-the-mufti-said-to-hitler/; https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2017-06-15/ty-article-magazine/revealed-photos-of-palestinian-mufti-visiting-nazi-germany/0000017f-ef6e-d0f7-a9ff-efefa25a0000; https://www.yadvashem.org/blog/adhering-to-the-historical-truth-about-the-mufti-during-the-holocaust.html. 

[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Paper_of_1939.

[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood.

[14] https://thecollegevoice.org/2024/05/08/student-statement-of-solidarity-with-the-palestinian-people/.

[15] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp.

[16] A tragically plausible alternative is that it just doesn’t care about its people and doesn’t mind sacrificing them.

[17] https://quillette.com/2023/10/25/failing-the-hamas-litmus-test/.

[18] https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2024/02/we-dont-know-exactly-what-happened-in.html.

[19] https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2024/03/journalists-know-hamas-lies-about.html.

[20] https://x.com/theisraelfiles/status/1795464267132494221.

[21] For a general overview of this fact, see https://x.com/Aizenberg55/status/1797648673964282104.

[22] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-health-ministry-fakes-casualty-numbers.

[23] https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2024/03/trusted-media-sources-more-proof-that.html.

[24] https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2024/03/more-than-half-and-maybe-as-many-as-75.html.

[25] https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-grim-milestone-number-of-fictional.html. See also a similar analysis here:

https://twitter.com/MarkZlochin/status/1778830455229366374

.

[26] https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/04/09/hamas-run-gaza-health-ministry-admits-to-flaws-in-casualty-data/.

[27] https://www.timesofisrael.com/un-drastically-revises-downward-number-of-identified-women-children-killed-in-gaza/; see also https://x.com/Aizenberg55/status/1792189635486962155.

[28] https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-gaza-deaths-women-children-e258a4c14641978a00dfb957ce348957; https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-gaza-deaths-women-children-360c6aabc03421c718d4a8452cec2c67

[29] In a similar vein, the months-long allegations of imminent or actual “famine” in Gaza (often invoked as part of the “genocide” allegations) were entirely undermined by the June 4, 2024 report by the Famine Review Committee of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which critiques and refutes earlier reports alleging famine as being inconsistent with the evidence and whose details are discussed here: https://x.com/MarkZlochin/status/1802277853905518858. Additional Columbia University research shows more than enough food has been entering the Gaza Strip: https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-806739. For the record, Israel has been facilitating the transfer of massive amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza from almost the start of the war.

[30] As this article went to press in mid-July 2024, the “official” number from Gaza was “over 38,000” (https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gaza-death-toll-how-many-palestinians-has-israels-campaign-killed-2024-05-14/). This update may alter some of the calculations below but not the conclusions.

[31] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll#Modern_(1500_AD%E2%80%93present)_wars_with_greater_than_25,000_deaths.

[32] https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/violence-democratic-republic-congo.

[33] https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2024/07/just-another-washingtonpost-lie-about.html.

[34] https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-780613; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_child_suicide_bombers_by_Palestinian_militant_groups.

[35] https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties.

[36] In mid-July, 2024, the Israel Defense Force confusingly asserted it had “killed or apprehended” 14,000 Hamas fighters, while injuring many others (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-hamas-leaders-killed.html). It is unclear whether they were “updating” and “clarifying” the totals or merely summarizing their totals from two months earlier. While these numbers, if current as of July 2024, would change the calculations in this paragraph, they would not affect the overall point as the civilian:militant ratio remains exceptionally low, even if not as low as originally suggested. 

[37] For an analysis of Hamas’s violations of numerous aspects of international law, see https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2024/06/it-is-not-only-october-7-and-hostages.html.

[38] For just a couple of illustrative quotes, all from late October 2023, shortly after the massacre: Ghazi Hamad, Hamas politburo member, said in a television interview, “Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/11/12/hamas-planning-terror-gaza-israel/). Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk also gave an interview explaining that Hamas built not bomb shelters for their civilians but “500 kilometers” of tunnels specifically to protect their fighters (https://www.memri.org/tv/hamas-official-mousa-abu-marzouk-tunnels-gaza-protect-fighters-%20not-civilians). Finally, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said in a public address, “The blood of the women, children and elderly […] we are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit, so it awakens with us resolve” (https://www.jns.org/hamas-leader-we-need-the-blood-of-women-children-and-the-elderly-of-gaza/).  

[39] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/30/israel-is-fighting-a-humane-ground-war-just-ask-experts/.

[40] The Gazan Ministry of Health, run by Hamas, apparently denies this, but there is no way to verify.

[41] https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2024/04/more-proof-israel-tells-truth-and-hamas.html.

[42] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel; https://www.ajc.org/news/what-everyone-needs-to-know-about-hamas-lie-about-a-rocket-strike-on-a-gaza-hospital.

[43] Or possibly include the nearly 500 Hamas falsely claims were killed there.

[44] https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urban-warfare-why-will-no-one-admit-it-opinion-1883286.

[45] https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-769989.

[46] See, for example

https://scholarsagainstwar.org/

and https://mesana.org/advocacy/letters-from-the-board/2024/03/11/mesa-board-joint-statement-with-caf-regarding-the-ongoing-genocidal-violence-against-the-palestinian-people-and-their-cultural-heritage-in-gaza.

1. https://x.com/COLRICHARDKEMP/status/1816796676763341262

2. https://x.com/COLRICHARDKEMP/status/1816796676763341262