Bret Stephens
No, Israel Is Not
Committing Genocide in Gaza
July 22, 2025
Opinion Columnist
It may seem harsh to
say, but there is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing
genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions
are truly genocidal — if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation
of Gazans — why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly? Why not,
say, hundreds of thousands of deaths, as opposed to the nearly 60,000 that
Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatant
and civilian deaths, has cited so far in nearly two years of war?
It’s not that Israel
lacks the capacity to have meted vastly greater destruction than what it has
inflicted so far. It is the leading military power of its region, stronger now
that it has decimated Hezbollah and humbled Iran. It could have bombed without
prior notice, instead of routinely warning Gazans
to evacuate areas it intended to strike. It could have bombed without putting
its own soldiers, hundreds of whom have died in
combat, at risk.
It isn’t that Israel has
been deterred from striking harder by the presence of its hostages in Gaza.
Israeli intelligence is said to have a fairly good idea of where those hostages
are being held, which is one reason, with tragic exceptions, relatively few
have died from Israeli fire. And it knows that, as brutal as the hostages’ captivity has been, Hamas has
an interest in keeping them alive.
Nor is it that Israel lacks diplomatic
cover. President Trump has openly envisaged requiring all Gazans to leave the
territory, repeatedly warning that “all hell” would break out in Gaza if Hamas
didn’t return the hostages. As for the threat of economic boycotts, the Tel
Aviv Stock Exchange has been the world’s best-performing major
stock index since Oct. 7. 2023. With due respect to the risk of Irish boycotts,
Israel is not a country facing a fundamental economic threat. If anything, it’s
the boycotters who stand to suffer.
In short, the first
question the anti-Israel genocide chorus needs to answer is: Why isn’t the
death count higher?
The answer, of course,
is that Israel is manifestly not committing genocide, a legally specific and
morally freighted term that is defined by the United Nations convention on
genocide as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
Note the words “intent”
and “as such.” Genocide does not mean simply “too many civilian deaths” — a
heartbreaking fact of nearly every war, including the one in Gaza. It means
seeking to exterminate a category of people for no other reason than that they
belong to that category: the Nazis and their partners killing Jews in the
Holocaust because they were Jews or the Hutus slaughtering the Tutsis in the
Rwandan genocide because they were Tutsi. When Hamas invaded on Oct. 7,
intentionally butchering families in their homes and young people at a music
festival, they also murdered Israelis “as such.”
By contrast, the fact
that over a million German civilians died in World War II — thousands of them
in appalling bombings of cities like Hamburg and Dresden — made them victims of
war but not of genocide. The aim of the Allies was to defeat the Nazis for
leading Germany into war, not to wipe out Germans simply for being German.
In response, Israel’s inveterate
critics note the scale of destruction in Gaza. They also point to a handful of
remarks by a few Israeli politicians dehumanizing Gazans and promising brutal
retaliation. But furious comments in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities
hardly amount to a Wannsee conference,
and I am aware of no evidence of an Israeli plan to deliberately target and
kill Gazan civilians.
As for the destruction
in Gaza, it is indeed immense. There are important questions to be asked about
the tactics Israel has used, most recently when it comes to the chaotic food
distribution system it has attempted to set up as a way of depriving Hamas of
control of the food supply. And hardly any military in history has gone to war
without at least some of its soldiers committing war crimes. That
includes Israel in this war — and America in nearly all of
our wars, including World War II, when some of our greatest generation bombed schools accidentally or murdered P.O.W.s in cold blood.
But bungled humanitarian
schemes or trigger-happy soldiers or strikes that hit the wrong target or
politicians reaching for vengeful sound bites do not come close to adding up to
genocide. They are war in its usual tragic dimensions.
What is unusual about
Gaza is the cynical and criminal way Hamas has chosen to wage war. In Ukraine,
when Russia attacks with missiles, drones or artillery, civilians go
underground while the Ukrainian military stays aboveground to fight. In Gaza,
it’s the reverse: Hamas hides and feeds and preserves itself in its vast warren
of tunnels rather than open them to civilians for protection.
These tactics, which are
war crimes in themselves, make it difficult for Israel to achieve its war aims:
the return of its hostages and the elimination of Hamas as a military and
political force so that Israel may never again be threatened with another Oct.
7. Those twin aims were and remain entirely justifiable — and would bring the
killing in Gaza to an end if Hamas simply handed over the hostages and
surrendered. Those are demands one almost never hears from Israel’s supposedly
evenhanded accusers.
It’s also worth asking
how the United States would operate in similar circumstances. As it happens, we
know. In 2016 and 2017, under Barack Obama and Trump, the United States aided
the government of Iraq in retaking the city of Mosul, which was captured by the
Islamic State three years earlier and turned into a booby-trapped, underground
fortress. Here’s a description in The Times of the way the
war was waged to eliminate ISIS.
As Iraqi forces have advanced,
American airstrikes have at times leveled entire blocks —
including the one in Mosul Jidideh this month that residents said left as many as
200 civilians dead. At the same time, the Islamic State fighters
have used masses of civilians as human shields, and have been indiscriminate
about sniper and mortar fire.
This fight, carried out over nine
months, had broad bipartisan and international support. By some estimates, it
left as many as 11,000 civilians
dead. I don’t recall any campus protests.
Some readers may say
that even if the war in Gaza isn’t genocide, it has gone on too long and needs
to end. That’s a fair point of view, shared by a majority of Israelis.
So why does the argument over the word “genocide” matter? Two reasons.
First, while some
pundits and scholars may sincerely believe the genocide charge, it is also used
by anti-Zionists and antisemites to
equate modern Israel with Nazi Germany. The effect is to license a new wave of
Jew hatred, stirring enmity not only for the Israeli government but also for
any Jew who supports Israel as a genocide supporter. It’s a tactic Israel
haters have pursued for years with inflated or bogus charges of Israeli massacres or war crimes that, on close inspection, weren’t. The
genocide charge is more of the same but with deadlier effects.
Second, if genocide — a
word that was coined only in the 1940s — is to retain its status as a uniquely
horrific crime, then the term can’t be promiscuously applied to any military
situation we don’t like. Wars are awful enough. But the abuse of the term “genocide”
runs the risk of ultimately blinding us to real ones when they unfold.
The war in Gaza should be brought to
an end in a way that ensures it is never repeated. To call it a genocide does
nothing to advance that aim, except to dilute the meaning of a word we cannot
afford to cheapen.
