Of Gaza, genocides, and blood libels

Gaza was and remains a humanitarian tragedy of enormous, perhaps incalculable dimensions. Thousands of Palestinian civilians, women, children, infants, and the elderly, were killed there alongside thousands more Hamas terrorists and their accomplices in the two-year war that was sparked by Hamas’s savagery against Israeli civilians on 7 October. Gaza’s population today is living in the wrecked remains of what were once their homes, hoping for an eventual return to some level of normalcy. 

All this is heartbreakingly true. But what occurred in Gaza was not a genocide. And no amount of inflammatory repetition of what the Israeli-American author Yossi Klein Halevi accurately refers to as a blood libel can make it so. 

When the South African Nobel laureate JM Coetzee refuses to take part in a Jerusalem literary festival on the grounds that “for the past two years the State of Israel has been conducting a genocidal campaign in Gaza that has been vastly disproportionate to the murderous provocation of 7 October 2023”, he knowingly misapplies the legal concept of genocide. 

Moreover, by downplaying the 7 October savagery as nothing more than a “murderous provocation”, Coetzee effectively seeks to absolve Hamas of responsibility for the carnage that followed. On 7 October, Hamas set out to kill as many Jewish men, women, children, and infants on the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border as possible, knowing full well that its actions would trigger a harsh Israeli response. 

But for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad murdering approximately 1 200 people that day, raping and violating Israeli women and girls, and brutally abducting more than 240 hostages into Gaza, there would have been no war. Coetzee, the South African government, and far too many others across the globe refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel’s subsequent retaliation against Hamas and instead insist on depicting it as an act of “genocide”. 

Genocide is not an abstract, amorphous term subject to academic or philosophical debate. Nor is it a vitriolic polemical missile to be hurled indiscriminately for maximum rhetorical effect. On the contrary, genocide has a specific, narrow legal definition, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December of 1948 and ratified by 153 countries, including South Africa, however belatedly, in 1998. 

Under Article II of the Genocide Convention, genocide is defined as one or more of certain specified acts if, and only if, they are “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”. 

More than two million Palestinians lived in Gaza on 6 October 2023. More than two million Palestinians live there today. The contemplation of all but a handful of extremist Israeli political and military leaders throughout the war that more than two million Palestinians would still be living in Gaza after the war effectively undercuts the charge of “genocide”. 

In the 2007 case of Bosnia and Herzegovina versus Serbia and Montenegro, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that, “The dolus specialis, the specific intent to destroy the group in whole or in part, has to be convincingly shown by reference to particular circumstances, unless a general plan to that end can be convincingly demonstrated to exist; and for a pattern of conduct to be accepted as evidence of its existence, it would have to be such that it could only point to the existence of such intent.” 

Simply put, Israel’s motivation ‒ its dolus specialis or specific intent, as it were ‒ for going to war against Hamas was not to destroy the Palestinian presence in Gaza. Rather, its motivations for waging that war were to prevent Hamas from ever again slaughtering Israeli civilians as its members did on 7 October and to free the captive hostages. 

The ICJ also held in some detail in Bosnia versus Serbia that an intent to commit genocide could not be inferred even in the face of a policy of “ethnic cleansing” ‒ let alone ruminations regarding such a theoretical policy – or of forced displacement of members of a protected group without a clear showing that such policy was part of an intention to destroy that group in accordance with the Genocide Convention. 

As the ICJ held in that case, even ethnic cleansing “can only be a form of genocide within the meaning of the Convention, if it corresponds to or falls within one of the categories of acts prohibited by Article II of the Convention. Neither the intent, as a matter of policy, to render an area ‘ethnically homogeneous’, nor the operations that may be carried out to implement such policy, can as such be designated as genocide: the intent that characterises genocide is ‘to destroy, in whole or in part’ a particular group, and deportation or displacement of the members of a group, even if effected by force, is not necessarily equivalent to destruction of that group, nor is such destruction an automatic consequence of the displacement.” 

In other words, one cannot as a matter of applicable international law infer an intent to commit genocide from actions or even a pattern or patterns of conduct that are the result of another motivation, such as, in the case of Israel in its war against Hamas, the intent to eliminate a murderous terrorist organisation, Hamas, as an existential threat to Israeli civilians. 

Hamas’s intent in perpetrating the 7 October onslaught, on the other hand, is not in question either. “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,” reads Hamas’s 1988 Covenant. Replete with antisemitic tropes and citing the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as authority, the Covenant makes abundantly clear that Hamas’s goal is not just to obliterate the State of Israel but to eliminate all “warmongering Jews” from the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. This determination – in contrast to Israel’s motivation after 7 October – falls four square within the legal definition of genocide. 

Let me be clear. I am and have long been an outspoken supporter of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, both in Gaza and the West Bank. Despite the respective intransigencies and bellicosities of both the Netanyahu government and Hamas, I continue to believe that the only way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is through an eventual two-state solution. But calling Gaza a “genocide” is another matter altogether. 

The proponents of the latter proposition, with the help of “useful idiots” like Coetzee, seek to demonise and delegitimise not the Netanyahu government or its policies, which richly deserve opprobrium, but the State of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants as a whole. 

This is antisemitism in one of its most egregious forms. 

I am not arguing here that the Israel-Hamas war was always waged appropriately or proportionally. Nor am I suggesting that Israel cannot be accused of or should not be held accountable for other alleged violations of international law. 

But those are entirely separate questions from whether Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, which I submit it has not. And continuously charging Israel with “genocide” only serves the interests of Hamas and its international acolytes whose nefarious agenda was and is to wipe Israel off the map, displace or subjugate its Jewish population, and replace it with an Islamist Palestine. 

• Menachem Z Rosensaft is Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, Lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School, and General Counsel Emeritus of the World Jewish Congress. His most recent book is Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz.