There's no magic number of deaths that makes it a genocide in Gaza

The Hill

2 days ago

There is a famous scene in 'Schindler's List,' where Liam Neeson, playing Oskar Schindler, looks at his personal possessions and realizes that he could have saved more Jews from death. Schindler looks at his gold Nazi Party pin and laments he could have saved one more person if he had sold it off.
The Jews he did save, however, quote from the Talmud, telling him, 'He who saves one life, saves the world entire.'
Countless books, movies, tv shows, plays, documentaries, museums exhibits, speeches and more have been dedicated to teaching Americans about the Holocaust and how to identify the warning signs so that it can never happen again. So it is perplexing and angering to many Americans that they should see the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and be told that this doesn't qualify as a genocide.
The New York Times ran a column by Bret Stephens in which he argued that it is not a genocide, on the grounds that a genocide would be 'more methodical and vastly more deadly.' But the idea that a genocide can only qualify as a genocide if it mirrors the horror of the Holocaust goes against the very teachings that countless survivors, professors, scholars and artists have warned us about. Martin Niemöller's poem ' First They Came ' was an explicit warning that you cannot wait to hit some magic number before a mass killing becomes a genocide.
The Rohingya genocide has resulted in 43,000 deaths at most, and yet we have no problem calling it a genocide. The same goes for the Yazidis, Bosnians and other victims of death campaigns over the years. It's a bizarre argument for the Israelis and their supporters to make, that the killing of Palestinians is not genocide just because it could be so much worse.
Even stranger is the notion that genocides have to be 'methodical.' Yes, the Holocaust showed a new level of human hatred when the Nazis turned executions into an organized process like something one might see in a factory. But as we saw in Rwanda, that is not always the case. The same can be said for the Armenian genocide, where forced deportations included death marches and mass starvation in addition to mass executions.
And speaking of mass starvation, we turn to Gaza. After the horrific Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, Israel did kill thousands of civilians (mostly women and children) via bombings while claiming it was fighting the terrorist group. This was an already weak argument, because many other countries have fought terror groups and insurgencies over the last two decades while going out of the way to minimize civilian deaths (or at least trying to). Today, even Israeli organizations are accusing their government of making little effort to differentiate between civilians and terrorists and allowing the civilian population to be starved to fight terrorism.
In the history of the world, sieges have been used to break people's will. But in the modern era, one has to question the morality, let alone the effectiveness, of starvation as a tool of war. Even now, historians are even looking back to reevaluate man-made famines or forced starvations to see if they qualify as genocides.
During the Siege of Leningrad, the Germans used mass starvation as a weapon to force the capitulation. One million Russians were said to have starved to death during that siege. The Holodomor famine in Ukraine is labeled a genocide because it was man-made, by the Soviet regime, used in part as a weapon to weaken Ukrainian independence movements. One can even make an argument that the British mass-export of foods away from indigenous people, as in the Irish famine and Bengal famines, qualifies as genocide.
The Israelis have every justification to fight a war against Hamas. The organization has always governed Gaza in bad faith, and the people who suffered the most were the people who voted them in during the 2000s, thinking that it would help them.
But Israel's argument that as a consequence anything goes — that withholding food and medicine from Gaza and shooting at people who try to get food somehow hurts Hamas — is ludicrous.
It is even more insane to insinuate that those who are looking to end the suffering of civilians are Hamas supporters. Is Mandy Patinkin a Hamas supporter because he has spoken out against Israel's actions?
Hamas, a terrorist organization, will be a threat as long as it has a supply of weapons and the illusion of political power. A great way to undermine them would be to provide Palestinians with the security, prosperity and peace Hamas has failed to deliver. Families in Gaza don't care about politics — they care about keeping their children alive.
It's these pictures of starving children that Israel can't argue with. The control of access points and reported massacres of civilians at food stations fall in line with many of the genocides mentioned above. We can argue about one-state versus two-state solutions all day. We can argue the best way to combat Hamas and eradicate its power. We can easily agree that Israel has every right to defend itself. But, because most Americans received the education we did about the Holocaust from survivors, teachers, artists and academics, we can also argue that what's happening in Gaza qualifies as a genocide against the Palestinians.
We were taught 'Never Again' to make sure it never happens again. That's why millions of Americans, from all backgrounds, have accused Israel of genocide.