Is Israel Guilty of Genocide?
By Col. Lawrence Franklin (Ret.), Al Bienenfeld
Israel’s enemies are charging the world’s only Jewish nation with committing genocide. This is a lie.
Genocide as a word and internationally accepted concept did not exist before 1944. It was specifically created to describe how the N**is sought to eliminate the entirety of the Jewish population in Europe. Resting on that singular historical example, the United Nations Office to Prevent Genocide defines this crime as any acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
This narrow definition under international law consists of two principal prerequisites: intent and a specific group’s physical destruction. This was certainly the case when Hitler almost entirely exterminated European Jewry and when the Hutu government massacred Rwanda’s Tutsi population in 1994.
Currently, there are politically motivated and rhetorically irresponsible charges of genocide leveled at Israel. These disingenuous accusations are a weapon of war that terrorist groups such as Hamas and its allies are using to achieve strategic political victory in the struggle for universal information dominance. Israel’s actions in Gaza were a response to Hamas’s October 7. 2023 assault against a mostly defenseless civilian population. Consequently, it seems incongruent that anyone is granting credibility to these anti-Israel charges of genocide rather than seeing them as pure antisemitism.
It's not just Israel’s open foes that claimed that Israel’s military operations have inflicted disproportionate damage upon Gaza’s civilian population. Even those who acknowledge her right to self-defense have chimed in. And while the Western media obscure Israel’s efforts to show accurately the scope of Hamas’s atrocities against Israeli civilians on October 7, these same outlets lovingly portray Hamas’s inflated civilian death numbers for Gaza. This scandalous anti-Israel orientation has successfully pressured the White House to demand that the Israeli Defense Force (“IDF”) give up its strategically advantageous position and yield to demands for a ‘short of victory’ ceasefire.
Israel’s ostensible “supporters” are quiet about the complexities of urban guerilla warfare against a determined, dug-in, well-armed adversary that invites attacks because it uses Gazan civilians as human shields in a propaganda war that’s more important than the war on the ground. The reports also ignore the advanced weaponry Hamas received from Iran, such as attack drones, mobile rocket launchers, long-range sniper rifles, and Improvised Explosive Devices (IED). The IDF’s task is further complicated because its mission is to bring home any surviving hostages still in Hamas’s hands.
Given the dishonesty and dissimulation around Israel, how do we refute the genocide charge? For this, we turn to two legitimate professional soldiers of the highest caliber: Col. Richard Kemp (ret.) and Col. John W. Spencer.
Colonel Richard Kemp, an internationally known soldier and veteran of multiple wars, has written extensively about IDF military operations. He has been living in Israel for the last several months, observing the IDF’s Gaza campaign. His report details the incredible complexity involved in prosecuting the war and the IDF’s enormous efforts to minimize civilian harm.
In the linked essay, Kemp rebuts those who criticize the IDF’s conduct in the Gaza Strip and rejects suggestions that Israel should emulate the rules of engagement and tactics US forces used in Iraq and Afghanistan. He wryly states, “Given the outcomes of both campaigns, perhaps neither provides the ideal template for how Jihadists can be defeated.”
Kemp further claims that critics have not proffered any realistic proposals that could reduce civilian losses in Gaza’s concentrated urban environment while allowing Israel to achieve a military victory. He notes that Hamas’s brand of warfare further complicates the IDF effort. Hamas uses schools, hospitals, and mosques for weapons storage, fighting positions, and access to their 400+ miles of tunnels. Hamas also uses office and commercial facilities, shops, and residential buildings for these purposes.
John Spencer, the US Army War College’s Professor of Military Science, addresses another standard critique against Israel, which is the claim that it violates the legal principle of “proportionality” in war. This concept concerns itself with minimizing harm to a civilian population, requiring commanders to weigh the anticipated military advantage against the expected collateral damage when planning an attack to ensure the results are not disproportional to a legitimate military objective.
However, there are limits on the constraints proportionality places on a military. Proportionality as a Law of Armed Conflict principle prohibits an attack only if the attacker concludes beforehand that the incidental or collateral damage will be excessive compared to the anticipated military advantage. The amount of collateral damage is irrelevant if the response was directed toward a legitimate military objective. It comes down to intent.
The best way to avoid civilian casualties is through advanced warning and evacuation. This obviously risks operational failure because it tells warns the enemy about an attack’s timing and location. The U.S. did not do this in the 2003 Iraq invasion, which involved major urban battles. It also did not do so before the first battle of Fallujah, giving warning only before the second battle of Fallujah, six months later.
Col. Spencer asserts that “Israel provided days and then weeks of warnings, as well as time for civilians to evacuate northern Gaza” before initiating the IDF main air-ground attack. The IDF used “calling and texting ahead of an air strike as well as roof-knocking, where they drop small munitions on the roof of a building notifying everyone to evacuate the building before a strike.” He adds that,
No military has ever implemented any of these practices in war before.
The IDF has also air-dropped flyers to give civilians instructions on when and how to evacuate, including with safe corridors. [snip] Israel has dropped over 520,000 pamphlets, and broadcast over radio and through social media messages to provide instruction for civilians to leave combat areas.
Israel's use of real phone calls to civilians in combat areas (19,734), SMS texts (64,399) and pre-recorded calls (almost 6 million) to provide instructions on evacuations is also unprecedented.
The IDF also conducted daily four-hour pauses over multiple consecutive days of the war to allow civilians to leave active combat areas.
Despite the unique challenges Israel faces in its war against Hamas, it has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other military in history.It has met the rules of proportionality by ensuring that every attack had a primary military goal and, because of its enemy’s deliberate decision to embed itself amongst civilians, it has gone above and beyond all moral military principles to shield enemy civilians from the effects of its war plans. The charges of genocide are demonstrably false.
I will be posting Colonel Richard Kemp’s article from January on to minimize civilian harm.
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