Why ‘Gaza genocide’ claims equal Holocaust denial

It has become fashionable among anti-Israel zealots — including hard-left academics — to use the term “genocide” to characterize Israel’s response to the murder, rape, beheadings and kidnapping of more than 1,400 innocent Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023.

Self-proclaimed “genocide scholar” Omer Barton wrote in The New York Times this week that he knows genocide when he sees it, and he sees it in Gaza. (Not in Israel on Oct. 7, though).

The king of Jordan accused Israel of genocide on Monday, following the lead of the UN rapporteur on Palestine.

The label will no doubt be a central part of campus rallies this fall. 

But this accusation is false as a matter of fact, morality, logic and law — and a dangerous distortion of history that amounts to Holocaust denial.

It trivializes the powerful term “genocide” and applies it to nearly every war fought by democracies during the last century, especially those directed against terrorism and other forms of modern asymmetrical warfare.

By doing so, it encourages terrorism and emboldens terrorists who use civilian human shields to force their enemies into making tragic and deadly choices.

Most distressingly, it makes genocide a meaningless epithet to be invoked promiscuously by those opposed to particular wars or nations. 

The Holocaust was the personification of genocide. Its expressed aim was the destruction of the entire Jewish race, wherever they were located.

Not only did the systematic mass murder of six million Jewish civilians serve no military purpose, on many occasions the Nazis actually compromised military goals to accomplish their non-military goal of murdering every baby who had a Jewish grandparent.

They went so far as to ingather Jews from areas that were not military targets and transfer them to death camps. 

These willful and systematic efforts to exterminate an entire “race” bears absolutely no relationship to what Israel is doing in Gaza: Every civilian death in Gaza is collateral to achieving legitimate military goals.

Even those who believe that Israel has gone too far in killing a disproportionate number of Palestinian civilians must acknowledge that Israeli actions do not parallel the gas chambers and mobile killing units that characterized the Nazi genocide.

To compare these two very different efforts is to suggest one of two possible conclusions: Either the Nazis did not employ gas chambers and other systematic methods of deliberately murdering every Jew they could find; or the Israeli government’s military campaign is morally indistinguishable from the Nazi death camps.

What Israel is doing is in no way comparable to the genocide planned and implemented at the Wannsee Conference of 1942. 

It is comparable, though not in degree, to the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths caused by American and British military actions following D-Day — including firebombing Dresden, Berlin and Tokyo and dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

These military attacks were designed to destroy Nazism, defeat the armies that had started World War II and prevent a recurrence — just as Israel’s actions in Gaza are designed to destroy Hamas and prevent a recurrence of Oct. 7.

If anything, the allied bombings were worse: They were not directed primarily at military targets, but at civilian populations in an effort to demoralize them and to get them to demand surrender.

The number and proportion of civilian casualties in those Allied operations well exceeded even the exaggerated numbers provided by the Hamas health authorities.

In other words, accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza constitutes a false claim that the United States did practiced it, too, in the heroic battle to defeat Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.

So did many other nations that have waged wars since the end of World War II.

We may still compare and contrast what Israel is doing now to what the Allies did then. Any such comparison favors Israel. 

Consider the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths, which is lower for Israel than for any army facing comparable enemies — especially those using civilians as human shields to protect their combatants.

In addition to bragging about using civilians as martyrs, Hamas hides its terrorists in protected tunnels while requiring civilians to remain above ground and vulnerable to attack.

Israel gains nothing and loses much whenever it kills a civilian in the course of trying to neutralize terrorists — but Hamas gains sympathy every time Israel accidentally kills a civilian, especially a child.

That is the Hamas strategy, and those who falsely accuse Israel of genocide incentivize the continuing use of this murderous gambit.

Alan Dershowitz is a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School. His most recent book is “The Preventive State.”