Recently, people from Joe Rogan to U.N. diplomats have argued that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, with Rogan going so far as to compare Israel’s actions to the Holocaust.
The war in Gaza is in direct response to the catastrophic terrorist attack in Israel waged by Hamas on October 7, 2023, that killed 1,200 Israelis and others, with another 240 taken hostage. While the civilian death toll in Gaza is horrific, the scope, scale, and intent behind Israel’s defensive actions in Gaza are not genocide.
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the atrocity, in part, as “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”
Critics of Israel confuse the brutality of the war in Gaza with the intent to destroy the Palestinians, but while all war is brutal not all warfare amounts to genocide. Nor must one defend every tactical mistake made by Israel, such as the recent strike against aid workers in Gaza, to realize there is no equivalency between the war in Gaza and the Holocaust.
Since the war’s inception, estimates are that 32,000 people have been killed in Gaza and among them 13,000 are terrorist fighters. The total population of Gaza is approximately 2.3 million. This means roughly 0.8 percent of the civilian population has been killed during the war, including hundreds if not thousands that have been slain by misfired rockets from Hamas that land in Gaza. In contrast, prior to World War 2, the Jewish population of Europe was 9.5 million, but by the end of that conflict over six million Jews had been slaughtered, or roughly 63 percent of all Jews on the continent, and 40 percent of the world’s total Jewish inhabitants.
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The civilian death rate in Gaza is rooted in two factors – the area is among the most densely populated on earth, and Hamas uses the civilian population there as human shields, itself a war crime. This is directly at odds with how Jews were targeted and murdered on an industrial scale across Europe as scapegoats for a fascist ideology. Moreover, Israel has the firepower to level Gaza and kill every living soul there but has gone to excruciating lengths to avoid killing civilians, putting its own troops in greater danger as a result.
Nor has Israel sought to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from Gaza, as the Nazis did the Jews from Europe and as Hamas does the Jews from Israel. Instead, Israel has declared it will oversee security in the strip after the war to prevent further acts of terrorism, not unlike the U.S. occupation of Japan and Germany following World War 2. Israel has also repeatedly called upon Hamas to surrender and free the hostages — including American citizens, — but Hamas refuses on both counts. Instead, Hamas believes the longer the war drags on and the more civilians that are killed, the greater the pressure on Israel to cease its operations.
Claims of genocide in Gaza are as baseless as those against the United States versus Japan, which involved the firebombing of Tokyo that killed more than 100,000 people and left over 1 million homeless, and the use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed approximately 150,000 across both cities. Those bombings saved lives by forcing Japan, itself the aggressor like Hamas, to surrender, and prevented a contested invasion of the Japanese home islands that would have been the bloodiest battle of the war. By destroying Hamas as a military fighting force, Israel will also save lives by avoiding future wars waged against it, given that Hamas has publicly pledged to commit additional attacks, consistent with its goal of destroying Israel.
More recently, in the fight against ISIS, the U.S. and its allies waged a fierce campaign in the Iraqi city of Mosul, an ISIS stronghold with a population of approximately 1.6 million. The fighting left the city gutted with an estimated 11,000 dead civilians, or nearly 0.7 percent of the population, but no one seriously argued the coalition committed genocide in Mosul. In Gaza, to avoid civilian casualties, Israel has often used ground troops to rid hospitals of Hamas fighters, a far riskier tactic for the Israelis than simply bombing them from the air, which is what the U.S. did when ISIS operated out of a hospital in Mosul in 2017. In fact, claims of Israel launching an airstrike against the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City in October turned out to be false — a fake news story eagerly amplified by certain American media outlets. Instead, it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that struck outside the hospital, killing roughly 100 Palestinians.
In a recent interview with an Israeli newspaper discussing how he would have responded to the October 7th attack, former President Donald Trump noted, “I would act very much the same way as you did. You would have to be crazy not to. Only a fool would not do that.”
Unfortunately, as the war in Gaza rages on, foolishness and false claims abound.
No country on earth would allow Hamas to remain in power next door to it after what took place on October 7th. As a civilized people, Israel must do all that it can to continue to avoid civilian deaths in Gaza, while achieving its legitimate objectives against a genocidal terrorist group bent on its destruction.
10% of the population in Gaza has been killed and about 20% has been injured (this is using Israeli numbers). If we go by Palestine’s then the estimates are much higher.
I am not sure what percent of a population must be killed to constitutes a genocide.
So Joe Rogan isn’t that far off by saying that they are “committing a genocide”. This would suggest that if they remain on the same trajectory – there will no be many “physically-abled) Gazans that exist.
Have they officially committed a genocide? I would lean towards no, but it could be in the horizon if those numbers continue to grow.
Israel is absolutely committing genocide in Gaza and they are also bombing embassies in an attempt to try and drag Iran into war. What else would you call what Israel is doing in Gaza? Is the Maine Wire merely trying to appease their Jewish masters and the jew controlled GOP? That’s very weak.
Seems like the Jewish lobby has paid another writer to propagate for them. Sad that the author has no moral compass or sense of humanity. Keep serving your Jewish overlords. Maybe you’ll get another $10,000 check
For Esau and others: Muhammaden Muslims over the 1,400 years since the fabrication of their barbaric “religion” have killed 270 million people (60 million Christians, 80 million Hindus, 10 million Buddhists and 120 million Africans). It’s known as the “Tears of Jihad”.
Israel is doing the rest of the world a favor by eliminating Hamas…although they’re only one of many jihadist groups. No one wants collateral damgae of innocents, but that’s a fact of war.
Btw, here’s a bit of a history lesson for those who support the fake Palestinians, a concept created by Yassar Arafat: https://barenakedislam.com/2024/04/03/a-little-history-lesson-for-the-free-free-palestine-muslim-and-far-left-ignoramuses/
Joshua Filler might widen his perspective by reading the following article:
October 21, 2023
The Liberty Beacon
ISRAEL: The State That “Has The Right To Defend Itself” From Unarmed Women & Children
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009.
…Today, Israel uses Hamas as a means to and end. Their goal is to remove what’s left of Palestine off the face of the earth, and they purposefully allowed Hamas to attack them on October 7th so they could justify an unprecedented bombing campaign that is nothing short of ethnic cleansing and genocide.”
Why don’t we just remove ourselves from the debacle. Stop sending billions to Israel and mind our own business? Let them duke it out on their own. We have more than enough problems right here. More than likely this won’t happen as the jewish banker/pols that control the US won’t allow it.
Lies. It is a genocide and a crime against humanity.
More jew war crimes! 72% of dead in Gaza are women and children. Fact!
Israeli Strikes in Rafah Kill 22, Including 18 Children
Anti-War
22 Apr 2024
“Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Sunday that the number of Palestinians killed in the Strip has reached 34,097, and 76,980 more have been wounded. The death toll is considered a low estimate since it doesn’t take into account people who are dead under the rubble”
Yes josh, you genocide apologist. It is a genocide!
‘Israel kills dozens of academics, destroys every university in the Gaza Strip [EN/AR]’
Relief Web
20 Jan 2024
‘UN calls for investigation into mass graves uncovered at two Gaza hospitals raided by Israel’
AP news
23 Apr 2024
‘Gaza Could Surpass Famine Thresholds in Six Weeks, WFP Official Says’
US News
24 Apr 2024