Bret Stephens is in no way owed a favor by the Israelis.
The opinion columnist for The New York Times took to The US newspaper of record’s pages yesterday to make his most recent bizarre claim, “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza.”
Nevermind that numerous international organizations, including Amnesty International and various UN organizations, have determined that Israel is doing exactly that. Stephens is more knowledgeable than most of these organizations, which hardly ever take the G-word seriously. And he’ll explain why.
Stephens makes a clear request in the very first sentence of his Times article, which should perhaps be followed by an aneurysm-provoking trigger warning for readers who are aneurystically prone. “If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal, if it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans, why hasn’t it been more methodical and significantly more deadly”?
Of course, it would seem that the Israeli military’s nearly comprehensive destruction of the Gaza Strip would be somewhat “methodical” due to the bombardment of homes, hospitals, schools, and anything else that could be bombed. Stephens cites the official Palestinian death count of “nearly 60, 000” in less than two years and wonders why there are “not, say, hundreds of thousands of deaths” because of the perceived insufficient deadlines of Israel’s ongoing “actions.”
The anti-Israel genocide chorus should be asked, “Why isn’t the death count higher, he continues, saying””” in his ode to a higher standard.
While Stephens himself needs to know why he thinks killing 60 000 people is a big deal, one of the many questions is. Israel killed at least 17, 400 children in Gaza as of November 2024, but it appears that this is not “malevolent” enough. Additionally, a study that was published in the Lancet medical journal more than a year ago suggested that Gaza’s actual death toll could already be higher than 186, 000. How does “hundreds of thousands” work?
Stephens presents his own statement, which states that “Israel is clearly not committing genocide,” rather than waiting for an answer from the “anti-Israel genocide chorus.” Stephens then goes on to say that “I am aware of no evidence of an Israeli plan to deliberately target and kill Gazan civilians” in response to the UN’s definition of the term “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.
Objectively speaking, this is equivalent to saying that there is no proof that the owners of a chicken slaughterhouse intended to deliberately end the lives of the poultry therein. If you don’t intentionally aim to kill civilians, you don’t kill 17,400 children in 13 months by accident, and you don’t bomb hospitals and ambulances repeatedly.
However, bombs are not the only thing to worry about. Genocide is also committed by forced starvation. Another question that Stephens might address is how intentionally denying a population of two million people the food and water needed for human survival does not mean that they are trying to “destroy” that group. Four children among the at least 15 Palestinians who died from starvation were reported by Gaza health officials alone on Thursday.
More than 1, 000 Palestinians have died in attempts to purchase food from the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) since the end of May. This obscene organization, supported by Israel and the US, not only concentrates large numbers of Palestinians who are starving in one location for the Israeli army to use it to mowing them off, but it also advances Israel’s US-backed plan to forcefully expel the remaining Palestinian population.
Stephens does not even bother to mention Gaza’s “chaotic food distribution system,” but he contends that “bungled humanitarian schemes, trigger-happy soldiers, strikes that hit the wrong target, or [Israeli] politicians reaching for vengeful sound bites” do not even come close to being considered a genocide.
Yet Stephens refuses to acknowledge that Israel itself has always been a genocidal endeavor in his campaign against the use of the G-word in the Gaza area. Before the formal establishment of the state of Israel on Palestinian land in 1948, a process that involved mass murder and the destruction of hundreds of villages, Zionists were well aware of the necessity to evict the majority of Palestine’s indigenous population. A quarter of a million people were converted into refugees.
Israel has since then engaged in what is essentially a genocidal strategy, as evidenced by Golda Meir’s famous claim that the Palestinians “did not exist” in her famous attempt to annihilate them both physically and conceptually. In fact, Israel’s status as a Jewish settler-colonial state is based on the statement that it has the intention to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such.”
Let’s disregard history and reality, though. Stephens warns against using the term “genocide” as a pretext for any military situation we don’t like if the word still refers to itself as a uniquely horrific crime.
The Israeli military has long been associated with The New York Times and a number of other US corporate media outlets, both of which attempt to sanitize Israeli atrocities as self-defense. However, Stephens’ genocidal journalism is also uniquely horrific because Israel is now carrying out a uniquely horrific crime in Gaza with the firm support of the world superpower.
Source: Aljazeera
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