Strong Words
Photo by Sabih Jafri
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
Genocide is a word I rarely use without thinking of the decimation of two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, by Nazi Germany. It is a word no one used until after then. It was coined by a Polish lawyer who could find no existing word to describe what had been done to his family, to millions of families like his.
Scholars have since applied that word, under the legal definition of the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide, to describe conflicts forward and backward in time, forty-nine times. The scope of conflicts range from as few killed as the forty by the Uruguayan Army in 1831 to eradicate the last of the Charrúa, to as many as the seven million Jews of the Holocaust.
Some would add a fiftieth to the list: the Israeli grandchildren of the Holocaust. Grandchildren of the Holocaust responding to an attack last fall by a Palestinian-elected government whose chartering document calls for extermination of the Jews particularly in Israel but also anywhere in the world.
The Israeli government says the war in Gaza is an existential defense against a Hamas government that vows slaughter inside Israel again and again until every Jew is dead or driven from the land. The Hamas government, and increasingly world opinion, believes that Israel doesn’t care if it has to commit genocide to save itself from genocide.
If the Israelis are intending a genocide of the Palestinians, they are doing a terrible job. John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, believes
“Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that’s fought an urban war.
“In fact, as someone who has served two tours in Iraq and studied urban warfare for over a decade, Israel has taken precautionary measures even the United States did not do during its recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Spencer says Israel first provided days, and then weeks, of warnings before starting its major attacks of urban areas. They called and texted civilians ahead of airstrikes, and began those strikes with a practice called roof-knocking: dropping small munitions on building rooftops so people could get out before the big ones came.
“No military,” Spencer says, “has ever implemented any of these practices in war before.”
Hamas, on the other hand, is doing a much better job at killing Palestinians. Its whole military-industrial complex is set up with the intention that civilians die before they do. They hope to draw fire while hiding behind women, children, and the elderly. They count on it. The more civilians who die while soldiers scurry tunnel to tunnel beneath them (relative safety they deny civilians), the better.
The more children maimed or killed, the better.
And, it seems to be working. Most of the United States and much of the world initially were appalled at the Hamas slaughter, rape, torture, and kidnapping of innocents. But most of the United States and much of the world suffer from ADHD: that was last October’s news. Today’s news is that a thousand Palestinian kids are amputees. We know Hamas won’t stop that: Hamas put those kids in harm’s way.
Americans in particular seem uninterested in the why of this war, more in the what. And what we’ve seen is the one day of Hamas evil, and months of Israeli painstaking response. One day of burned and beheaded babies is very low on the American scale compared to months of having to watch the Palestinian suffering courtesy of Hamas.
So Israel has to stop the war. We somehow have to make them stop the war.
Hamas doesn’t have to win this war they started.
Hamas just has to outlast Israeli resistance to world opinion.
Then they can get back to killing more Jews.
