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.
1 April 2024 @ 8:58 am
Philip,
I’m just a plainspoken Israeli criminal defense lawyer (and the former deputy director of the Criminal Division in the Israel State Attorney’s Office), but the way I see it…you’re totally right.
Many criminal prosecutor friends of mine have been working on special assignment for nearly half a year with the Israel National Police unit (Lahav 433) assigned to investigate the thousands of gruesome and horrific crimes committed during and after the 10/7 massacre by bloodthirsty terrorists from Gaza. To say the least, they now have a lot of trouble sleeping at night…
I can only add that the unmindful people who cannot tell the difference between the intentional, heinous and malicious slaughter, rape, beheading, kidnapping, and body burning of helpless Israeli civilians by evil terrorists (in other words, attempted genocide) and the unintentional, inadverdent and incidental harm caused to Gazan civilians (who are cynically being used as human shields by these same despicable cowards) as a result of the IDF’s military actions against the genocidal maniacs, are either fools or Jew haters – or both.
Nevertheless, despite the current perverse and twisted “world opinion” – Israel and the Jewish people will survive and prosper. Never Again is now!
31 March 2024 @ 10:45 pm
Dear Mr. Rosmarin,
I often enjoy your column, but not your most recent one. I take serious issue with your assertion that the IDF is exercising care in its bombing practices.
You are of course entitled to your opinion, but it’s always good to consider sources from the other side.
The article below, on this topic, is from about four months ago.
https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/
Two months ago, in the New York Times, I read an article by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, Dr. Balakrishnan Rajagopal. You can read it here:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/29/opinion/destruction-of-homes-crime-domicide.html
Dr. Rajagopal notes that during the firebombing of Dresden during the closing days of the Second World War, about 25,000 houses were destroyed. My research shows that this amounted to about 56 percent of the houses in Dresden. In northern Gaza, on the other hand, about 84 percent of the buildings have been destroyed, amounting to more than 70,000 houses.
If you have not examined the case before the International Court of Justice, you should do so. The brief from South Africa contains a quotation from Netanyahu, in which he cites a Biblical passage concerning the people of Amalek. The International Court of Justice refrained from quoting it, but the quote says what it says. It rather belies your argument.
In my opinion Hamas no more represents the Palestinian people than the State of Israel represents the Jewish people of the world.
31 March 2024 @ 11:29 am
You should post this as a blog on Jewish Boulder News.
31 March 2024 @ 10:23 am
I appreciate the point of view that you’re laying out. It is sadly overlooked, and anti-semitism is becoming more and more part of revisionist history. For example, calling Jesus of Judea a palestinian is historically impossible since the word did not exist until years after the death of Jesus.
The palestinians can surrender anytime! They started a war and have lost it. Should they release the hostages and stop sending rockets into Israel perhaps then there would be something to talk about. Until then, there is always palestinian surrender. Israel could, should, and MUST continue the horrors of war until the war is over. It is not over. The palestinians can end it anytime they want. Hamas does not want to end the war. Poor decision, but only they can make it.