Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.

In a commentary published on July 22 in the leading US newspaper, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens stated: “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza.” Six weeks earlier, Holocaust and anti-Semitism researchers Norman J.W. Goda and Jeffrey Herf had already stated in an opinion piece in the Washington Post: “Why it’s wrong to call Israel’s war in Gaza ‘genocide.’”

“I Know One When I See One.”

The articles are reactions to a growing circle of experts, institutions, and organizations that describe Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip as genocide. These include various UN agencies, an investigation by the Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.

In a guest article in the New York Times on July 15, one of the leading genocide researchers, Omer Bartov – an Israeli Jew who grew up in a Zionist family and is a former IDF soldier – explained in detail why the Israeli war in Gaza is a genocide: “Never Again. I’m a Genocide Scholar. I know It When I See It” is the title of his essay.

In the Washington Post, columnist Shadi Hamid also argued at length at the end of May: “A genocide is happening in Gaza. We should say so.” However, the two newspaper articles by Bartov and Hamid are extreme exceptions in the American media landscape.

Self-Defense Instead of Crime

There has been no genocide debate in the US mainstream press over nearly two years of devastation in the Gaza Strip, with accusations of genocide mostly dismissed reflexively as anti-Israel, activist, and anti-Semitic. Israel’s war on Gaza is consistently framed as self-defense, while war crimes, if criticized at all, are portrayed as excesses.

The fact that the two “newspapers of record” in the US now felt compelled to publish articles referring to genocide has to do with the changed situation. After a year and a half of war against Gaza, the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unilaterally terminated the temporary ceasefire in March and imposed another total humanitarian blockade on Gaza, which was later eased somewhat, triggering an artificially created famine for the more than two million Palestinians living there.

In addition, there are the drastically deteriorating living conditions, the continuing rise in the number of victims of bombings and Israeli troops, mainly children and women, multiple expulsions, ethnic cleansing, and the de facto complete destruction of the enclave, including its medical infrastructure.

No Change of Course

This openly documented reality, live-streamed every day, including images of the continuing escalation of the Gaza catastrophe, the Netanyahu government’s ongoing willingness to wage war with no endgame beyond the “disappearance of the Palestinians” from Gaza – either through physical destruction or expulsion or a mixture of both, openly stated by Israeli officials – and the unconditional support of the US government, with President Donald Trump declaring to the world that he wants to turn Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East” without Palestinians: all this has caused sympathy for Israel and its war to plummet among the US population, with even staunch supporters of Israel criticizing the Netanyahu government’s actions.

Only 32 percent of Americans now approve of Israel’s military actions (only eight percent of Democratic voters). The liberal mainstream media responded to this mood with two critical articles on Israel’s war in Gaza.

But it would be wrong to see these publications as a sign of a change of course in the media. They remain the exception that proves the rule. This is made clear by the promptly published “counter-opinions” that “neutralized” the genocide articles and stifled the debate.

Only 60,000 Dead

The authors who responded to Bartov and Hamid’s statements and portrayed the term “genocide” as nonsensical and dangerous made little effort to engage with the arguments, evidence, and investigations of experts and international organizations. NYT columnist Stephens, for example, writes the following objection to the use of the term genocide:

“If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal – if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans – why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly?”

Why only 60,000 deaths and not hundreds of thousands, asks Stephens?

Apart from the cynical nature of the question and the fact that a Lancet study published a year ago already put the total number of deaths, including indirect deaths, at around 200,000, this argument can of course also be used against other genocides that are officially recognized in the West.

In Srebrenica, “only” 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed. Why not many more? The number of deaths is therefore not decisive for the UN Convention’s definition of genocide.

Hamas Massacre as Genocide

In their counterstatement, Goda and Herf content themselves with repeating the talking points of the Israeli government that the Israeli government is fighting Hamas and that civilian casualties are collateral damage, without addressing the flood of evidence that shows the opposite. At the same time, as usual, the subject is changed and the accusations are dismissed as “anti-Semitic.”

“The genocide accusation hurled against Israel draws on deep wells of fear and hatred, both conscious and unconscious, that lurk in radical interpretations of both Christianity and Islam. These currents view Jews as uniquely evil and murderous. The Gaza genocide accusation has shifted opprobrium from Jews as a religious/ethnic group to the state of Israel, which it depicts as inherently evil.”

Here, too, the question arises: What about Serbs, Sudanese, Burmese, Cambodians, or even Chinese, who are accused of genocide in the West?

While the accusation of genocide is labeled anti-Semitic, the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, is classified as genocide in the same breath. Here, too, Goda and Herf argue without evidence or arguments, without pointing out that this repeatedly made accusation has been rejected as false by genocide researchers and is not shared by expert organizations.

Please Do Not Use the Word “Genocide”

The isolated genocide articles in the two leading US media outlets had no effect on the general reporting on the Gaza war. The Israeli action continues to be described by the American mainstream media as military self-defense and a fight against Hamas, not as genocide.

Media and journalists do not use the term, even though, as we shall see, there is a growing consensus among genocide researchers and observers on the ground, UN agencies, and leading human rights organizations that Israel’s war on Gaza is genocidal.

This is certainly perceived as a threat by the press. For example, The Intercept revealed how the New York Times “instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to ‘avoid’ using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.”

The German Debate

In Europe, especially in Germany, there is also no serious debate about the term genocide to describe what is happening in Gaza. In the general reporting on Gaza the term is absent, too.

There are only a few exceptions. For example, in a commentary for the left daily newspaper Taz on July 25, Pauline Jäckels, in the face of growing criticism of the German government and referring to Omer Bartov’s essay in the NYT, said that the government was not exerting enough pressure on Israel to “prevent genocide.” To be precise, Bartov considers it proven that it is already taking place. Otherwise, the accusation of genocide is virtually never used in reports.

When it does appear in the German mainstream media, it is almost always rejected or the evidence is deemed “inconclusive.” In addition, anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli motives are implied.

The Loss of Humanity

One of the few journalists who puts the finger on the sore spot is Stephan Detjen. In a commentary on the public radio station Deutschlandfunk, he rightly states: “The reactions in this country, however, are either embarrassed silence or angry accusations of anti-Semitism.”

In contrast, the leading newspapers Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt and Süddeutsche Zeitung condemn the Hamas attack not only as a massacre, but as a genocidal crime. The genocide in Srebrenica and that committed by Hamas are on the same level, they say. Those who do not make this an issue, according to Detlef Esslinger in his SZ commentary of October 23, 2023, but instead focus on the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ultimately give up part of their humanity.”

When Genocide Is Just a Superfluous Term

Even critics of Israel who do speak of Israeli war crimes avoid using the term. For example, when asked in an interview whether he would describe what Israel is doing in Gaza as genocide, Jan von Aken, party leader of Die Linke (“The Left”), replied that this was not “our choice of words as a party.”

He considers it wrong to use “legal terms” such as genocide or apartheid because then “you quickly stop talking about what is happening there” and “start arguing about terminology.” Leaving aside the question of whether this is true – whereby the objection would have to be raised equally against other accusations of genocide – the strategic argument is not credible.

Von Aken and Die Linke are well aware that such terms carry weight and serve to generate political pressure and force governments to act. Take, for example, the anti-apartheid movement against South Africa. The Left Party also condemned the crimes against the Yazidis in Iraq by the Islamic State as genocide and worked to have the Bundestag recognize the acts as genocide, which it did unanimously on January 19,........

© CounterPunch