GNITN - Special Edition

Israel At War – Day 224

Hamas Can End This War

Who Is Really Genocidal?

It seems almost every day that I hear someone on social media decrying the genocide that Israel is committing in Gaza. As a matter of reference I will give us the meaning of “genocide” from an article about it from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

Genocide is an internationally recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

The article tells of about five categories these acts can fall into:

  • Killing members of the group
  • Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
  • Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
  • Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
  • Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

As many have said, if Israel was really genocidal the war would have been over on October 8th and there is merit to that statement. However, just who is the genocidal party in this war? On October 7th Hamas perpetrated the first three of the five on the list. And this is clearly documented and actually admitted to by the terrorist group. And all one needs to do is to read the charter of Hamas to read this:

"The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine." (Article 6)

On the destruction of Israel:

"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." (Preamble)

As for ending the war through a truce, we see what Hamas thinks about them in their covenant:

"[Peace] initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement... Those conferences are no more than a means to appoint the infidels as arbitrators in the lands of Islam... There is no solution for the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility." (Article 13)

And their hatred for all Jews is also seen in their covenant:

The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him." (Article 7)

Unless they are ignoring their stated reasons to exist, Hamas is by definition the genocidal party. And their recent and current actions prove it for anyone willing to actually be objective. And according to at least one person, Israel has a duty to defeat Hamas on this one issue.

Israel Must Stop Hamas Genocide

In a report in The Jerusalem Post we read about one man who believes Israel must defeat Hamas over their genocidal intentions:

Israel and much of the world have a legal obligation under international law to stop the genocidal intent of Hamas in the wake of the October 7 massacre, former United States Justice Department Office of Special Investigations director Eli Rosenbaum told The Jerusalem Post in an interview on Wednesday, in which he also decried the abuse of international criminal law to attack Israel and rejected the allegations of genocide against the Jewish state.

Rosenbaum has a long track record of prosecuting war crimes from around the world:

Rosenbaum, whose 38-year career with different incarnations of Department of Justice war crimes investigatory departments saw him prosecute Rwandan génocidaires, Russian war criminals, and more World War II Nazi criminals than the rest of the world combined, explained that not only does Israel have a right to pursue the destruction of the Hamas terrorist entity if it can, “but Israel has a legal obligation under international law as a signatory of the Genocide Convention [1948, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide].

And Israel shouldn’t be fighting this alone:

“Every country that signed the Genocide Convention, which is the vast majority of the countries of the world and that has the capability to act, has a treaty obligation that is an obligation under international law,” said Rosenbaum. “To quote the International Court of Justice, if they’re aware or should normally have been aware of the serious danger that acts of genocide would be committed, those countries are obligated to employ all means reasonably available to them to prevent genocide within the limits permitted by international law.

“And I would say that a few countries, in addition to Israel, have taken this obligation seriously, most notably the United States – initially through President [Joe] Biden sending naval power, closing in on the Mediterranean [Sea] and reportedly warning off both Hezbollah and Iran.“But there are other countries that are well resourced and well positioned to help prevent genocide and that are signatories to the convention.”

Rosembaum them said that anyone funding or aiding the genocide is culpable as well:

Turkey is also a signatory to the convention, “so rather than spewing outrageously false accusations about Israeli genocide, countries like Turkey have a legal obligation to do what they can to help prevent renewed genocide by Hamas.”

While there was not much jurisprudence or International Criminal Court (ICC) litigation on support for genocidal actors, Rosenbaum’s view is that “providing weapons to an entity that you are aware or should have been aware is carrying out or applying a genocide would be a violation of both the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute on the ICC. It would be a criminal offense, basically, in rendering that state or other entity complicit, as one might say, an accessory to genocide or something of that nature.”

Israel Isn’t Guilty Of Genocide

Rosenbaum considers charges leveled against Israel of perpetrating genocide as outrageous:

The accusation of genocide by Israel during the Israel-Hamas war is an "obscene falsehood", according to Rosenbaum. The crime of genocide requires not just an outcome of mass death over the course of war but the intent “to destroy a population in whole or in part.”

He added it’s not just about how many people have died either:

"It is not simply a matter of casualty numbers." He noted that, in any event, it has been proven by the research of Professor Abraham Wyner of the University of Pennsylvania, among others, that Hamas has “faked and exaggerated” the civilian death toll numbers, including those involving women and children.

Rosenbaum elaborated on the inaccuracy of the numbers and why they aren’t telling us the whole story:

Even if one accepts Hamas-sanctioned casualty numbers often cited by activists accusing Israel of genocide – which the anti-Nazi prosecutor noted did not detail Gazan combatants, those slain by Palestinian rocket misfires or booby-traps, or even deaths that occurred of natural causes – the death of 35,000 people during a war is not alone indicative of genocidal intent.

“Genocide is not a crime that is based on numbers,” said Rosenbaum. “If it were, then the allies would have committed genocide in the Battle of Manila with over 100,000 civilian deaths in World War II. We would have committed genocide in Germany, where, just to speak of aerial bombing, not ground operations, by the British Royal Air Force and the then US Army Air Force, that combined bombing killed somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people. No one would say that the Allies committed genocide against Germans. That’s just absurd. Germany started a war. It was also a genocidal war, particularly against Jews and Roma, and they killed millions of people. The Allied military campaign is what brought an end to genocide.”

He said that casualties of war are not evidence of genocide as many are stating now. As sad as it may be, those numbers don’t prove Israel is guilty of genocide. But he is puzzled by the lack of protests against real recent examples of genocide:

The mass death of civilians is part of the tragedy of war, said Rosenbaum, which is why it was so important to avoid launching armed conflict. He noted that during the First Chechen War in the 1990s over 50,000 civilians were killed by Russian forces, representing “5% of a population of 1.1 million, a population that’s half the size of Gaza,” and in Syria, Bashar Assad had overseen a civil war in which at least 300,000 civilians were killed since 2013, but Rosenbaum had not seen major student demonstrations against Russia, Syria, or Hamas’s October 7 massacre. “So there’s been some loss of moral authority there.”

No Proof Of Genocide By Israel

Rosenbaum knows a thing or two about researching and proving genocide and he just doesn’t see the Israel Defense Force doing it:

Rosenbaum, who delayed his retirement in 2022 to serve as the Justice Department’s first-ever counselor for war crimes accountability and to head the agency’s newly created War Crimes Accountability Team to investigate atrocities committed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, said that in contrast to the conduct of the Nazis and Russians, Israel did not target civilians. On the contrary, genocidal intent was disproven “because of the extensive measures they’ve taken to try to protect civilians, despite the best efforts of Hamas to maximize civilian casualties in Gaza.

“Israel is taking measures to protect civilian life in Gaza that no military has ever taken in any war,” said Rosenbaum. “It causes Israeli casualties. Israel has willingly paid that price. They drop leaflets. They make thousands upon thousands of phone calls to try to get people to leave the area. Hamas sometimes impedes the efforts of civilians to leave. And they [Hamas] also don’t share the vast storehouses of food, water, and fuel that they’ve stored underground. It’s almost beyond human imagination, the level of cruelty on the part of Hamas and its allies.”

He points to Hamas and their strategies as increasing the deaths of their own people despite the extraordinary steps taken by the IDF:

The charge of genocide is all the more obscene due to “not only all the efforts that Israel has made to protect civilians in Gaza, but also the impossible situation created by the fact that Hamas hides behind and underneath civilians, and actually has been working to maximize the civilian death toll in Gaza.

“Israel can no more protect all Palestinian Arab citizens or civilians in Gaza than it can protect its own hostages in Gaza. Hamas is hiding behind them also, and some hostages have died, accidentally killed during the Israeli military response. And I’m sure no one would think that Israel is committing genocide against Jews.”

Mr. Rosenbaum addressed the current protests against Israel in America:

Student activists who charged Israel with genocide and compared Israelis to Nazis were incorrect, said Rosenbaum, who successfully brought cases against actual Nazis such as John Demjanjuk, Jakob Reimer, Arthur Rudolph, Aleksandras Lileikis, and Michael Kolnhofer. He questioned the failure of critical thinking skills and commitment to research among what he said is a radical minority engaging in disruptive protest and occupation of academic institutions across the United States.

“In addition to the fact that the accusations are fundamentally false, I think they’re also racist,” said Rosenbaum. The failure to seriously protest what Hamas did on October 7, and every day since then, holding hostages, which is a war crime, under appalling conditions, in addition to being immoral and amoral, it’s racist “an example of what is called the soft racism of low expectations.”

Instead of railing against Israel, they should point the finger at the real culprits:

The student activists ignored actual genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, and were facilitating Hamas’s pursuit of its goals.

“Hamas has been tragically successful in its effort to ensure that a large number of Palestinians die in order to gain world sympathy,” said the lawyer. “But every single death in Gaza of Palestinians and hostages is the doing of Hamas. They are responsible, morally and legally, for all of those deaths.”

According to Rosenbaum, Israel has to eliminate Hamas, but Hamas can also end it:

The Allies had, as the Israelis have now, a moral obligation to finish the fight in the face of the supreme crime of genocide, Rosenbaum said.

“Hamas had said publicly, they’re going to repeat October 7, again and again, until Israel is destroyed. So a ceasefire is simply delaying the next genocidal attack. It does not end the war.

“Only Hamas can end this war, unless they want to wait and let the Israelis destroy them. There are only two alternatives for Hamas, surrender or destruction.”