The Question They Cannot Answer

How and why I opened a very ugly can of worms

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash

Early this week, I wrote a post on X about whether Israel has committed genocide in Gaza:

Destroying buildings is not genocide. Warning people that you’re going to destroy their buildings before you do, is definitely not genocide. Stopping the war when we got our hostages back shows it never was genocide. Targeting and taking out people who murdered, raped and abducted our fellow citizens is justice, not “ongoing” genocide. The famine that never happened is not genocide. Taking quotes out of context does not prove genocide. And for all of you who continue to lie about this and treat it like it’s just a simple fact like the color of the sky? You are justifying the harming and killing of Israelis and Jews. You’ve chosen the wrong side.

It has generated 188K views and 772 comments, more than my usual posts. Many of the comments were supportive. Many were in strong disagreement. A number were very ugly.

Part of me thinks such posts are a waste of time. Of course they are unlikely to convince anyone not already in the choir. But maybe they give some strength to my fellow singers. And part of me thinks if we let people lie about us, the lie eventually sticks and even though that dishonest horse left the barn long ago, part of me just wanted to have something to post when people show a picture of a devasted city in Gaza as if that proves genocide.

I also learned a few things in the back and forth with some of my critics and I wanted to share some afterthoughts here.

Language is inherently ambiguous. There are two senses of the word genocide. One is the everyday sense that I’m not going to bother to look up in a dictionary to quote here. We know what it is. We know it when we see it. It’s the systematic attempt to exterminate or eliminate a people. The other sense of the word is a much more complex legal concept that leads to sanctions or indictments or arrest warrants and so on.

When I say Israel hasn’t committed genocide in Gaza, I mean it in the everyday sense of the word, the way the word was used in the aftermath of the Shoah. The word that describes the Nazi’s relentless killing machine, an extermination effort so thorough that at the end of the war, Germany was devoting trains to killing Jews that they could have used to win the war. And if you are uneducated and you want to understand the cruelty of the Nazis and their relentlessness, it is enough to read “The Hell of Treblinka” by Vassily Grossman, his eyewitness account after visiting the death camp shortly after it was liberated. If you have a heart, you’ll weep for the victims and for humanity that is capable of such cruelty.

What I wrote on X was simply to point out that there is nothing about the war in Gaza anything like this everyday use of the word genocide. Yes, there is the occasional cruel and despicable treatment of a Palestinian. And yes, it’s often taken out of context or the video fails to support the claim of the headline. But even at its worst, sorry, it’s not like the Nazis, and for those of you who keep making the comparison, making that comparison tells the world more about you than it does about the IDF or the people of Israel.

A common response to my post was that the “experts” have declared that what Israel has done in Gaza is indeed a genocide. They often cited the UN even though the UN has not made any such ruling as a body and even though the UN would be a very strange place to find truth. But they also cite academics, often Israelis or Jews—what I would call the usual suspects—who have decreed that Israel has committed genocide. These claims are related to the question of international law and not the everyday use of the word. I think these claims are wrong, but I concede it is more complicated than the usual everyday sense of the word. I would add that questions of intent that quote a variety of Israeli politicians and leaders out of context, is again an indication of where many people are coming from rather than what we would normally call evidence.

When Mayor Mamdani posted the video about his frustrated desire to arrest Netanyahu, most of the furor was over his lack of authority to do so. The critics accused Mamdani of grandstanding, of producing an act of political theater for his base. They urged the Mayor to focus on potholes and mediocre public schools. I suspect most of the critics of that video did not watch it. What was truly offensive about it was that by condemning Netanyahu, it allowed Mamdani to enumerate Netanyahu’s alleged war crimes. These focused on an alleged desire of Netanyahu and the IDF to kill children, including the claim that Israel deliberately destroyed hospitals and NICUs to prevent newborns from surviving. It went on for a while These claims legitimize the harming or killing of Israelis. They are the new blood-libel.

Some have responded to the claims of genocide by saying that if you want a real genocide, look at October 7. I don’t think this is helpful. October 7 was a pogrom. That is not a genocide. That the leaders of Hamas would have liked the pogrom to encompass all of the land from the river to the sea is not relevant to how we think about October 7. It is relevant to how we should think about what comes next in Israel’s relationship with Gaza. But I don’t think it helps to call it genocide.

Some defenders of Israel have invoked Dresden or Hiroshima. Was that a genocide they ask? No they were not. But they are both problematic. I don’t want to defend Israel by saying that what we did in Gaza wasn’t as bad as Dresden. Good grief.

What has happened in Gaza is a very ugly war. There have surely been mistakes made that led to tragic deaths of Gazans. Surely, young men under incredible pressure and fear have done wrathful things that they regret or are ashamed of. But that’s not genocide. It’s a terrible tragedy for both sides—the people of Gaza and for Israelis.

After conceding that war is hell and that yes, the people of Gaza have had a disproportionate share of that pain, and yes, much of Gaza has been leveled which is horrifying for the many innocent Gazans who did not vote for Hamas in 2005 because they voted for the Palestinian Authority or they weren’t even alive, I then come to the unanswerable question. This is the question I asked those who called me a monster or a child-killer when I had the gall—the chutzpah!—to suggest Israel has not commited genocide in Gaza.

This is the question. If 250 of your friends and neighbors were kidnapped and held below ground, starved (actually starved) and presuming (correctly as it turns out) that many of them were sexually abused, what would you have done? What would you have done, knowing that Hamas had dug tunnels under hospitals and schools where those people were being held? You claim that what Israel has done is genocide. What would you have done?

They never answer. I’m not saying there isn’t an answer. Maybe some people have answered it. I’m saying that I never get an answer. There is an implicit answer—Israel should have done something else, anything else, other than what it did. What that something else is, they do not elaborate. I understand the impulse.

I wish October 7th never happened. But it did. I wish that once it happened, the world had risen up and instead of tearing down the posters of Israeli men, women, and childen being held in tunnels, they had put up a bunch of their own posters. I wish the world (and not just the Jews and our stalwart but small group of friends) had demanded the release of the hostages . I wish the world had isolated Iran and Qatar for their support of Hamas and said that’s over and put sanctions on Qatar instead of seeing them as a useful intermediary. If we had lived in that world, I don’t think Gaza would look like it does today and a lot of people would still be alive. I wish that world were possible. Evidently not. It’s easy to dislike the world we live in, but its’ the world we live in. Tell me what Israel should have done given the way the world actually is.

War is hell. Urban war is even worse. Urban war with an adversary holding the children of your neighbor hostage below ground is worse still. And the worst thing of all is to face an adversary who sees the death of their neighbors as a feature not a bug, an adversary who created the greatest bomb shelters in the world and refused to let their neighbors use them.

So yes, we devasted the buildings of Gaza, often after warning the people who lived there that we would do so. It’s horrible. Innocent people died. Innocent people lost their homes. And that leads to the other unanswerable question. What has happened in Gaza is a terrible tragedy. But I often ask those who accuse Israel of genocide, OK, whatever you want to call it, it’s awful. I’m with you there. But does Hamas bear any of the responsibility for that tragedy? And they are almost always silent though they will occasionally concede that October 7th was a bad thing. But they say nothing about holding Hamas responsible for what happened after October 7.

If you accuse Israel of genocide, if you cannot tell me what Israel should have done instead of what it has done in Gaza after October 7th, and if you cannot bring yourself to condemn Hamas for the suffering of the people of Gaza, then I’ll say it again: you have picked the wrong side.