The International Court of Justice is preparing to lower the legal threshold for “genocidal intent”; not in South Africa’s case against Israel, which everyone is watching, but Gambia’s suit against Myanmar, which gets less than 1% of the coverage.
If you have rarely, if ever, heard of the Rohingya, a stateless Muslim ethnic group facing a systematic military campaign of mass killings, sexual violence and village burnings, that is exactly the point. Despite the urgency and gravity of their humanitarian crisis, they are not the reason the government of Ireland, purported “human rights” groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and U.N. Special Rapporteurs such as the contemptible Francesca Albanese are seeking this new ruling.
To understand why the aforementioned parties see a need to move the goalposts is to reveal their true agenda. A bar is lowered when conduct one wishes to condemn does not remotely clear the current one. This cast of characters has attempted to slander Israel as “genocidal” for decades and has always suffered from the same problem: The facts do not merely fail to support the charge; they refute it.
Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, when roughly 1.4 million people lived there. By 2023 the figure had passed 2.1 million—a rise of better than half in 16 years. Not incidentally, that is one of the highest growth rates on earth. Whatever else was happening in Gaza across those 16 years of alleged extermination, mass murder wasn’t it. No genocide in recorded history has produced that result because that is not genocide. The word has a meaning, and the people deploying it against Israel have always known that the meaning does not fit.
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer, constructed the word “genocide” in 1944 out of Greek and Latin to name what was then being done to his own family members—49 of them were murdered in the Holocaust. He created the term so that the world would never again be able to say it had no language for what it was watching. But now advocates are pushing to redefine his word to tie that vile crime to Jews as perpetrators rather than victims.
There is a name in psychology for what is happening here: projection. The charge is not an analysis of Israeli conduct; it is a confession of the accuser’s own intent, laundered through the accused.
Hamas has never been coy about its intentions. Its 1988 covenant does not call for a state, border or negotiation; it calls for genocide, the real kind, without exaggeration and without prevarication. It quotes a hadith in which the stones and trees call out to Muslims to come kill the Jews hiding behind them. And lest one imagine this is merely some form of theological hyperbole, Hamas leaders said proudly after Oct. 7 that, if given the chance, they would repeat the massacre of that day again and again until Israel is annihilated.
There is a name in psychology for what is happening here: projection.
That is a program for implementing Hitler’s Final Solution, stated in public in the organization’s own words. Thus, those who march for Hamas and cannot say the word “Hamas” without an apology attached accuse Israel of the very crime they are marching to see committed against Jews. They describe their own ambition and put Israel’s name on it.
Consider, as well, a fact that ought to end the argument and never does. John Spencer, who chairs urban warfare studies at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and has spent a career studying the subject, has stated that Israel has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any military in the history of warfare. This encompasses measures that the United States did not implement in Iraq or Afghanistan, or, for that matter, by any other army anywhere. Evacuation warnings, roof-knocks, leaflets, phone calls, published corridors, daily pauses: Every one of them surrendered surprise, which is to say every one of them risked the lives of Israeli soldiers. Israel has paid for Arab civilian safety in Jewish blood, repeatedly and deliberately.
Hamas spent those same months doing the precise opposite, with equal deliberation. It built its command posts under hospitals and its rocket launchers beside schools; it blocked the corridors Israel opened; and it fought in civilian clothes from inside apartment blocks. This was not indifference to Gazan life, but a deliberate strategy that depended upon needless deaths. Hamas understood that every Arab child killed in a building it had turned into a bunker would be charged against Israel, because it knew that the world has blood-libeled Jews for deaths caused by others for millennia.
The present day is no exception, and this is where the West’s moral scolds come in.
The Hamas strategy depended upon the campus encampments, celebrity statements, U.N. rapporteurs and newspaper editorialists. They were not incidental to Hamas’s calculation; they were the mechanism. Every professor and pop star who blamed Israel for collateral damage caused by Hamas encouraged Hamas to cause more Arab deaths. If you want to know who was responsible for Arab children dying in Gaza, start with Hamas, and continue directly to the people who guaranteed that those deaths would be profitable for the terrorists.
Nor was that the full extent of their culpability. Objectively, if someone is being tortured, starved and forced to dig his own grave, as Evyatar David was until his release, then someone whose only contribution is to slander his rescuers as “genocidal” is a barbarian who is at least indifferent to torture and starvation, if not wanting it to continue. If someone is being sexually assaulted daily, as Arbel Yahoud was, someone slandering her rescuers as “genocidal” is a deviant. And if a months-old baby is murdered with bare hands by his captors, as Kfir Bibas was, someone slandering his rescuers is simply a monster.
QED, the governments of South Africa, Ireland, Iceland, Brazil and several other states—like Cuba, Nicaragua and other “paragons” of human rights—are dominated by barbarians, deviants and monsters. To those with a working moral compass, this is no exaggeration.
So let us understand what the judges at The Hague are being recruited for: They are being asked to take a word that the Jewish people gave international law—purchased at a price no one should have to pay, much less repeatedly—and file its edges down until it can be turned around and weaponized against the Jews.
The judges should be told the rest of it too: A threshold low enough to convict Israel is quite low enough to convict the United States, Britain and every First World peacekeeping force that has ever been forced to fight in a city. That is not a warning. It is the plan.
Lemkin wanted a word so that the world could not plead confusion. It is worth noticing who is now working so hard to make it confusing again.
