By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday,
December 11, 2024
In a shocking development last week, Amnesty
International effectively exonerated Israel of genocide.
This was easy to miss, and not just because of the recent
crush of news. Amnesty’s
report, titled “ ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide
Against Palestinians in Gaza,” buried the lede, as journalists say. And most of
the media coverage reflected that.
The New
York Times’ headline read: “Amnesty International Accuses Israel of
Genocide in Gaza.” The Los
Angeles Times’ was similar: “Amnesty International says Israel is
committing genocide in Gaza.”
Before I get to Amnesty’s overlooked acquittal of Israel,
it’s worth noting that calling its report unfair would be a profound
understatement. Here’s the first sentence: “On 7 October 2023, Israel embarked
on a military offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip … of unprecedented
magnitude, scale and duration.”
In other words, the story of the Israel-Gaza war, as far
as the storied human rights group is concerned, begins not with Hamas’
unprecedented terrorist attack on civilians that day, which included rapes, kidnappings, and
other forms of staggering, premeditated barbarity. Rather, it begins with
Israel’s response to Hamas’ aggression. Hamas, by the way, is an organization
that was literally founded
on the principle of genocidal eradication of Israel.
This is a bit like beginning a report on America’s
“genocide” in Japan by stating, “On April 18, 1942, the United States embarked
on a military offensive on the Japanese nation of unprecedented
magnitude”—leaving out, until some 50 pages later, that whole Pearl Harbor
thing.
None of this is to say that the Israel-Gaza war hasn’t
been horrific. Nor is it to say that Israel deserves no criticism for its
conduct of the war—even if I think most of the criticisms are exaggerated,
often for ideological reasons.
But the Genocide
Convention of 1948 is very clear about what constitutes actual or attempted
genocide: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
The idea that Israel is dedicated to genocide of the
Palestinians has been routinely bandied about for decades at the United Nations
and by anti-Israel governments and organizations. But the Palestinian
population has grown more than eightfold
since Israel’s founding, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of
Statistics, and the population of the Gaza Strip has increased 600
percent since 1960.
One of the most important words in the U.N.’s definition
of genocide is “intent.” And if Israel, which even its enemies characterize as
supremely competent and lethal, intends genocide, it’s really, really, bad at
it. Indeed, if genocide were the goal, you would think Israel would stop
dropping leaflets warning civilians to evacuate areas it’s about to attack or
sending Palestinians caravans of aid.
Which brings us back to Amnesty International’s
exoneration. On page 101 of its 296-page report, the authors acknowledge that
the question of intent is a huge problem for those who accuse Israel of
genocide. But they go on to reject “an overly cramped interpretation of
international jurisprudence … that would effectively preclude a finding of
genocide in the context of an armed conflict.”
If Israel were actually trying to eliminate the
Palestinians as a people, I think it would be obvious and easy for Amnesty and
others to prove. But the point is that the report essentially concedes that
Israel isn’t committing genocide under prevailing interpretations of
international law.
Imagine if a prosecutor noted during a murder trial that
under the existing statutes and case law, the defendant was not guilty. That
might be considered an important concession.
As Commentary’s Seth Mandel writes,
“So Amnesty International dissents from international law. That’s fine. Just be
up-front about it: Amnesty is not accusing Israel of ‘genocide,’ it is accusing
Israel of a different crime which Amnesty has named ‘genocide,’ just so it
could use that word.”
It would be one thing if Amnesty issued a report calling
for a more capacious definition of genocide under international law. I’d be
open to such a recommendation. The existing definition still has the taint of
the Soviet Union’s meddling to ensure it didn’t cover its crimes in Ukraine. A
better, fairer definition of genocide wouldn’t be bad news for Israel, but it
would for Russia and China.
Amnesty didn’t want a discussion about the proper
definition of genocide, though. It wanted headlines alleging that Israel
committed the crime—and it got them.
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