In recent decades, as many as three million people perished in a famine in North Korea that was mainly government-induced. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were gassed, bombed, starved or tortured to death by the Assad regime, and an estimated 14 million were forced to flee their homes. China has put more than a million Uyghurs through gulag-like re-education camps in a thinly veiled attempt to suppress and erase their religious and cultural identity.
But North Korea, Syria and China have never been charged with genocide at the International Court of Justice. Israel has. How curious. And how obscene.
It’s obscene because it politicizes our understanding of genocide, fatally eroding the moral power of the term. The war between Israel and Hamas is terrible — as is every war. But if this is genocide, what word do we have for the killing fields in Cambodia, Stalin’s Holodomor in Ukraine, the Holocaust itself?
[The New York Times Op-Ed continues]
It’s obscene because it’s historically hypocritical. The United States, Britain and other allied nations killed a staggering number of German and Japanese civilians on the path to defeating the regimes that had started World War II — often known as the Good War. Events such as the bombings of Dresden or Tokyo, to say nothing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were tragic and far more indiscriminate than anything Israel stands accused of doing. But no serious person holds Franklin Roosevelt to be on a moral par with Adolf Hitler. What the Allies did were acts of war in the service of a lasting peace, not genocide in the service of a fanatical aim.
The difference? In war, the killing ends when one side stops fighting. In a genocide, that’s when the killing begins.
It’s obscene because of its strange selectivity. Reasonable people can argue that Israel has been excessive in its use of force, or deficient in its concern for Palestinian civilians, or unwise in thinking through the endgame. I disagree, but fine.
But how curious that the discussion has turned to genocide (and did so from almost the first day of the war) because it’s the behavior of the Jewish state that’s in question. And how telling that the accusation is the same one that rabid bigots have been making for years: that the Jews are, and have long been, the real Nazis — guilty of humanity’s worst crimes and deserving of its worst punishments. A verdict against Israel at the I.C.J. would signal that another international institution, and the people cheering it, has adopted the moral outlook of antisemites.
It’s been nearly 50 years since Daniel Patrick Moynihan condemned the U.N.’s “Zionism is racism” resolution as “this infamous act.”
“The abomination of antisemitism,” he warned, “has been given the appearance of international sanction.” Maybe the I.C.J. will make a similar mistake. If so, the shame and disgrace will rest with the accusers, not the accused.
Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
View this New York Times Op-ED from January 16th