Pretty Lousy at Genocide

Anatomy of a voluntarily inefficient military offensive

Since its founding in 1948, Israel has gotten really good at a lot of stuff.

The Jewish state has excelled in the fields of higher education, cybersecurity, and agricultural technology. It has also emerged as a leader in areas as diverse as renewable energy and the film industry.

However, though it's often referred to as the "Startup Nation," there's one enterprise for which Israel hasn’t exactly shown much of an aptitude.

Genocide.

You would think that, given the countless, relentless, and widespread accusations of war crimes against it, Israel must be quite skilled at intentionally destroying a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

(That's a pretty tight paraphrase of the UN's definition of 'genocide.')

Anyway, from where I'm sitting, if that's what Israel is trying to accomplish —genocide, that is— it's doing an incredibly shitty job. Like, cluelessly, spastically bad.

And, for the record, the UN's language makes no mention of a nation defending sovereign territory, protecting its citizenry or defeating an enemy intent on its destruction, which is what Israel has been doing since October 7 — well, more like since May 14, 1948.

Moreover, the operative words in the UN document are intent, deliberately, and destroy.

Article II:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:

• 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.

The Geneva Convention of 1948 says that "the crime of genocide requires that a perpetrator's [acts be] calculated to bring about the destruction of a group, in whole or in part, with the intent to destroy the group as such."

So, just to set the stage, I want to point out that neither Israel's Declaration of Independence nor its Basic Laws (its constitution), nor any of its statutes or policies calls for "destroying" any "nation or group".

Hamas’ charter, on the other hand, is exceedingly clear about the terror group's desire to do just that. The document's preamble reads, in part, "Israel will exist and continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it…"

So, there's that.

Article 28: The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: 'The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews, killing the Jews.'"

Now, that all sounds pretty straightforward, doesn't it? You might even be forgiven for thinking that they were calling for —dare I say?— another Jewish Holocaust.

(In case you missed it, that’s precisely what they’re calling for.)