The word “genocide” comes from “géno,” the Greek for “race,” and “cide,” the Latin for “kill.” That is, “kill the race.” The word “genocide” didn’t exist before World War II. Instead, in 1944, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who fled the Holocaust, coined it to describe what the Germans were doing to the Jewish population. It was, we thought, a unique evil, but now, in a horrible irony, accusations of “genocide” are being hurled at the Jews to justify another genocide against the Jews.

We need to talk numbers here.

Before World War II, there were approximately 9.5 million Jews in Europe. As everyone knows, the best guess is that 6 million Jews were slaughtered during the Holocaust (63% of the Jewish population). That’s a kill rate of approximately 2,850 Jews per day throughout the war.

Image created using AI.

But even that’s not the real story, though. The “Final Solution” occurred not over the full five-and-a-half years of the war, but only for about three years of the war, so the kill rate was roughly 6,000 Jews per day from 1942 through war’s end.

To give you a better sense of proportion, on September 11, 2001, we lost 2,977 people out of a nation of 2.8 million people. I bet you can—as I still do—feel the overwhelming sense of loss when you contemplate that single day.

And if you want to add an “it almost happened” hypothetical to the Holocaust death toll, think about this: If Allied forces hadn’t defeated Rommel at the Second Battle of El Alamein in October and November of 1942, the Nazis and Arabs would have joined together and massacred the almost 500,000 Jews who were living in British-Mandate Palestine (now Israel) at the time.

So, that’s what an actual genocide looks like.

Now let’s look at what’s been happening in Gaza. I’m using ChatGPT numbers for this, but I believe they’re roughly accurate. In 1967, the year Israel won Gaza from Egypt in the Six-Day War, Gaza’s population was slightly fewer than 393,000 Arabs. In 2005, when Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, its population was 1.4 million Arabs. If Israel was ethnically cleansing the place during its years in control, it did a lousy job.

In 2022, Gaza’s population was slightly over 2 million people, so living adjacent to Israel hadn’t harmed its growth. No genocide there either

Even though Gaza civilians joined in the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, gleefully assisting in the rape, torture, slaughter, and kidnapping of Israeli civilians, and have since participated in their ongoing torture and imprisonment, Israel has waged war in a way never before seen.

Yes, Israel has waged war aggressively against Hamas, a military enemy. Nevertheless, aware that its enemy has embedded itself deep within the civilian population, it has done everything possible to minimize civilian casualties, even when doing so risks its troops. Unlike Hamas, it never deliberately targets civilians, and it always weighs collateral damage in its military plans.

And of course, Israel has shipped thousands of tons of supplies to an enemy population. Can you imagine the Allies feeding the German population during World War II? Nobody in the history of war has fed the enemy population (or at least, tries to feed it)! You win a war, as Sherman knew, by demoralizing the population, not by sustaining it.

If Israel really were interested in committing genocide, it would have leveled Gaza with a few strikes. We know it could have, because we’ve seen what it did in Iran, where, again, it avoided civilian casualties. Israel’s technology is so sophisticated that nothing would have stopped it from wiping out Gaza in an afternoon. (And for purposes of this post, we’re pretending that “Gazans” are a “race,” rather than just a community of Arabs, of whom there are 250,000,000 in the world.)

As to how many Gazans have died in the war, it’s impossible to tell. The Gaza health ministry is part of Hamas, so its data are propaganda. However, even accepting its claimed 59,000 deaths, that’s only 2.95% of the Gaza population at the start of the war.

As a reminder, the Nazis had managed to eradicate 63% of Europe’s Jews before WWII ended. This is not a genocide by any definition. Indeed, by any definition of war, this is a strikingly low civilian death rate during a hot war in a densely populated urban environment. (And recall that the reasonable presumption is that most deaths are, in fact, military.)

And what have Jews gotten for this remarkable care and self-sacrifice? Bubkes!

This revolting Wikipedia article sums up all the nations and organizations accusing Israel of genocide. Just today, the NY Times ran an essay entitled “A Genocide Scholar on the Case Against Israel: An Israeli historian answers his critics and explains why his home country’s conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide.” I won’t dignify this drek by saying any more about it.

Actually, they’ve gotten nothing. By being accused of genocide, they’re once again being lined up for...genocide. Why? Well, ask yourself this: What’s the cure for a genocidal nation? You destroy it, of course. How do you destroy it? You globalize the intifada. In other words, the cure for the Big Lie that Israel is committing a “genocide” of the Gazan people is the genocide of the Jews. Somewhere in Hell, Hitler laughs.