In the circles Kamala Harris inhabits, Israel’s guilt is simply beyond dispute. Honest people always saw the genocide charge as a malicious fiction.
The drawn expression on Vice President Kamala Harris’s face betrayed the discomfort she attempted to hide when she grudgingly praised Donald Trump and his administration for negotiating the release of the last living 10/7 hostages in Hamas’s hands. Nevertheless, she added, the way Gaza was “treated with such brutality of force” during the war could not be erased.
“A lot of folks in your party have called what’s happening in Gaza a genocide,” MSNBC correspondent Eugene Daniels observed. “Do you agree with that?” Harris paused. “It is a term of law that a court will decide,” she replied. “But I will tell you that when you look at the number of children that have been killed, the number of innocent civilians that have been killed, the refusal to give aid and support, we should all step back and ask this question and be honest about it. Yeah.”
Those are the shibboleths we were bombarded with almost from the outset of Israel’s defensive war against the terrorist groups with which Iran surrounded the Jewish state. But any honest broker must concede that, if Israel is a genocidaire, it’s an incompetent one.
As President Donald Trump observed on Friday, the Israel Defense Forces count 58,000 Hamas fighters and operatives among the dead in its defensive war. Even if we take the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers at face value, which we shouldn’t, that would indicate that the vast majority of the 67,000 deaths over the last two years were legitimate targets. That is the kind of ratio that represents, according to military historian John Spencer, a “remarkable, historic new standard” in taking “precautions to prevent civilian harm.” Indeed, even if the enemy was not dug into a densely populated urban space and tactically devoted to using civilians as shields, such a ratio would be difficult to achieve.
In the circles Harris inhabits, the Palestinian genocide wantonly engineered by Israel is simply beyond dispute. Indeed, that atrocity was overdetermined. It is represented by Israel’s supposed attacks on hospitals it did not bomb. It is apparent in the campaign of ethnic cleansing in which Israel never engaged. It is supported by the famines that never occurred and the desperate lack of food aid that Israel never denied the enemy population. Indeed, the Gazan people themselves are stubbornly refusing to cooperate with this narrative, as video after video emerges of nourished and healthy Palestinians celebrating the end of the war, flanked not by mounds of rubble but a functional urban landscape.
The genocide lie was not merely a florid exaggeration meant to highlight the hardship inside war-ravaged Gaza that no one denied. It was designed to rob the Jewish people of their unique victimization in the Holocaust. Some of Israel’s most pathologically hostile critics already tacitly admitted as much in their efforts to establish unconvincing moral equivalencies between the Gaza operation and the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jewish population. It was a lie that has been exposed as a lie in countless ways, the breakout of peace being only the latest.
And it was known as a lie at the time, even by regional actors who perpetuated it. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi called Israel’s war a “systematic genocide,” but that didn’t stop his government from participating in a U.S.-brokered joint security mechanism with Israel even as the fighting was ongoing. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said the same thing but had no qualms about coupling his security interests with Israel’s. Even as it participated in that process, the Jordanian government signed onto a statement describing the imagined famine in Gaza as a “stain on the conscience of humanity.”
It was all a game that these Arab governments knew to be a game — a messaging campaign aimed at woolly-headed Westerners too credulous to know that they were being used. There is too much pride at stake for those who allowed themselves to be taken in to acknowledge their own naïveté. But elementary logic should lead those of us who are not radicalized by the shadows that dance across the walls of our social media prisons to concede that, for all its military prowess and technological dominance, Israel is for some unknowable reason really bad at genocide.
Those of us who are still capable of applying logic to accusations of Israeli perfidy didn’t need the ample evidence we have today that the accusations of genocide were a malicious fiction. The lie will persist, of course. After all, logic has nothing to do with it.