In his latest column for the NYT, Bret Stephens tries to excuse a uniquely horrific crime with uniquely horrific journalism.
The Israelis certainly owe Bret Stephens a favour.
Yesterday, The New York Times opinion columnist took to the pages of the United States newspaper of record to promote his latest deranged argument, headlined: “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza”.
Never mind that numerous global institutions, ranging from various United Nations bodies to Amnesty International, have determined that Israel is committing just that. These are organisations that hardly throw the G-word around lightly, but Stephens knows better. And he will tell us why.
In the very first paragraph of his Times intervention – which should perhaps come accompanied by a trigger warning for readers prone to aneurysms – Stephens demands defiantly: “If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal – if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans – why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly?”
It would seem, of course, that the Israeli military’s near-comprehensive conversion of much of the Gaza Strip into rubble – via the bombardment of homes, hospitals, schools, and everything else that can be bombed – would be rather “methodical”. As for the perceived insufficient deadliness of Israel’s ongoing “actions”, Stephens cites the official Palestinian death count of “nearly 60,000” in less than two years, and wonders why there are “not, say, hundreds of thousands of deaths”.
He goes on to proclaim that “the first question the anti-Israel genocide chorus needs to answer is: Why isn’t the death count higher?”
Among the many questions that Stephens himself needs to answer, meanwhile, is why he thinks slaughtering 60,000 people is no big deal. As of November 2024, Israel had killed at least 17,400 children in Gaza – but even this is apparently not “malevolent” enough. Furthermore, according to a study published in the Lancet medical journal more than one year ago, the true death toll in Gaza was already potentially set to exceed 186,000. How’s that for “hundreds of thousands”?
In lieu of waiting for an answer from the “anti-Israel genocide chorus”, Stephens presents his own, which is that “Israel is manifestly not committing genocide.” Citing the UN genocide convention’s definition of the term as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”, Stephens proceeds to announce that “I am aware of no evidence of an Israeli plan to deliberately target and kill Gazan civilians.”
Objectively speaking, this is the equivalent in terms of ludicrousness of claiming that there is no evidence of a plan by the operators of a chicken slaughterhouse to deliberately end the lives of the poultry therein. You don’t kill 17,400 children in 13 months by accident; nor do you repeatedly bomb hospitals and ambulances if you aren’t, you know, deliberately aiming to kill civilians.
But it’s not just about bombs. Forced starvation is genocide, too. And on that note, another question Stephens might answer is how intentionally depriving a population of two million people of the food and water that is necessary for human survival does not constitute an “intent to destroy” that group. Yesterday alone, Gaza health officials reported that at least 15 Palestinians had starved to death, including four children.
Since the end of May, more than 1,000 Palestinians have also been killed while trying to procure food from the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). This diabolical outfit, backed by Israel and the US, not only concentrates large numbers of starving Palestinians in a single location for easier mowing down by the Israeli army, but also furthers Israel’s US-backed vision of forcibly expelling the surviving Palestinian population.
While Stephens does deign to mention the “chaotic food distribution system” in Gaza, he insists that “bungled humanitarian schemes or trigger-happy soldiers or strikes that hit the wrong target or [Israeli] politicians reaching for vengeful sound bites do not come close to adding up to a genocide.”
And yet in his war on the use of the G-word in the Gaza context, Stephens refuses to acknowledge that Israel itself has been a genocidal endeavour from the get-go. Zionists were well aware of the need to dispense with the majority of the Indigenous population of Palestine even before the formal creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land in 1948, a process that entailed mass killing and the destruction of hundreds of villages. Some three-quarters of a million people were made refugees.
Since then, Israel has continued on what is fundamentally genocidal footing, working to disappear the Palestinians both physically and conceptually – as exemplified in the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s famous assertion that the Palestinians “did not exist”. Indeed, Israel’s existence as a Jewish settler-colonial state is predicated on the very “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”.
Anyway, forget history and reality. Stephens warns us that, if the word genocide “is to retain its status as a uniquely horrific crime, then the term can’t be promiscuously applied to any military situation we don’t like”.
Speaking of promiscuity, the Israeli military has long been in bed with The New York Times and a host of other US corporate media outlets, which do their best to sanitise Israeli atrocities as self-defence. But as Israel now continues to carry out a uniquely horrific crime in Gaza with the firm backing of the global superpower, Stephens’s genocidal journalism is also uniquely horrific.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect media’s editorial stance.
