Dec 17: Let's Call Everything Israel Does Genocide

A novel strategy to make Trump a legal zombie; Tel Dan stele in Manhattan; Syria's Jews chugging along

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The Big Story

We can all agree that genocide is bad and, thankfully, rare. But what is it? Over the past year it has been stated with forceful determination that Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza is genocidal. It has to be—look at all the dead people! Former Pink Floyd frontman and SS-cosplayer Roger Waters summed up the view that has taken hold from college quad encampments to the hijab’d streets of Melbourne to the learned halls of Durban, South Africa: “It’s quite clear to anyone with half a brain that they are committing genocide.”

But that being so, why is it so hard to get a group of right-minded jurisprudes, all experts in human-rights law and the history of settler colonialism, to rule conclusively that Israel is indeed committing genocide? The International Court of Justice (ICJ) heard South Africa’s application to begin genocide proceedings against Israel almost a year ago, and all we’ve gotten back is a ruling that the Rainbow Nation (murder rate: 30 times that of Israel) has a plausible case for its right to initiate proceedings—not, it is important to underscore, that Israel is plausibly conducting a genocide, which is how many in the gutter press have chosen to read it. Plausibility in this context is a procedural question.

Hence the intervention of Roger Waters, Mark “Hulk” Ruffalo, Mehdi Hasan, and countless other luminaries to insist that the international community act now to expel the Zionist contagion from its midst. What’s taking the ICJ so long? Fortunately, the Republic of Ireland has stepped up to solve the problem. In applying to join South Africa’s case against Israel last week, Ireland joins such beacons of human rights as Nicaragua (run by former Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega); Colombia (50-year civil war marked by butchery); Mexico (owned by drug cartels); and Libya (where the slave trade in sub-Saharan African migrants is currently thriving). Ireland wants to join the case against Israel but offers a brilliant suggestion, which is to jettison the old “narrow” definition of genocide in favor of one that fits the current case more accurately.

In the words of Irish Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Micheál Martin:

By legally intervening in South Africa’s case, Ireland will be asking the ICJ to broaden its interpretation of what constitutes the commission of genocide by a state. We are concerned that a very narrow interpretation of what constitutes genocide leads to a culture of impunity in which the protection of civilians is minimized.

The old “narrow” definition of genocide, which as we are constantly reminded was largely defined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish refugee whose family was killed by the Nazis, is fairly straightforward:

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:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

What annoys activists about this definition so much is the word intent. If a nation kills civilians in the course of military engagement, as happens regularly, that isn’t genocide. Israel is conducting its war in Gaza with the aim of destroying Hamas, not of eliminating the Palestinian population, and Hamas has embedded itself under hospitals, schools, and mosques with the intent of causing civilian casualties.

Hence, the Irish want to expand the definition of “genocide” to fit … whatever Israel happens to be doing. This kind of Procrustean-bed legal logic follows the “I know it when I see it” line of thinking, or the Lavrentiy Beria school of jurisprudence, wherein if you “show me the man, I will find you the law.” Since Roger Waters has already determined that Israel is committing genocide, it becomes the job of jurists to cut the cloth to fit the case. In response, Israel has recalled its ambassador to Ireland and closed its Dublin embassy, though it retains diplomatic relations.

We see where this argument leads in the words of Spanish politician Ione Belarra, the leader of the left-wing Podemos Party, who complained last week that Israel is now committing genocide in Syria. “Israel is taking advantage of the instability in Syria to advance its colonial and genocidal plan, bombing several areas, including Damascus,” she posted on social media. “Virtually no Western media outlets are reporting on it. International inaction in the face of genocide endangers humanity as a whole.” While it is true that Israel has been bombing Syria, its focus is entirely on military sites and weapons depots; there are no reports of civilian casualties, and certainly none that rise to the level of genocide.

But as the left insists, “It didn’t start on October 7.” Israel’s purported genocide of the Palestinians predates the war on Gaza, the building of the separation barrier, the invasion of Lebanon, the Six-Day War, and the founding of the state in 1948. It predates the Holocaust and the founding of Tel Aviv. As a settler-colonial project, Zionism was never not genocidal; the anti-Israel narrative equates Zionism with genocide, full stop. The official announcement by the Irish foreign minister that the movement wishes to rewrite 75 vaunted years of human-rights law to convict Israel of genocide reveals the naked cynicism of international law and the real motives of the soi-disant humanitarians who bark in its support.

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The Rest

→Fresh off his defeat in the prosecution of Daniel Penny, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is attempting another novel legal maneuver against President-elect Donald Trump, whose lawyers are trying to have his “34 felony convictions” dismissed. Two weeks ago, you will recall, Bragg was facing a possible hung trial in his manslaughter case against Penny, who restrained Jordan Neely, a crazed vagrant on the subway, who later died. To avoid a mistrial, Bragg’s office dropped its charge of manslaughter, and the judge ordered the jury to take up the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide. The jury, perhaps annoyed by the DA’s obvious gamesmanship, quickly came back with a not-guilty verdict, which we wrote about here.

Bragg’s case against Trump is far more convoluted, based on the claim that someone in the privately held Trump Organization recorded his payments to a former lover as legal expenses rather than “hush money.” The case claims that this alleged falsification—which wouldn’t have been seen by anyone—violated campaign finance laws, because the prosecution somewhat obscurely defined the payments as benefitting Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Obviously the incoming president is not going to be sentenced to prison in this case, and there is every likelihood that the convictions will be overturned on appeal. Bragg, up for reelection next year, is desperate for the verdict to stick and initially asked Judge Juan Merchan simply to suspend sentencing until Trump’s term ends in 2029. But that would violate his right to a speedy trial and due process of law. So Bragg has another idea: Treat Trump as though he is dead, in Alabama.

Typically, when someone dies in the middle of a court process, the verdict is vacated. But Alabama has a special category of “abated verdict” for people who die after being found guilty, but before receiving a judgment of conviction. As Bragg’s office responded to defense motions:

Adopting something like the Alabama rule in this case would better balance the competing interests here than [the] defendant’s request to dismiss the indictment and vacate the jury verdict. On one hand, this remedy would prevent [the] defendant from being burdened during his presidency by an ongoing criminal proceeding. On the other hand, this remedy would not precipitously discard aspects of this criminal proceeding.

This perverse legal maneuver sounds like something out of Der Prozess and is patently a wish fulfillment. Get help, DA Bragg!

→The National Association of Independent Schools, an organization of private schools, held its annual People of Color Conference earlier this month. A group of Jewish attendees complained that a keynote speaker, Dr. Suzanne Barakat, used her time at the podium to denounce Israel and describe Zionism as a form of settler colonialism. She also gave a talk to students about the “genocide” in Gaza and described the Palestinian dead as “martyrs.” NAIS apologized and promised to review keynote speeches going forward.

Dr. Barakat has emerged as a regular on the DEI, trauma-informed healing, Third World miserabilism lecture circuit and has a very sad personal story. Her brother, his wife, and his sister-in-law were murdered in North Carolina in 2014 by their neighbor, a noted misanthrope. The story was national news and widely described as an Islamophobic hate crime, though authorities were unable to determine as much. In any case, the killer was convicted and sentenced to three life terms in prison, so it’s not as though he got away with very much.

But Dr. Barakat, who has worked in Syrian and Turkish refugee camps, is so steeped in the discourse of trauma that she is unable to disentangle her personal tragedy from geopolitics, or vice versa. I took an hour to listen to a recording of one of her recent presentations. Her narrative veers raggedly from the Syrian civil war to her brother’s murder to the Palestinians to her grandmother’s death to the 2023 Turkish earthquake to U.S. asylum policy. She is obviously a broken person, and one wonders why she is given so much prominence as an authority to speak on so many matters.

→Tweet of the Day:

The majority of that money appears to have gone to Thomson Reuters Special Services LLC, a separate branch of the Thomson Reuters corporate empire that delivers “creative, data-driven solutions for the U.S. government,” but more than $10 million has been awarded directly to Reuters News & Media Inc.

→The Jews of Syria appear to be holding up. The four Jews who comprise the vestiges of what was once one of the Middle East’s most vibrant communities report that all is well with them following Bashar al-Assad’s sudden hegira to Moscow a few weeks ago. None of Damascus’ five synagogues has been molested. (One is reminded of the old joke about a Jew stranded on a desert island who shows his rescuers the two synagogues he built. “This one I pray in, the other I wouldn’t go to if you paid me.”) Soon they will even be getting some of their artifacts back. Moti Kahana, an Israeli businessman, took an ancient Torah scroll into safekeeping during the civil war and plans to lead a delegation of Syrian Jews to Damascus to return the scroll and other religious objects.

→The San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum announced that it is closing. A victim of the “slow recovery from the pandemic” (read: a hollowed-out city center that struggles to attract visitors put off by crime and filth), the museum directors are hoping to reenvision the institution in order to revive it. Meanwhile, through Jan. 6, the Jewish Museum in New York will display the Tel Dan stele fragment, dating from the ninth century BCE. The Tel Dan stele, whose Aramaic was written in the Phoenician alphabet, represents the earliest extra-biblical reference to King David.

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