Bret Stephens once again tries and fails to deny Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. It is a despicable piece of writing. It could be ignored entirely except that it has been published in such a high-profile paper.
Stephens’ argument is as weak as it is appalling. He ignores the overwhelming evidence that has led Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and U.N. experts to conclude that the Israeli government is committing genocide. He does not engage any of the arguments made by genocide scholars, including Omer Bartov, who wrote an op-ed for The New York Times just last week in which he made a compelling case that the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza. Bartov was initially reluctant to say that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza because he didn’t believe that the evidence supported the charge, but he changed his mind as the evidence piled up:
My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could [bold mine-DL]. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.
It isn’t just Bartov who has reached this conclusion. This is now the consensus among genocide scholars. Israeli scholar Shmuel Lederman said earlier this year, “I think the second half of 2024 is the point at which a consensus emerged among genocide researchers (as well as the human rights community) that this was genocide.” Stephens doesn’t acknowledge any of this.
Stephens also has nothing to say about the Netanyahu government’s deliberate policy of starvation or its systematic destruction of objections indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. Like a good regime apologist, he doesn’t talk about the famine conditions that the Israeli government has created. It is the Israeli government’s use of starvation as a weapon and its destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure that show their genocidal intent. They are starving millions of people on purpose. They know what the consequences for the population will be, and they continue doing it in full view of the world.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
