In “Israel’s war in Gaza and the specter of ‘genocide,’” Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor spotlights the claim promoted by certain critics of Israel that the fight against Hamas in Gaza is tantamount to genocide.
However, rather than a sober analysis of both the claims and counter-claims, Tharoor’s piece relies on a biased narrative, misleading assertions, and selective omission to implicitly join in the chorus of those malevolently accusing Israel of genocide and/or “de facto ethnic cleansing.”
🙅 No. What is happening in Gaza is not a genocide. It is a war. Israel is fighting a war against Hamas, and abiding by international law as it does. pic.twitter.com/qgdykxH8rx
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 31, 2023
The Missing Hamas Factor
Tharoor cites a group of UN special rapporteurs who issued a memorandum recently wherein they accuse Israel of war crimes and contend that “the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide.”
Among the UN independent experts behind the memorandum is Francesca Albanese who has previously apologized after antisemitic posts on her personal social media profile were uncovered and has likened the Jewish state to Nazism.
Another of these “experts” is Michael Fakhri, a BDS supporter who signed an academics’ petition affirming “the Palestinian struggle as an indigenous liberation movement confronting a settler colonial state.”
Tharoor echoes these UN rapporteurs when he implicitly accuses Israel of wantonly attacking civilian targets, claiming that Israel’s assertion that it tries to limit civilian casualties is “difficult to square against a catalogue of Israeli strikes on crowded civilian neighborhoods, hospitals and U.N. facilities.”
🔴 Watch: Thousands of civilians from northern Gaza evacuate to southern Gaza following the @IDF’s efforts to move innocents out of harm’s way.
We will continue to take every possible measure to protect innocents while Hamas continues to intentionally endanger civilians by… pic.twitter.com/herapOLUDW
— Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) November 7, 2023
What both the UN special rapporteurs and Ishaan Tharoor fail to acknowledge is Hamas’ cynical use of civilian infrastructure to conceal and abet its terror operations.
Throughout this war, the IDF has provided evidence showing how Hamas’ terror tunnels snake underneath residential homes in Gaza, how the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City is being used as a base by the terror organization, and how Hamas fires its rockets toward Israel from within built-up areas.
While Israel tries to avoid harm to Gazan civilians, it is absurd to classify the inevitable collateral damage caused by Hamas’ entrenchment within civilian areas as being akin to “genocide.”
WATCH: Hamas turned a mosque into a rocket launching compound.
This is yet another example of Hamas’ shameless exploitation of civilian areas for its terrorist activities. pic.twitter.com/TvKsCdabO4
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) November 6, 2023
The Russian Connection
In a bid to paint the West’s support for Israel’s fight against Hamas as hypocritical, Tharoor seeks to compare Israel’s actions to those of Russia in Ukraine.
Tharoor writes that “the blasted moonscapes of parts of Gaza don’t look dissimilar to what Russia reduced Mariupol to” and also claims that in the early part of the war in Ukraine, “Russian officials…blamed Ukraine’s military for using its civilians as ‘human shields.’”
This latter point is clearly an attempt to discredit the IDF’s claim that Hamas uses the people of Gaza as human shields, complicating its attempt to uproot Hamas while avoiding overwhelming civilian casualties.
However similar the images from Gaza and Ukraine might seem to Tharoor, this is a simplistic and superficial analysis without much merit.
Russia’s actions during the war in Ukraine are defined by its illegal invasion of a sovereign country while Israel’s actions in Gaza are defined by its stated military goal of uprooting the terror group that committed barbaric atrocities against its civilian population within its sovereign territory.
The sharp difference between Russia’s and Israel’s actions is best exemplified by Ukraine’s immediate support for Israel following the Hamas attack of October 7 and Russia’s ambivalence coupled with its sharp criticism of Israeli actions.
Horrible news from Israel. My condolences go out to everyone who lost relatives or close ones in the terrorist attack. We have faith that order will be restored and terrorists will be defeated.
Terror should have no place in the world, because it is always a crime, not just…
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) October 7, 2023
Ishaan Tharoor’s Selective Evidence
Tharoor quotes the views of three people, all of whom are severely critical of Israel:
- Martin Shaw, who has been sympathetic to the anti-Israel BDS movement, who has compared Israel to Hezbollah, and who was outspoken in his opposition to Israel’s right to self-defense in its fight against Hamas in 2014.
- Craig Mokhiber, a former UN official who has accused Israel of war crimes, has spread the work of BDS activists, and has denied Israel’s right to exist. Only in the past few weeks has it been uncovered that he fraudulently turned his anti-Israel views into a means by which to distract from the real reasons behind his departure from the UN: his open antisemitism. (See the tweet below.)
- Bruno Macaes, a former Portuguese government minister, who asserted in early 2023 that “Israel is no longer a liberal democracy” and who has recently accused Israel of committing war crimes in its war with Hamas.
SHAMEFUL: How did some media outlets allow themselves to be manipulated by an antisemitic UN official looking to use his hatred of Israel as a false cover for his own indiscretions?
Must-read 🧵: https://t.co/UD0WomS4r0
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 1, 2023
In the growing discussion surrounding the genocide accusation against Israel, Ishaan Tharoor does not mention even one expert who is opposed to the classification of Israel’s war against Hamas as “genocide.”
A simple search of the internet would find several scholars, including Michael Berenbaum, Richard Libowitz, and Polly Zavadivker, who have spoken out against using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions.
Israel’s continued warnings to Palestinian civilians to seek the relative safety of southern Gaza, the defensive nature of the war, and the discriminate nature of Israel’s military campaign all point to the fact that, despite the number of civilian casualties, Israel’s actions do not come close to meeting the legal threshold of what constitutes “genocide.”
By ignoring these opposing voices and selectively focusing on those agenda-driven individuals who wish to tar the Jewish state with war crimes, Ishaan Tharoor is deliberately leading his readers to conclude that Israel is guilty of some form of ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
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