As Genocide in Gaza Turns the World – Apologists for Israel Ossify

A response to Bret Stephens’ recent opinion piece (July 22nd, 2025) in the New York Times, 'No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza’. (BRET STEPHENS: No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza | The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette - Arkansas' Best News Source)

Yes Bret, this is called Genocide in Gaza

So, is Israel committing genocide in Gaza?

Well, let’s start by understanding what constitutes ‘Genocide’ as per the legal instrument to codify genocide as a crime, unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948. The Convention entered into force on 12th of January, 1951 and has 153 state parties as of February 2025.

Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as:

... 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.

— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2^[1]

Bret Stephens wrote the opinion piece for The New York Times, which was published on July 22, 2025, opining: ‘No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza’. His opening contention was that Israel could not be committing genocide in Gaza because, ‘why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly? Why not, say, hundreds of thousands of deaths, as opposed to the nearly 60,000 that Gaza Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths, has cited so far in nearly two years of war? It’s not that Israel lacks the capacity to have meted vastly greater destruction than what it has inflicted so far. It is the leading military power of its region …’

Bret Stephens is saying that Israel is obviously not committing genocide in Gaza because it simply has not killed enough Palestinians at ‘nearly 60,000’, in two years, when it obviously had the capacity to have killed a lot more; ‘it is the leading military power of its region…’  

The above definition of ‘Genocide’ clearly states, that an entity engaged in ‘any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’

Israel is clearly guilty of acts committed in Sections (a), (b), and (c) – and is therefore committing genocide!

Israel does not have to kill all, or a certain number, of Palestinians to qualify as committing genocide. It has to commit ‘any’, or just one of the acts, as per the definition above. It is guilty of committing the acts clearly defined in Sections a, b and c.

As for the words ‘intent’, ‘as such’, Bret uses those words to excuse Israel’s 80-years of brutal actions against the Palestinians, and specifically in Gaza and West Bank now, contending that Israel did not have the ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part’ Palestinians, and ‘as such’ is not ‘a) killing; b) causing bodily or mental harm; and c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part’.

Israel has been doing precisely a), b), and c) in spades, but to Bret and other Israel sympathizers, doing all that to Palestinians as a distinctly ‘racial, ethnical and religious group’ is not genocide even though it fits the definition.

All these atrocities are still not quite enough for the ‘Brets’ of this world to be genocide?

Israel has for 80 years, systematically killed, robbed, expelled and ethnically cleansed Palestinians. The Israel State, and most of the Jewish population of Israel, have consistently, and to this day, denigrated Palestinians as an inferior race, and killed them, ghettoed them, jailed and tortured them, severely curtailed their movements, and their livelihoods, stripped them of their dignity and their civil rights, and made their lives wholly wretched, and unsafe.

You know, much like the Germans did to the Jews for years, before shipping them to the concentration camps.

Israel is also not content anymore with removing Palestinians over years, it’s already done that. Now, it’s made it clear publically, it wants ALL Palestinians out of ‘greater Israel’. They want the survivors gone to Jordan, Egypt or anywhere else, it doesn’t much care.

What did the Palestinians do to deserve ethnic cleansing and genocide? They just happened to be living on the land that European Jews decided that they must have in order to ‘establish’ from scratch, a majority Jews State.

The Palestinians had to go. Any protests were brutally dealt with as ‘terrorism’. (The Jews in Poland in WWII, who fought back, were and are heroes! However, any Palestinians who dare protest or fight back are ‘terrorists’!) This is the basic art of de-humanizing people; the oldest and the most used tactic to de-sensitize the human conscience in the brutalization of other people.

In Gaza, Israel still has not stopped killing Palestinian civilians. It is still bombing, shooting, blowing up, mass starving, and for months depriving Palestinians of all aid, water, medicines, hospitals, schools, and shelter.

They have bombed civilians in refugee tents and lured them and shot them at the tightly controlled ‘food and aid stations’. And for every brutality they blame Hamas. So, ‘Hamas’ has taken on the role of ‘the devil’. Every bad thing that Israel does, Hamas made it do it! Bomb civilians, women and children; bomb all hospitals, schools, libraries, universities, refugee tents, electric infrastructure, water infrastructure, food and aid infrastructure, kill journalists, foreign medical and aid workers, kill doctors, kill everything, because ‘Hamas made us do it! What about prior to October 7, 2023? Israel’s attitude, it didn’t happen. And, if it did happen?

Israel’s response - ‘F*CK you! You wanna do something about it?’ Well, nobody ever did!

So, Israel is continuing to commit genocide in Gaza, and is ‘methodically’ upping that number of ‘nearly 60,000’, daily!! Hang in there, Bret, the numbers will get to your liking.

Also, that – you know, too small a number of 60,000 to be genocide - is surely an underestimation of the real number of the mass-dead, because under the 50 million tons of concrete rubble, that once was GAZA, lie the unnumbered dead - Palestinian men, women, children and the old, who will never ever be counted. They have, simply put, become part of the rubble.

Bret justifies the mass killing, torturing, starving, withholding of water, medical aid, shelter, electricity, etc. as price of ‘war’. He specifically cites the mass casualties of the World War II, and in America’s more recent wars, as sad but inevitable and horrible cost of war – ‘victims of war not genocide’.

But this is not a war; it is retaliation against Hamas (stands for ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’, to fight for Palestinians) for its October 7^th, attack on Israel. But, Israel has been attacking Palestinians for over 80 years, expelling them from their homes, stealing their land, and killing them if they resist. It continues today. All resistance by Palestinians is called ‘war’ by Israel. All its own actions, regardless how genocidal, are called ‘defence’. One sided or what?

Hamas’s ‘fighters’, estimated to number 20,000 to 30,000 on October 7^th, are now estimated at 14,000 to 16,000, of lightly armed (small arms, rockets, mortars, improvised explosives and perhaps some drones), are pitting themselves against the most well-equipped army in the world.

It is not a ‘war’ because Gaza is not a country, and Hamas is not a proper army - with proper weaponry like artillery, tanks, armoured carriers, attack helicopters, bombers, jet fighters, a standard navy, etc. Israeli armed forces have all that, and more; an endless supply of weapons, money and support from the biggest military power, the United States of America. And, Israel has nuclear weapons!

It’s hardly a contest! Israel’s active backer is America, while Hamas’s backer is supposedly Iran. Again, it is hardly a contest. And yet, in spite of systematic open theft of their very homeland, Palestinians are always wrong, and their sympathizers are always portrayed as ‘terrorists’ or anti-sematic Israel haters. Meanwhile, no one has killed, terrorized, or wreaked more destruction in the entire Middle East, than Israel and the United States. No one has destroyed more countries, or killed more civilians, than these two countries. They are currently the biggest flaunters of international law.

Bret also waves off ‘a handful of remarks by a few Israeli politicians de-humanizing Gazans and promising brutal retaliation’, as hardly amounting to a Wannsee Conference (where high ranking German Officials gathered to plan the ‘Final Solution’ to exterminate Jews). Ironic indeed, he slams people and countries for comparing Israel’s actions to Nazi Germany’s, and yet, to make his own point, he invokes Nazi Germany’s Official’s actions. When it suits, right?

Israeli government high ranking officials have, for years, planned and worked towards systematically getting rid of Palestinians from their lands and territories (Bret says he is unaware of such plans, but most of the rest of the world is aware), till they who lived in ALL of Palestine, before the Jews started to come back from Europe, are now in ever-shrinking ghettos from which they are being driven by mass killings, in Gaza, and by brutalization, killing and expulsion from the West Bank by Israeli extremists, backed by Israeli police and the army.

Israel has publicly, and finally, admitted to ‘never wanting a ‘Two State Solution’. It never did. All the decades of ‘negotiations’ were a sham, and always sabotaged by Israel, as many Jewish scholars who have studied the past 80 years and more, of ever more violent Zionism have confirmed. But then, Bret dismisses any and all ‘pundits and scholars’ (including Jewish holocaust survivors who are calling out ‘Gaza genocide’) who believe ‘the genocide charge’ as ‘anti-Zionists and anti-semites’, and ‘Israel haters’. This is the ultimate attack Israel and Israel-supporters have used, to silence all criticism of Israel’s decades of illegal actions and atrocities.

But, this time it is not only faceless ‘pundits and scholars’, ‘anti-Zionists and antisemities’, and ‘Israel haters’, this time it is 148 member countries of the United Nations, and its international agencies, and the International Court of Criminal Justice, and most of the American, and Western countries’ populations who are saying unequivocally, Israel is committing Genocide in Gaza!

Israel and its die-hard and blind supporters (and Bret obviously is one), who cannot under any circumstances, acknowledge the horrific reality of decades of injustices against Palestinian civilians, whose only sin was to own the land that Zionist Israelis want, after millennia, are on the wrong side of International Law, and now definitely on the wrong side of history.

Israel is already called out as a country that is committing genocide. It is before the International Criminal Court as a nation committing genocide and war crimes. Its Prime Minister and Defence Minister have been charged with ‘war crimes’ and there are warrants out for their arrest.

The world is no longer willing to ignore Israel’s increasingly brutal and genocidal treatment of the Palestinians, and its regular rogue behaviour in flaunting International Law. To date, Israel has the most UN Resolutions passed against it for violations of International Law.

Israel’s position is, the whole World is mad, and it is the only one that is sane; and, of course, the United States, as always, is the only one that agrees. But the world has turned, and Gaza is already down in history as ‘Genocide’.

As Genocide in Gaza Turns the World – Apologists for Israel Ossify - July 28, 2025