The Fix: Genocide Denial in the NYT

A New York Times writer dabbled in genocide denial. It did not go well.

Credit: Matthew Nichols / Shutterstock

Last week, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote a piece entitled, “No, Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza.” In it, he offers one fatuous claim after another to absolve Israel of a charge that is increasingly leveled against it.

The amount of bad faith, intellectual laziness, and sheer incompetence on display is hard to overstate. But as we will see, there is a reason why Stephens decided to write this column now. It is a reason that he did not wish to reveal, since doing so would have raised uncomfortable questions about his credibility and agenda.

But first, let us go through his argument point by point, if only to show the nonsense of it.

Consider his opening salvo:

The first question the anti-Israel genocide chorus needs to answer is: Why isn’t the death count higher? The answer, of course, is that Israel is manifestly not committing genocide.

This is a silly and misleading statement. As anyone familiar with the subject can explain, a finding of genocide has nothing to do with the number of victims affected but rather hinges on the intent of the perpetrator.

Under the terms of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, genocide refers to any of five acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” The five acts include (1) killing members of the group; (2) inflicting serious harm, whether mental or physical, on members of the group; (3) imposing conditions of life intended to destroy the group in whole or in part; (4) attempting to prevent births within the group; and (5) forcibly transferring the group’s children to another group.

Acts such as killing and inflicting bodily harm do not by themselves imply genocide. Only if they are undertaken with the intent to destroy one of the designated types of groups do they qualify.

Stephens, it turns out, is well aware of this fact. After spending the first 30 percent of his essay arguing—erroneously—that Israel has not killed enough people to warrant the charge of genocide, he then proceeds to explain—correctly—that “genocide does not mean simply ‘too many civilian deaths’…[but instead] means seeking to exterminate a category of people for no other reason than that they belong to that category.”

Doing It Half-Assed

Things do not get much better from there. In the remainder of the piece, we are treated to a mix of facile excuses, fallacious assertions, and more frivolous “gotchas” in a hollow effort to exonerate Israel.

If it really were genocide, Stephens asks, why does Israel offer evacuation warnings before bombing a given area? (It frequently does not, and many of the warnings it does provide are impossible to heed).

If it were really genocide, he continues, why would Israel put its own ground forces at risk instead of obliterating Gaza from a safe distance? (The use of ground troops does not somehow rule out the possibility of genocide.)

In any event, Stephens reminds us, all wars are destructive, so why single out Israel? (No, not all wars are this destructive).

As for all the genocidal statements of top Israeli leaders, we are told, these were but “furious comments in the wake of Hamas's Oct. 7 atrocities.” Were they not allowed to blow off a little steam?

And let us not forget Hamas's refusal to release the hostages, he says, not to mention its other war crimes (as if either of these things grant Israel a free pass to violate International Humanitarian Law).

Besides, he concludes, we should be more cautious about employing so incendiary a term as genocide lest it be “used by anti-Zionists and antisemites…to license a new wave of Jew hatred.”

The Third Man

Amidst all the evasions and non sequiturs, Stephens was too busy to mention the elephant in the room. That elephant is Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American historian who serves as the Dean's Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University.

One week to the day before Stephens wrote his Times column, Bartov penned a 3500-word essay in the very same paper accusing Israel of genocide. This explains why Stephens published his apologia in the first place and chose to do so now.

“My inescapable conclusion,” Bartov writes,

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. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.

In making his case, Bartov cites the steady stream of eliminationist rhetoric from top Israeli leaders, the systematic destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure (“a policy aimed,” he says, “at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely”), and the infliction of death, starvation, and other forms of deprivation on a massive scale.

He also takes Holocaust experts to task for their conspicuous silence, arguing that it has caused a rift with the “wider community of genocide scholars” that is coming “ever closer toward a consensus over describing events in Gaza as a genocide.”

Still, despite transparently responding to Bartov, Stephens does not dare mention his name. The reason why is obvious. Had Stephens acknowledged the essay’s existence, he might have caused readers to wonder what qualifies him, of all people, to contradict a leading genocide expert. He might have also run the risk of inadvertently prompting people to go and read it, thereby enabling them to contrast Bartov’s reasoned judgment with Stephens’s frivolous deflections.

As Bartov notes, he is hardly alone among human rights experts in accusing Israel of genocide. The ranks of those who have joined him include international organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Israeli organizations like B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and official bodies such as the International Court of Justice and the United Nations Special Rapporteur.

Dozens of individual specialists agree, including Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars; Amos Goldberg, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Hebrew University; Daniel Blatman, a professor in the same department as Goldberg; William A. Schabas, a professor of international human rights law at Middlesex University; Luis Moreno Ocampo, the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court; Aryeh Neier, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch; Shmuel Lederman, a research fellow at the Weiss-Livnat International Center for Holocaust Research and Education at the University of Haifa; Martin Shaw, a sociologist and genocide expert at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals; and Raz Segal, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University.

On the one hand, then, there are legions of human rights specialists, organizations, and agencies that contend that Israel is at least plausibly guilty of genocide. On the other hand, you have Bret Stephens—someone who, notably, is not a human rights expert and who for some reason chose to “examine” the issue without acknowledging, much less engaging with, the dozens of actual experts who have made the claim.

If you want your readers to take you seriously on an issue, it might help if you take it seriously yourself.

It may well be possible to dispute Israel's culpability for genocide in a way that is evidence-based and intellectually honest. But this ain’t it.

Equality For Some

Thought experiment: How would Stephens respond if somebody treated Hamas's terrorist attack on October 7^th, 2023 with the same glaring omissions and lazy excuse-making that he applies to Israel's crimes? What if they took his words and turned them around to describe Hamas?

Consider the following statements, all of which are adapted from Stephens’s own:

• “There are important questions to be asked about the tactics Hamas has used…[but] hardly any movement in history has pursued decolonization without at least some of its soldiers committing war crimes.”

• “Trigger-happy militants or strikes that hit the wrong target or movement leaders reaching for vengeful soundbites do not come close to adding up to genocide. They are decolonization in its usual tragic dimensions.”

• “Israel’s tactics, which are war crimes in themselves, make it difficult for Hamas to achieve its military aims: a Palestinian state and the elimination of the Israeli state so that Palestinians may never again be threatened with more indiscriminate attacks.”

• “While some pundits and scholars may sincerely believe the genocide charge against Hamas, it is also used by racists to equate Palestine with Nazi Germany.”

Leaving aside the factual inaccuracies and selective omissions they contain, such statements are morally reprehensible. They excuse Hamas’s crimes, obscure its eliminationist goals, and discount the lives of its victims—just as Stephens does when using those very same words to defend Israel.

It would be one thing if Israel, unlike Hamas, were not intentionally targeting civilians. But Israel clearly is targeting civilians and doing so on an enormous scale—by its own admission, too. As such, it would be wrong to describe the above as an exercise in false equivalence.

There is a term for the failure to afford others the same dignity one demands for one’s own community. That term is dehumanization, and it is exactly what Stephens is doing in his column. His strained rationalizations derive from the same impulse behind the genocide itself, one which carves out exceptions in the granting of basic humanity to certain groups for the sake of bestowing eternal innocence on others.

In this respect, Stephens’s evidence-free whitewashing of Israel’s genocide is indistinguishable from that of the ostensible leftists who excuse Russia's genocide against Ukrainians. Both suspend the privilege of humanity for whole groups of people whose only crime is to be victimized by the wrong offender.

For Stephens, as for his pro-Russian counterparts, the obligation to exonerate a favored perpetrator outweighs his professed commitment to universal equality.

Stephens would never accept such doltish apologias on Hamas’s behalf, which begs the question of why he finds it acceptable to do the same for Israel. The inescapable conclusion is that he assigns less value to the Palestinians than he does to other communities.

Either we are to recognize the universal equality of human dignity or instead maintain that some people have less dignity than others. It is clear where Stephens stands. It is high time that the rest of us made our choice.