Israel’s everyday treatment and mistreatment of Palestinians on the West Bank and “over the top” violence in Gaza are certainly open to criticism. Well, that’s an understatement. The tragic facts on the ground demand criticism, as, of course, the wanton slaughter of boys, girls, men, women, and children on October 7th by Hamas demands outrage.

Did Hamas commit genocide on October 7th? Is Israel committing genocide now? In both cases, the answer is “No.”

We should strive for clarity and precision about how we label different acts. It makes a difference, and I believe that we cheapen and dilute the horror when we inflate our rhetoric. We debase the currency of our moral disgust. Not every killing is murder. Not every “mass killing” is meaningfully mass.  When we define mass causalities at 5 (wounded and/or killed) because a pipe bomb found in Times Square some years ago was categorized as a Weapon of Mass Destruction, we cheapen the horror. I’m not trying to downplay pipe bombs and their lethality, but when the truck bomb that took down the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma and the A-Bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki share the same category, we are not communicating rationally. These events are tragedies, but the word “mass” loses meaning.

When the words “violence” and “brutality” become metaphors for something that may be rhetorically violent, this subtracts from the impact of actual physical violence and brutality. A word may be offensive, may be provocative, or may lead to violence and brutality, but the word is not identical to the act. (See Magrittet’s painting, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Of course, it isn’t a pipe. It’s a painting of a pipe).

Some words and phrases should be sacrosanct in their horror to keep them safe from being cheapened as metaphors. “Rape” is such a word. Hearing it used metaphorically, particularly by men who have not been raped, as I have heard too often, is an offensive misappropriation of a specific experiential horror. 

“Genocide” is another word/term whose unique horror ought to be protected from cheapening. Genocide is different from a “War Crime,” a “Crime against humanity,” or an “atrocity.” Yes, I believe that most killings and all wars are tragedies and crimes. However, genocide is of a different order. True, the deaths are equally tragic; the families mourn just as deeply. The level of feeling and depth of horror may be the same or worse, but the words mean different things. 

Genocide is a term coined specifically after the Holocaust, the Shoah, to convey the German’s maniacal and obsessive attempt to annihilate a people. Genocide as a label is not a matter of numbers. More Soviet citizens died in WWII than Jews. (Present statistics are 6 million Jews and 26 million Soviets, reported by The Russian Academy of Sciences.) The Soviet citizens were victims of war and certainly of many war crimes, crimes against humanity, sexual violence, and intentional starvation. The Soviets were clearly frequent victims of atrocities but not genocide.

In our human madness, we distinguish and must distinguish between so-called rational and legal acts of war and genocide. Rational and legal war acts (the phrase sticks in my throat) are undertaken to win land, power, factories, cities, markets, and minerals. Atrocities happen in war. War crimes are committed. Civilians are slaughtered but for a rational if horrifying end. Hitler may have believed that Slavs were inferior and dehumanized them after the failure of the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact, but he didn’t set out to exterminate all Slavs—only those necessary for his ambitions of power.

Today, the US nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be considered war crimes and atrocities, but no matter the number of dead (110,000 immediately and eventually 226,000), we were not trying to erase the Japanese people from the earth and perpetrate a genocide. We wanted the war to end. We didn’t want to invade the main Islands. We didn’t want to kill all of the ethnic Japanese.

The German attitude and obsessive hatred of Jews were different. It was not to get cheap labor or confiscate their property. Those were only additional benefits—or so they believed. Their irrational yet profound hatred of Jews arguably cost them the war. If not for anti-Semitism, Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Klaus Fuchs could have remained in Germany and built the German bomb first. But hate trumped national interest, and even at the end of the war, when they knew they had lost, they kept sending Jews into the ovens, shooting them, and dumping them into trenches.

Hamas espouses the desire to annihilate Jews in Israel, which would be genocide, but October 7th was not genocide. As horrific as the bombing and killing in Gaza is, there is no ambition to wipe out a people or a faith.

Protesting the tragedy in Gaza is completely appropriate—many Israelis and American Jews are equally repulsed. War Cabinet members are threatening to resign, and generals have retired. Debate if the tactics are either moral or effective. Picket and sit in if your moral judgment calls for it. If you carry signs opposing Netanyahu, I may join you. Please join me in mourning all the wounded and dead—the Gazans, the Israelis, the hostages, and the many more who seem cursed to die in this futile war that moves all of us further away from a state for the Palestinians and peace for the Israelis. 

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