If you take what you get in the New York Times at face value, you might get the impression that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. It seems a little late in the day for a newspaper to run a story with this headline, for example, as the Times did on Saturday: “Gaza Health Ministry Says Israeli Military Killed 32 Near Aid Site.” Or to run a story like this one on Sunday:
Israeli forces killed and wounded dozens of Palestinians on Sunday in the northern Gaza Strip as crowds gathered near a border crossing where United Nations trucks were entering the enclave with humanitarian aid, according to the Gaza health ministry and local health workers.
Well, yeah, we’ve heard it before and we’ve learned not to trust anything asserted by “the Gaza health ministry” and those subject to its jurisdiction. The Times, on the other hand, has served as a mouthpiece for Hamas.
Bret Stephens decamped from the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal to the editorial page of the New York Times back in 2017. I wonder what he thinks about the reportage of his colleagues. In today’s paper he takes issue with the ludicrous charge of “genocide” that is hurled against Israel — by readers, I would add, who might otherwise have had their minds deformed by overconsumption of the Times and the rest of the mainstream press:
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It may seem harsh to say, but there is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal — if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans — 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’s 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, stronger now that it has decimated Hezbollah and humbled Iran. It could have bombed without prior notice, instead of routinely warning Gazans to evacuate areas it intended to strike. It could have bombed without putting its own soldiers, hundreds of whom have died in combat, at risk.
It isn’t that Israel has been deterred from striking harder by the presence of its hostages in Gaza. Israeli intelligence is said to have a fairly good idea of where those hostages are being held, which is one reason, with tragic exceptions, relatively few have died from Israeli fire. And it knows that, as brutal as the hostages’ captivity has been, Hamas has an interest in keeping them alive.
Nor is it that Israel lacks diplomatic cover. President Trump has openly envisaged requiring all Gazans to leave the territory, repeatedly warning that “all hell” would break out in Gaza if Hamas didn’t return the hostages. As for the threat of economic boycotts, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange has been the world’s best-performing major stock index since Oct. 7. 2023. With due respect to the risk of Irish boycotts, Israel is not a country facing a fundamental economic threat. If anything, it’s the boycotters who stand to suffer.
In short, 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…
Whole thing here.
