“We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” Stanford students chanted last week, a call for genocide against Israeli Jews and the establishment of a single Muslim state from the river to the sea, as they say.
That’s according to Theo Baker, a Stanford sophomore whose exposé on antisemitism for The Atlantic is one of this week’s must-read pieces. A subscription to either The Atlantic or Apple News+ is required, but if you were thinking of burning an email address for a free trial to read just one paywalled article this week, this might be the one.
Calling for the destruction of Israel might or might not be genocidal, but the means that Hamas chose on Oct. 7 — mass murder of civilians, rape as a terror weapon, kidnapping, and worse — are inarguably genocidal.
Baker also related a conversation he had with a Muslim student named Hamza El Boudali:
El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.”
The “peace” that El Boudali and so many others crave is the peace that comes from putting all your enemies in mass graves. Stanford has “had protests in the past,” interim president Richard Saller reminded Baker, but those protests didn’t pit “students against each other” the way Israel’s counteroffensive against Hamas has. Maybe that’s because protests about the environment, apartheid, and Vietnam didn’t involve one group of students acquiescing to or even demanding the extermination of another group.
But there is no Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, no matter what lefties and other concern trolls might have you think.
Let me share something utterly remarkable with you.
Urban combat is about as bad as war gets. That’s not just for the soldiers doing the fighting — it’s also for the civilians caught up in it. Typically, civilian casualties far outnumber military casualties in city fighting.
Until now.
John Spencer is the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point and an infantry combat veteran. He’s just back from the Gaza Strip, where he witnessed the extraordinary measures Israel has taken to avoid civilian casualties.
“By my analysis,” Spencer reported for Newsweek on Monday, “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history — above and beyond what international law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The net result — and this is that “utterly remarkable” thing — is that civilian casualties do not outnumber military losses. The best estimate is just one civilian casualty for each military casualty.
Israel has accomplished this unprecedented feat “in intense urban warfare against an enemy trying to maximize its own civilian casualties.”
Spencer calls Israel’s achievement “a remarkable, historic new standard” because that’s precisely what it is. Sadly, but predictably, “the international community, and increasingly the United States, barely acknowledges these measures while repeatedly excoriating the IDF.”
It might well prove that by sparing Gaza civilians the true cost of this war, Jerusalem is encouraging continued support for Hamas. But what it does prove is that Israel has not, does not, and will not commit genocide — unlike their enemies.
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