The Real Genocides That the World So Quickly Has Forgotten

While the world is paying attention to South Africa’s accusation, brought before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), that Israel is guilty of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide,” many real genocides in recent times have received insufficient, or in some cases no, attention.

More on this selective indignation can be found here: “The Real Genocides the World Ignores,” by Shoshana Bryen, JNS.org, January 19, 2024:

“Genocide” is a word that should never be used lightly.

According to legal scholars Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany, the definition of genocide is “well settled” and “commonly agreed.” There is a consensus that “genocide involves killing members of a national or ethnic group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Despite the baseless accusations against Israel at the International Court of Justice, this is not happening in Gaza. Nonetheless, the ICJ blood libel is an object lesson in how the international anti-Israel mob works. Slandering Israel and Jews is a time-honored method of diverting attention from the depredations of others. It also erases the victims of these crimes without so much as a crocodile tear.

The accusations by South Africa of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” by the IDF in Gaza are preposterous. There is no ethnic cleansing going on in Gaza. No Arabs have been subject to mass killings or forcibly removed from the Strip. Instead, the IDF makes enormous efforts to minimize civilian casualties. It does so by warning civilians to leave areas that are about to become a battlefield, and to leave buildings that are soon to be targeted. It has done this in Gaza by dropping six million leaflets, making 14 million prerecorded telephone calls, and 72,000 personal calls. Israeli pilots also call off attacks if they spot too many civilians at or near the intended target. These warnings are also heeded, of course, by Hamas combatants who can thereby manage to escape. No other army in the world warns its enemies where or when they will be targeted. But the IDF does so, as an unavoidable byproduct of its determination to limit civilian deaths. It is because of this and similar practices by the IDF to minimize civilian casualties that British Colonel Richard Kemp, who commanded British forces in Afghanistan, has called the IDF “the most moral army in the world.”

As for the accusation of “genocide,” we must point again to the same warnings by the IDF — leafleting, emailing, telephoning, and use of the “knock-on-the-roof” technique — that are all designed to minimize civilian casualties, the very opposite of an attempt at “genocide.” And another way to answer the charge of “genocide” is to note that in 1948 there were 156,000 Arabs in Israel; today there are more than 2 million. When Israel took over Gaza in 1967, its population was 400,000, and when Israel pulled out of the Strip in 2005, its population had risen to 1.3 million, a more than threefold increase. Similarly, when Israel took over the West Bank in 1967, there were 900,000 Palestinians living in the area; today there are 3 million. What kind of “genocide” is this where its supposed victims increase in population by more than twelvefold in Israel, and – over a shorter period —more than threefold in both Gaza and the West Bank?

And while that non-existent “genocide” by Israel is being reported on by an implacably hostile media, the real genocides of recent decades are quickly forgotten.

Here are some examples of such depredations:

Darfur, Sudan: In 2007, then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell described the situation in Darfur as genocide. The U.N. estimates that by 2016, 300,000 people had been killed and there was credible evidence that the Sudanese government used chemical weapons against the local population. By Feb. 2023, government-sponsored militias have killed an estimated 400,000 people through starvation and disease. Mass rape has also occurred. More than 2.5 million people have been internally displaced and over 200,000 have fled to Chad.

These figures need to be updated. In Darfur the Arab militias and the Arab Rapid Support Force (RSF) had killed 300,000 black Africans by 2016, and an additional 400,000 have been killed since 2016, for a total to date of 700,000 largely unarmed and helpless civilians. 7.5 million black Africans, not 2.5 million, in Sudan have now been internally displaced. 500,000 black Africans — not 200,000 —have fled to Chad from the Sudan. This was undeniably an attempt at ethnic cleansing by the Arabs in Sudan, to kill as many black Africans — unarmed and helpless men, women, and children — as they could, and to drive the rest out of the country.