JONESING FOR GENOCIDE

HUMANITARIANS’ RIGHTEOUSNESS REQUIRES PILES OF PALESTINIAN BODIES.

Good advice.

Imagine a scenario where, amid the fog of war, some people claim a genocide occurred and others argue it did not.Then imagine people hoping it happened.

Imagine further that the people wishing for genocide were the very people who self-define as humanitarians, peace activists, progressives.

Take it an unimaginable step further and visualize that the population these people are determined to prove were genocided are the very people the activists claim to venerate and defend — and that any evidence that this population was not subjected to genocide is a threat to the cherished worldview of the people who claim to seek the best for the victims.

This is what has been happening in the debate over the recent war in Gaza.

I have always maintained that a main reason Palestinians are dying (not just in the Gaza war, but since 1948 at the latest) is because dead Palestinians are a prerequisite for “proving” Israeli malevolence.

Since the first Arab-Israeli war, Palestinian death tolls have been waved like flags and celebrated as scorecards by the very people ostensibly on their side. Arab tyrants decided in 1947–48 that coexistence with the Jews was intolerable and fighting the existence of a Jewish state was a sacred cause, no matter how many dead Palestinians were churned into the machine of war and death. The more dead Palestinians, the more venal the Jews. (Or Israelis. Call them what you will, we know who you mean.)

Overseas activists oblige enthusiastically. Playing their assigned role, “humanitarians” worldwide line the streets of capitals, hollering against the Zionists and terrorizing Jews. The Arab dictators, in turn, oblige Western activists, ensuring more Palestinians die, the global mobs continue to grow, the death toll rises and so on and so forth.

I have known this has been happening and have written about it many times.

But I have never heard so crystal clear a demonstration as my friend Rena recently posted on Facebook.

She wrote about an interaction she had at a party. (I share with her permission.)

She hit it off with another guest, “Mina,” with whom she shared much in common. Fun!

“Then the conversation veered,” Rena wrote.

“That’s when she announced that she’s the faculty advisor for her school’s SJP chapter — Students for Justice in Palestine — a group well-known for anti-Zionist and frequently antisemitic positions.

“Mina would throw out an inflammatory and verifiably false accusation about Israel; I’d counter with facts. She’d rebound with a new falsehood, a tired slogan, or a talking point that’s been thoroughly debunked.

“She quoted Francesca Albanese, who’s repeatedly minimized Hamas’s atrocities and claimed Israel had no right to defend itself after October 7. She quoted Norman Finkelstein, who weaponizes his parents having been in the Holocaust and who’s made a career out of attacking Israel; Finkelstein called the October 7 attacks ‘heroic.’ And so on.

“Naturally, she leaned heavily on ‘Israel is committing genocide / 200,000 innocent Gazans have been killed including 100,000 children’ — a claim that’s been thoroughly and repeatedly discredited.

“As disturbing as her assertions were, I also felt this was a rare opportunity to engage with someone so thoroughly steeped in propaganda yet willing to talk. What unsettled me wasn’t the propaganda; it was knowing she teaches college students.

“We tried to keep our voices measured, reminding ourselves that we were at an anniversary party, but the argument kept reviving itself.

“On the third cycle, Mina said dramatically: ‘Well. I guess we’ll see who’s right in three years’ time.’

“Yes,” I replied, “I’m already looking forward to your apology.”

“She gave me a dirty look, so I softened: ‘Okay, I’m looking forward to your acknowledgment that I was right.’

“She said, ‘Don’t hold your breath.’

And I said, “But you want me to be right, don’t you?”

She blinked. “No.”

“So I said:

“If I’m right, it means there was no genocide. If I’m right, it means Israel had one of the lowest civilian-to-combatant ratios of any modern war. It means 100,000 innocent children were not killed. Isn’t that what you WANT?”

“She looked startled — eyes wide.

“It was the look of someone suddenly confronted with the moral implications of her own position.

“I’ve had conversations with people who hate Israel but I’d never watched someone actually register, in real time, that a moral person would want me to be right. That fewer lives lost is not a defeat, but something any decent person should hope for.

“For a moment, she was forced to see what her argument required: that she needed the higher death toll to preserve her worldview.

“Her guard dropped for a heartbeat, and something honest flickered.

“It felt like a small victory — not over her, but over the story she’d been trapped inside.

“I haven’t seen that flicker again, but I still think about it.”

Rena has more patience than I do. I admire her willingness to engage. In this instance, she may have actually had a powerful impact.

In his 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay declared: “Men, it has been said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

The world is a mess and it will only be fixed when a ton of people come to their senses.

But a ton of people will only come to their senses, I’m afraid, through one-on-one and small group conversations like Rena had. There is no magic bullet that will miraculously change millions. It will be a series of small, incremental shifts until a tipping point of correction finally takes place.

That is Lesson 1 for today. It’s a matter of strategy.

The other lesson, though, is one of content. It is realizing that the people who claim to be the defenders of the Palestinian people are the ones who are so disappointed to think there is no Palestinian genocide. We need to shine a light on their horrific moral hypocrisy, like Rena did: Let them see that they are rewarding and encouraging the deaths of more Palestinians.

Their entire worldview depends on Israeli wickedness and Palestinian victimization — and the more victimized the better. The higher the number of dead Palestinians, the more righteous their activist cred.

The anti-Israel/”pro-Palestinian” movement debases both Israelis and Palestinians, turning them into avatars, dehumanizing them into symbols for Western activists to demonstrate their self-interested, egotistical objectives, no matter how many Palestinians suffer or die for their virtuous moral crusading.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep repeating it.

There are terms for people like these.

But “pro-Palestinian” doesn’t seem like the right one.

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