In World War II, millions of Americans fought valiantly to bring an end to Nazi genocide and aggression.
Last month, protesters in our nation’s capital burned American flags and defaced memorials, including with pro-Hamas slogans, while asserting that Israel is committing genocide — and that it is doing so with American complicity.
These accusations have spread on America’s campuses and elsewhere since Israeli forces commenced their defensive response last year to the murderous, indeed genocidal, rampage committed in Israel on Oct. 7 by Hamas. Hamas’ invasion of Israel took the lives of some 1,200 people in a single day and perpetrated the largest mass murder of Jews since the Nazi Holocaust. Once again, the victims included men, women, and children.
The six colleagues who join me in writing this essay — Bruce J. Einhorn, Kathleen N. Coleman, Clarice R. Feldman, Joel K. Greenberg, Jeffrey N. Mausner, and Philip L. Sunshine — worked as U.S. federal prosecutors of perpetrators of Nazi genocide who fled to this country after the war. In combined service exceeding 60 years, we prosecuted Nazi criminals who shot civilian men, women and children in death pits and others who killed victims in Nazi concentration and death camps.
In our work at the U.S. Department of Justice as prosecutors of Hitler’s henchmen, we meticulously investigated acts of genocide — and then we proved them in court. We feel impelled to declare that any fair review of the verifiable, publicly available facts shows that the accusation of genocide against Israel is false and indeed outrageous.
Simply put, we have seen no evidence of Israeli commission of genocide, and there is much evidence that disproves that charge — including the recent report that, since October, Israel has facilitated the entry of more than 870 metric tons of food and other humanitarian aid to Gaza’s two million inhabitants. Meanwhile, Hamas attacks or plunders food shipments, and it has denied Gazan civilians access to vast storehouses of food and medicines that it secreted in its tunnels before Oct. 7.
Genocide is defined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) as killing and other specified acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Israel has targeted only Hamas and its terrorist group partners, not the civilian population of Gaza. Hamas is not a national, ethnical, racial or religious group; it is a designated terrorist organization that itself engages in genocidal acts.
Israel has, in fact, done more than any other military has ever done to minimize civilian casualties during large-scale urban warfare, even sacrificing the lives of many of its own soldiers in the process. For example, Israeli forces drop warning leaflets, distribute maps, and place automated phone calls to civilians in Gaza to identify areas in which combat is planned, in order to enable civilians to evacuate in advance.
Yet Hamas intentionally impedes efforts of Palestinian civilians to flee to safer areas, and then it uses the military plans provided by Israel to attack its troops, employing Palestinian civilians and hostages seized in Israel as human shields — undeniably a war crime.
Retired U.S. Army major and combat veteran John Spencer, currently the chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, has concluded that Israel “has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history — above and beyond what international law requires.” He continues: “[A]ll available evidence shows that Israel has followed the laws of war, legal obligations, best practices in civilian harm mitigation and still found a way to reduce civilian casualties to historically low levels.”
We are not alone in rejecting the false genocide accusation. For example, the German government, which is well familiar, of course, with the genocide committed by a prior German government in murdering millions of Jews and Roma, has declared that the accusation of Israeli genocide “has no basis in fact” and that Berlin “decisively and expressly rejects” it. The United States government too has rejected the claim.
Unfortunately, many voices nonetheless remain arrayed against Israel, and they have frequently overwhelmed, in the public sphere, the analyses of qualified experts who have subjected the allegation to careful analysis and have found it wanting.
Hamas is thereby winning an enormous propaganda victory, continuing to mislead many who are legitimately horrified by the undeniable horrors of war. This, in turn, encourages Hamas to continue its war of aggression, hiding behind and under Palestinian civilians and the hostages, pursuing its perverse goal of prolonging the suffering and death in Gaza in order to generate international condemnation of Israel and advance its stated goal of destroying the country.
When Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and then publicly promised to repeat that atrocity again and again until Israel is annihilated, it was acting on the genocidal command of its 1988 founding charter, which declared that it is a religious duty to kill all Jews. This commitment was unabashedly renewed in 2019, when the Hamas Gaza television station broadcast a speech by a senior Hamas official in which he openly exhorted Palestinians the world over, “There are Jews everywhere! We must attack every Jew on planet Earth — we must slaughter and kill them, with Allah’s help.”
Hamas’ announcement last week that it has selected Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the Oct. 7 genocidal attack on Israel, to be its new political leader makes clear that Hamas is doubling down on its intention to target Jews for mass murder.
Israel and other signatories of the Genocide Convention have a legal obligation to stop Hamas’s genocidal actions; Article I of the Convention obligates all nations not just to refrain from committing genocide, but also “to prevent and to punish” that crime. That is exactly what Israel is doing, with U.S. support, along with fulfilling its legitimate obligation to rescue the hostages and protect its populace, among them seven million Jews and two million Arab Israelis. Notably, of the 153 nations that have signed onto the Convention, Israel was among the first 10 to do so, in 1950.
Even if one accepts the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry mortality numbers and the percentage breakdowns it has disseminated of women and children victims (which credible experts say are greatly exaggerated and which do not distinguish between armed fighters and civilians), the deaths of thousands of people during a war is not alone indicative of genocidal intent.
Genocide is a crime based on intent, not one that is based specifically on numbers. If it were based on numbers, then the World War II Allies would have perpetrated genocide in Germany, where their forces killed 300,000 to 400,000 civilians in air operations alone, even apart from loss of life that occurred during ground offensives. No serious observer would contend that the Allies committed genocide against Germans during World War II.
German fatalities instead occurred as a result of the Allied waging of a manifestly defensive war to bring an end to aggression, war crimes, and genocide perpetrated by Germany. And those German civilian fatalities continued to mount until Nazi Germany at last surrendered — just as Hamas can and should do, at once, to end the war and the associated suffering in Gaza and Israel.
Israel too is waging a defensive war against ongoing aggression, war crimes and genocide, but it is taking far greater steps to protect civilian lives than Allied forces did. Ultimately, Allied military operations were successful in bringing Germany’s ghastly crimes to an end. It can only be hoped that Israel too will succeed, so that Hamas will never again be able to commit such crimes.
The core truth is that the genocidal frenzy of killing, rape, torture, kidnapping, and mutilation that Hamas launched in Israel on Oct. 7 were crimes of monstrous evil that every American should stand against.
Israel is fighting to ensure that it will never happen again. People of goodwill here and abroad should reject propaganda that conflates genocide with the heartbreak of casualties in defensive war and that dishonestly portrays Israel — which is combatting genocide no less heroically and necessarily than did our fighting forces in Europe in the 1940s — as a perpetrator of that infamous crime.
Rosenbaum, Einhorn, Coleman, Feldman, Greenberg, Mausner and Sunshine previously served as prosecutors in the United States Justice Department, Criminal Division, Office of Special Investigations (OSI). Rosenbaum also served as OSI’s director from 1995 to 2010; later as director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy in OSI’s successor Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section; and finally, until his retirement this year, as the Justice Department’s counselor for War Crimes Accountability and founding head of its War Crimes Accountability Team.