BY JONATHAN LEVITT

The word ‘genocide’ is loaded with emotional and political impact and needs to be used very carefully. The dictionary gives:

‘The deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.’

Which, of course, does not define ‘large’ and does not determine what is ‘deliberate’ and what is not.

I would say that October 7th showed that Hamas was deliberately aiming to kill as many Jews as they could, apart from the ones that they wanted to kidnap. They did not kill more only because they did not have the capacity to do so. Israel, in contradistinction, has the military capacity to kill far larger numbers of Palestinian people but they choose not to, because, I would argue, 1) they are not genocidal and 2) it is not in their interests to do so.

‘Success’, if that is an appropriate word in these circumstances, where there is a choice between bad outcomes, would consist in dismantling Hamas with sufficiently limited collateral damage so as not to alienate the whole Arab world and much of the western world against them. ‘Failure’ would be any endgame where Hamas is still in control of Gaza and operating on Israel’s border.

In that light, an immediate ceasefire, which seems a reasonable call on the surface and is one being made by many people sensing that civilian casualties are already too high, would be seen (not unreasonably) as a failure by Israel. Having started, they will want to see the job through, even if there are enormous risks involved and things could turn much worse in some scenarios.

Psychologically, it is difficult to just accept a failure, especially in a situation where emotions are still so charged by the barbaric, recent 7th October attack.

Anyone labelling what Israel is doing as ‘genocide’ clearly does not believe Israel’s claims that they are targeting Hamas and trying to limit civilian casualties. A word is just a word and the reality is that a lot of people (including children) are being killed. In practice, on the ground, in an urban warfare environment, a lot may depend on the psychological disposition of individual soldiers. How risk averse are they? Will they shoot first and ask questions later to maximise their own safety?

It may sound analytical and cold-hearted to look at numbers, but three weeks in to this war, Hamas claims there are over 7000 Palestinian casualties, including 2900 children. These figures can and will be disputed.  They matter because world opinion matters and thus Hamas has an incentive to exaggerate them. Looking at the images of Gaza, they seem plausible. You might even expect more, but then there have been warnings about strike locations (which would not happen if the intention was genocide).

Assuming for the moment we accept the 7000 figure, some questions arise:

• How many Hamas terrorists are among them? How many Hamas officials? What percentage would one consider reasonable, for a targeted attack? 100% is not a realistic figure.
• How many victims are directly due to Hamas itself? The misfired rocket (thought probable by multiple intelligence agencies) hitting the hospital claimed 500 according to Hamas. Further misfired rockets? Unfired Hamas rockets exploding when hit by Israeli ordnance? Others may have been killed for following Israeli evacuation orders against Hamas instructions.
• With 2.2 million people in the Gaza Strip, you might expect about 1800 people to die of natural causes in a period of three weeks in normal circumstances. ‘Circumstances’ are very strained indeed, so you might expect even more than that in this case. Are these included in the overall 7000 figure?
• Clearly the vast majority of the 2.2 million Gaza Strip population are being seriously inconvenienced and disadvantaged in a major way, but that is hard to avoid in a war to replace the political/military structure of Hamas. Three weeks in, the overall death toll represents some third of one percent. At what percentage point do you think it becomes unacceptable? At what percentage point would it be appropriate to call it genocide? 

Looking at social media it seems a lot of people have taken sides. You could even break them up into four matched groups:

1. Antisemites or specifically, those with a prejudice against Jews
2. Non-racist, but anti the Israeli government and pro-Palestinian
3. Islamaphobics
4. Not Islamaphobic, but against extremist Islam ideology

Jeremy Corbyn would probably place himself in category 2), while many Jewish people see him in the first category. ‘Intention’ always creates a fuzzy borderline. The same issue of it being so difficult to determine intention in the mind of another lies between the competing narratives regarding the war itself. Those claiming ‘war crimes’ and genocide’ are giving no credence to Israeli claims that their target is Hamas and that it is a legitimate war. They cannot know ‘intention’ in this instance, but assume the worst, for whatever reason. Those accepting the Israeli narrative of ‘legitimate war with collateral damage’ equally cannot be sure of the intention of the decision makers, or ‘masters of war’ as Dylan put it.

Do both narratives have ballpark figures of what is acceptable and what is not? If so, nobody wants to specify them.

Jonathan Levitt is a retired chess Grandmaster who played for the very strong England chess team that beat Russia in Reykjavik 1990. He is an Oxford maths graduate and lives in Suffolk with his wife Maria, making a living betting on live cricket. He is also an author. Jonathan’s most recent book, Contemplating Comedy (The Conrad Press, 2020), is an exploration of the psychology and philosophy of humour, packed full of examples.