The question with which Bret Stephens opens his op-ed in The New York Times, rejecting the claim that Israel is committing genocide, is appalling. 

Why has Israel not killed more people if that is what it intends to do, he asks. This is the basis for his argument to deny that Israel is committing genocide. 

He argues that if Israel had that intention, then it would have killed many more people, because it obviously can. 

As if killing more than 59,000 people, by the most conservative reports, and the total destruction of Gaza are not enough.

However, genocide is not a numerical concept. A genocide could be committed by killing just one person, if that person was among the last representatives of a particular group and the person killing them intended to eradicate that group. 

This is according to the UN genocide definition that Stephens himself quotes: “a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.”

Stephens’s question is completely wrong and misleading, as numbers don’t show whether a crime is genocide, but the intent with which the crime is committed does. 

That is the argument of the ICJ to consider the case against Israel. It considers that Israel has committed crimes which may have been carried out with the intent of committing genocide; the case itself will be to prove that intent.

That is not too difficult a task, as Israeli politicians, military officials, and civil society have made that intent very clear. Consider, just as an example, the event of May 26, when Israelis celebrated the ‘Jerusalem Flag Day’.

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel's finance minister, said that “we are blessed with the opportunity to blot out the seed of Amalek,” a reference to the “biblical enemy of the Israelites”, and in this case, the Palestinians.  

Netanyahu himself claimed that it was a war of “good against evil,” a war fought against “monsters,” and that they “will wipe them out”. 

While that was being said in a government meeting in East Jerusalem, illegal settlers and soldiers were chanting “May Palestine be wiped,” and a group of young girls was marching around singing “May your village burn” in the old city.

Destruction in part is also genocide 

This shows an intention to commit a crime “with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part,” as per the UN definition of genocide quoted by Stephens. 

Further refuting his claim is the fact that the definition he uses specifies that it does not need to be in whole; destruction in part is enough to be considered genocide.

Therefore, killing over 59,000 people, 17,000 of them children, as per the most conservative estimates, is a considerable part of the whole that comprises the two million Palestinians in Gaza. 

That number is likely much larger, as demonstrated by the Lancet report published in July 2024, which claimed that more than 180,000 deaths could be attributed to Israel’s war on Gaza.

That is only counting from October 7, 2023, and in Gaza, but similar claims can be made about the occupied West Bank, which the Knesset has recently voted to annex, and in which Israel has killed over a thousand people since the same date.

Further back, we could go to 1947, the year of the Nakba, when thousands of Palestinians were killed, hundreds of villages were burned, and over 700,000 people fled their homes never to return, and recount the statements since then with the “intent” to eradicate Arabs, and specifically Palestinians, from the land Israelis consider to be theirs. 

“Death to Arabs” is just one of the many slogans that Israelis chant, in and outside of Israel, with impunity.

The “intent” that Stephens so willfully ignores in his pieces for The New York Times is further demonstrated by statements, in audio, text, and video, recorded in several databases. 

The Law for Palestine is one example. But there are others: TikTok Genocide is a thorough compilation of most public statements with that “genocidal” intent since October 7, 2023. There are hundreds of them. The Al-Haq database has a similar purpose.

If anyone has any doubt about the Israeli intent to commit genocide, according to the UN definition quoted by Stephens, they can spend five minutes on any of these sites. 

If, even after that, that person still has any doubt that many Israeli politicians, military commanders, soldiers, and part of civil society intend to commit genocide, then they are definitely afflicted by the same malady that Stephens and the editors of The New York Times seem to have: an aversion to truth.