On that Dark Day a Genocide was Stopped

Juliet Moses, Auckland Lawyer and Chair of the New Zealand Jewish Council

On Wednesday it was three years since October 7, 2023, the joyous Jewish festival of Simchat Torah, when Hamas invaded sovereign Israel, massacring 1200 people and taking 251 hostage, in an orgy of sadistic savagery that harked back to medieval times. Even for those of us who were not in Israel that day, Wednesday was sombre and unsettling, a day of real trauma. A few nights ago, the Jewish community here held a dignified, moving service behind closed doors in a secret location, guarded by police and security, prefaced with an explanation of lockdown procedures, all of which we have sadly become accustomed to.

Today is not a vigil. It is to stand against the march advertising itself as the Global March for Palestine. 

If you have chosen to join that march today, you are doing so because it is the weekend following the third anniversary of October 7. You are hijacking our pain and grief. And if you are celebrating that day, chanting for intifada, or insisting that the so-called right of resistance includes burning whole families alive, kidnapping nine-month-old babies, livestreaming the murder of a grandmother on her Facebook page, and mass raping young women at a music festival, you have no right to bemoan its consequences, including by calling it “genocide”.

"Genocide." We need to talk about that word, the one the mob can't go a sentence without saying, because you know what Goebbels said about repeating a lie.

The weaponised misuse of the genocide accusation against Israel is not new. Fifty years ago the USSR first made the charge in the UN Security Council, and its orchestrated propaganda campaign has outlived it, metastasising through academia, the UN and NGOs, the media, unions, even now the Nobel Peace Prize.

This has been a brutal war, and every innocent life lost is a tragedy. But brutal, even catastrophic or disproportionate wars do not equate to genocide. This war was started by Hamas, after years of planning and building 500 kilometres of tunnels used for fighting and denied to civilians. Israel has taken unprecedented measures to minimise civilian casualties in intense urban combat conditions designed by Hamas.

This week 76 retired senior military leaders and legal experts rejected the genocide allegation, stating that Israel "has not committed genocide but rather set a high bar for how to conduct urban warfare against an enemy who will stop at nothing, including the death of its own civilians."

 A statement signed by more than 6000 leaders and public figures lists the factors erased in the eagerness to indict Israel: the tunnels, the booby-trapped homes, the conflating of combatants with "journalists" and "human rights workers," a civilian-to-terrorist casualty ratio considered low for asymmetrical urban warfare, the absence of mass starvation despite repeated claims of imminent catastrophe, and the warnings given to civilians before attacks.

It said:

“A crucial difference between war as tragedy and war as genocide is intent. In this war, only one side intended to commit genocide, and that is Hamas.

The bitter irony is that Israel, home to half the world's Jews, is the only country to face a sustained war of attempted genocide from its inception in 1948 until today.”

Anyone intellectually honest who has looked at the facts knows the genocide label is a libel. But those who use it are impervious to evidence and reason. It is a rhetorical rocket, the chief weapon in their arsenal against Israel and the Jewish people.

It has become the primary means by which antizionists and antisemites delegitimise Israel and demonise those who don't want it eradicated. It is Holocaust inversion; some even justify it. It permits them to feel righteous in their hatred of Jews, and gleeful that they can express it openly again. And it enables discrimination, intimidation, exclusion and violence against Jews, who are held collectively responsible for the Israeli government regardless of their views, unlike any other minority community. The genocide libel creates the permission structure for villainising and violence against Jews. That is why they began using the word within days of October 7, before any troops were on the ground in Gaza.

In reality, the genocide accusation is the grievance that Hamas did not complete the genocidal attack it began at 6.29am on October 7, and that it lost the war it started. On that dark day a genocide was stopped, not started. That is why protestors who were demanding a ceasefire within days of October 7, never called for the release of the hostages or for Hamas to disarm, even though that would have hastened a ceasefire. They only wanted a ceasefire if it would give Hamas the best chance of fulfilling its promise to repeat October 7 over and over until Israel is destroyed.

Wars have awful consequences, but that is why you don't start them, and why you don't celebrate them, as I have seen so many Kiwis do, including those across the way.

Yet we should not be surprised by today. We have had three years of incessant protests that show no decency, a revolting sense of entitlement, and a nihilistic desire to tear us apart. Protesting at toy stores. Smashing windows at ministers' houses. Sabotaging businesses with fake reviews and intimidating customers. Rorting our democratic system to take taxpayers' money to fund a party dedicated to the eradication of Israel. Assaulting schoolchildren. Damaging Jewish community centres. Insisting artists make political statements or be cancelled. Nothing is off limits, except it seems condemning Hamas, including for what it has done to its own people - launching the war that brought death and destruction on Gaza, being happy to sacrifice Gazans, and oppressing them.

No one else protests like the intifada crowd. Not our Iranian community, whose compatriots were murdered by the tens of thousands in two days in January by the regime whose ambassador remains here, while our government has failed to designate the IRGC a terrorist entity. Not our Uyghur community, whose loved ones have disappeared into Chinese camps. Not our Ukrainian community, whose homeland is suffering one of the worst Russian onslaughts in months and from which some 20,000 children have been stolen. Not our Afghan community, whose women have been dehumanised by the Taliban. Not our Rohingya refugees, though the ICJ is deliberating whether Burma committed genocide against them, something you have likely heard nothing about. None of these communities use their people's suffering as a pretext to wreak havoc on our society, and they get no attention from our “wonderful human rights activists” across the way.

It should be possible to care for Palestinians while treating Israelis as humans, not wanting Israel annihilated, not indulging antisemitism, and condemning Hamas. Increasingly it is not. Antizionism has become a core identity for people who have never been to the Middle East and know little about it. It is a cult, and like all cults, it demands absolute fealty, portrays itself as uniquely righteous, and punishes dissenters through silencing and shunning. Antizionism is racism and it has hijacked the left. It consumes and corrodes everything that tolerates it. It starts by targeting Jews but never ends with them.

I am here today not just as a Jew, but as a Kiwi who loves my country and is fighting hard for it, before we go down the path we are seeing like-minded countries take.

Thank you to everyone who is here today. Lucy Rogers, you are a legend, a woman of principle and moral courage. And to our Iranian brothers and sisters: we love you, we grieve with you, and we are in awe of you. When the regime that has held your once glorious nation and much of the Middle East hostage finally falls, I will dance in the streets of Tehran with you, and you will dance in the streets of Tel Aviv with me, and what a party that will be.

From the devastation and grief of the last three years, seeds of hope are sprouting. The Iranian regime is perhaps the weakest it has ever been. Last week was the first time this century that no rockets crossed from Gaza into Israel for a year. Hamas is significantly weakened, and some brave Gazans are speaking out against it. Lebanon may be liberating itself from Hezbollah. There was a march in support of Israel in Syria this week. Syria! And representatives of Israel, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have just met in Abu Dhabi.

I pray that the Middle East will one day be a region where everyone who belongs there lives in peace with their neighbours.

 Oseh shalom bimromav,

hu ya'aseh shalom aleinu,

ve'al kol Yisrael,

ve'al kol yoshvei tevel

ve'imru amen.

May the One who makes peace in the heavens make peace for us, for all Israel, and for all who dwell on earth. Amen.

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