Ros Altmann

What Israel did in Gaza may well go down in history as the most humane and precise urban warfare environment the world has ever known—the very opposite of genocide. The entire purpose of a genocide is to push civilians into the killing zone. Think about what happened in the Holocaust, where children in line at Auschwitz were given bars of soap, where inside of the gas chambers there were fake shower heads. What was the point? It was to trick and induce civilians to get in to the killing zone so that you could kill more of them more efficiently over time. Israel has done the very opposite—warning civilians and then manning humanitarian corridors with its own soldiers, risking its own sons’ and daughters’ lives to ensure that civilians get out of the killing zone. We see two remarkable things in Gaza. First, according to preeminent urban warfare scholars like John Spencer, Richard Kemp, and Andrew Fox, Israel has the lowest militant-to-civilian kill ratio in the history of urban warfare. Genocides have extreme civilian-to-militant kill ratios. Hundred, thousand, ten thousand-to-one. That’s the point of a genocide. Here we have a militant-to-civilian kill ratio of may be two-to-one—not consistent not just with law of war violations—but much less with genocide. Second, and more importantly, all genocidal regimes get better over time at killing civilians. Again, think about the Holocaust. The Nazis started with firing squads killing 20, 30, 50 people at a time and realized that was too inefficient. Then they got these vans and filled them with exhaust pipes, and they would kill more people. And they said, “We’re never going to get to six million killing them this way.” That led them to construct these massive gas chambers and crematoria—the architecture of true genocide—to kill thousands and thousands of people cheaply and efficiently a day. Israel has done the opposite. Even if you believe Hamas’ numbers, the scale of civilian death in Gaza went down over time. Israel got better and better and spent hundreds of millions of shekels learning how to become more efficient at preserving innocent Palestinians’ lives. Again, the very opposite of genocide.