135,000

So I don't like quoting Bret Stephens. He almost personifies that strain of neoconservative Jewish nationalism that's going to get every Jew killed. Every era has their Bar-Kochbas and Rabbi Akivas who imagine us all having greater power and ability to get away with more than we really have, Stephens is just one of a hundred or two major public figures in 21st Century Jewish-American discourse who make me scared as shit.

But he was right about something crucial this week: if it's a genocide, why is the total not much higher? If Israel wanted to actually murder Gazans, they could have mowed Gaza down to the last child two years ago, and yet the total seems to stand at 60,000. Mass murder? Sure. War crimes? Absolutely. Democide? I don't think you can deny that. Gross negligence? There should probably be a thousand soldiers thrown in jail for decades.

But genocide? Well... we'll see who we can count on these days.

It's not the fault of those who started parroting the charge in recent weeks. I don't hold them antisemitic or remotely as responsible as people who were making the charge two years ago. It takes a formidable mental strength to withstand 2025's blitzkrieg of propaganda, whether from Palestine or from Israel or from anywhere else in the world. If I weren't Jewish, I don't know if I could have withstood it. We all would like to think that we would have come to the same conclusions were we from a different background. Bullshit. Politics is identity. It is far from only identity, but you can only perceive the world from inside your own head, which is formed by facts about yourself and your life history. There is something resembling an objective truth about all of us, but it's much too complex to perceive all its dimensions.

But if the total goes over 135,000, and it very well could, and if some evidence turns up that the total is reliable, then we are in very, very different territory. The standard for what constitutes genocide has gone down and down over the decades. As I've written a number of times, the term 'genocide' was created to define the Holocaust. There was no term for the enormity of what happened, and for the probable murder of a total resembling 60,000 in a territory of 2.1 million to be termed equivalent in a place to a much larger territory of 6 million out of 7 million Jews is absolute shandeh und a kherpah. A shame and a disgrace. The genocide experts who claim it should be discredited forever.

Nevertheless, it is Jewish history's most infamous chapter in two-thousand years. This now has nothing to do with October 7th, this is a war of choice that even the majority of Israeli military experts are against. The death toll before Rafah, which a large part of the Israeli military warned against, was 35,000. It should have ended there. The total now is currently 25,000 since Rafah. When it hits 100,000, the total of unnecessary deaths will be 65,000. When we get to 135,000, it will be a total roughly equivalent to Germany's Ponary Massacre in Lithuania and Babi Yar in Ukraine. Those particular massacres were not necessarily genocides; included were a sizeable quotient of Ukranians, Lithuanians, Poles, Cossacks, and native Russians, but they are the most disgraceful form of mass murder. And if famine becomes a weapon of this war, we will be pursuing the tactic of Stalin against Holomodor, the death by starvation of 8 million in Ukraine, including God knows how many Jews. Even if it's not a genocide, and if it kills a couple hundred thousand I don't know how it can be denied, if it hits 135,000, this is so greater a shandeh und a kherpah than that perpetrated by our accusers that history shall remember it a deed as infamous as the annihilation of native tribes in the land of Israel, as documented in the Tanakh (Old Testament). Leaving aside any moral considerations, it is as dangerous to the Jewish future as any of the most disgraceful moments in the Bible.

Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites, Amorites, Amalekites, Canaanites, Gazans.

Chant that litany to yourself. How does it sound?