A Jew responds to one Zionist’s refusal to recognize the IOF’s atrocities

Kurtzer writes that before defining what is happening in Gaza as a genocide, the following information would need to be gathered: “Death counts, precisely; the differentiation among the dead between civilians and combatants; the military calculations that are actually going into the choices to attack targets that also result in the killing of civilians, so that you could determine whether those choices were being done responsibly or not. You would need to understand the obstacles to the distribution of aid on both the Israeli side, on the Gaza side, and on the Egyptian side.”

According to Kurtzer those are the criteria needed to determine whether or not a genocide is taking place: accurate data, the ability to distinguish definitively between civilians and combatants, the opportunity for the military to justify their decisions, an opportunity for governments to explain why starvation took place. Estimates based on eyewitness accounts cannot be trusted.

These requirements lead me to believe that had Kurtzer been alive on November 26, 1944, and reading the Auschwitz Protocols, he would have been reticent to claim that there was a genocide taking place. In fact, given Kurtzer’s standards, it seems like scholars will never be able to determine whether or not a genocide is taking place until years after the genocide has been completed. The United Nations office of Genocide Prevention would have no purpose because no one would ever be able to claim that a genocide was taking place. According to Kurtzer, genocide can only be accounted for with the benefit of hindsight.