Bret Stephens speaking at the 92nd Street Y, YouTube screenshot.

In a July 22 essay that is extraordinary even for someone as morally odious as he is, The New York Times columnist and Israeli propagandist Bret Stephens writes that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. His reasoning? Israel has the capacity to efficiently kill way more people than it has—if it wanted to.

You might call this an exercise in gaslighting if Bret weren’t sufficiently ideologically committed to plausibly believe this bullshit. The essay is, ostensibly, like much of what he has penned in recent years, a response to the increasing disgust toward and isolation of Israel internationally, and to the immediate reality of mass starvation in Gaza. It also comes only days after prominent Israeli-American genocide scholar Omer Bartov penned a long essay in the same opinion section, systematically explaining why Israel is in fact committing genocide; it also comes as over one hundred aid organizations issued a joint statement about Israel’s starvation campaign. Should we assume that Bret, a pathological Israeli devotee, is somehow more credible here?

Bret Stephens has one overarching goal in his writing, which I have described elsewhere: defend Israel. At various times this involves demonization of Israel’s enemies, obfuscation of Israeli crimes, endorsement of Israeli “successes,” false equivalences between Israel and other states, and maybe his favorite tactic, baseless and borderline defamatory accusations of antisemitism against Israel’s (or his) critics.

There’s much to pick apart in this offensive and essentially incoherent essay, as in everything he writes, but a few brief points. One: Bret demands to know why the death count isn’t higher. Cute question, but it is. Over six months ago the British medical journal The Lancet published a study estimating the death count was 40 percent higher than what was recorded at the time—which would put the number of dead at the start of this year around 64,000 people, higher than what it “officially” is now. But even this is probably nowhere near the actual toll, as The Lancet also published a correspondence one year ago estimating a death toll near 200,000. Earlier this year Ralph Nader plausibly estimated the death toll at over 400,000. The Gaza Strip has been completely destroyed; “conservative” couldn’t begin to describe the scale of the undercount.

Two: Bret complains that people accusing Israel of genocide are making a comparison to Nazi Germany, which, to his mind, apparently adopting the tactic perfected by Elie Wiesel of effectively situating the Holocaust outside of history, is inexcusable. Never mind that this mythical view of the past, at the core of Israel’s self-justification today, is entirely ahistorical: Zionism has always been closely linked to the European nationalisms that coalesced into fascism. The comparison is, in fact, the necessary one. How can anyone today ignore the horrific closeness between the enforced starvation and wanton murder in Gaza—including the specific aim of concentrating Gazans into a so-called “humanitarian city”—and the Nazi death camps?

Three: Bret’s desperation suggests he is going through something many devout supporters of Israel are going through. He apparently finds it intolerable not only that he cannot be outwardly pro-Israel—as if he’s entitled not just to giving that support but to widespread acceptance of that support—but also that the general population might turn of its own volition against an avowedly supremacist and actively genocidal state. Would we consider open support for South African apartheid in 1980 socially acceptable? One difference here is the situation in Palestine today is worse. Bret may be entitled to his reprehensible views, but he cannot demand others share them, endorse his delusions about Israel, or accept the open extermination campaign that underpins his worldview.

At the end of the essay, he writes the following: “The war in Gaza should be brought to an end in a way that ensures it is never repeated. To call it a genocide does nothing to advance that aim, except to dilute the meaning of a word we cannot afford to cheapen.” If the Israelis get their way, it will be brought to an end in a way that ensures it’s never repeated: through extermination and ethnic cleansing. This is not a war in any meaningful sense. Calling it a genocide is not only the bare linguistic minimum this mass slaughter deserves, but, if this is a word “we cannot afford to cheapen,” absolutely necessary.

Read Will Solomon’s investigation into Bret Stephens here.

The post The New York Times’ Bret Stephens, Genocide Denier appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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