In a TV appearance in April 2024, Israeli-American journalist and pundit Emily Schrader said, “I don’t know of anyone who is in the current Israeli government that would support any form of genocide.”If you participate in online debates about Israel and Gaza, you know Schrader’s view is common among Israel’s online defenders. Which drives me up a wall, because it’s so obviously false. Denying that some Israeli officials have advocated for mass death and collective punishment in Gaza is as unjustifiable as denying climate change. It’s one of those things that makes me feel despairing, because nothing is as hopeless as realizing that there isn’t even a common reality we can all acknowledge. More nuanced defenders of Israel will admit that multiple people in Israel’s government have said genocidal things, but say that doesn’t matter because the government officials in question don’t have direct authority over Israel’s military.
For example, in 2024, Aharon Barak, a former Israeli Supreme Court president and an ICJ judge ad hoc, dismissed energy minister Israel Katz’s well-publicized statements by pointing out that Katz was “not an official with authority over the military.”
Here are just some of Katz’s statements calling for collective punishment of civilians in Gaza:
“Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water pump will be opened and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home.”
“All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately… They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”
“Without fuel, even the local electricity will shut down within days and the pumping wells will stop within a week. This is what should be done to a nation of murderers and butchers of children.”
Later that same year, Katz was appointed minister of defense, a position with significant authority over the military. He was chosen by Prime Minister Netanyahu and approved by the Knesset in a 58–0 vote (the opposition walked out in protest). Genocidal views are no barrier to a position of military authority in Israel. Nor has Katz moderated his views since November 2024, when he became minister of defense. (For example, in March 2025, Katz warned “residents of Gaza” that they would “pay the full price” if the hostages were not released and Hamas was not removed, saying “the alternative is absolute destruction.” His quote in my cartoon is from April 2025.)
Remember, this is, or was, a smart, educated, thoughtful man. Like so many others in the pro-Palestinian terror camp, he appears to be unable (or unwilling) to grasp what “genocide” and “genocidal” means. Declaring war on an enemy after it has authored an unprovoked, surprise attack on civilians, killing, raping and taking hostages and savaging the population until it surrenders isn’t genocide. Genocide isn’t even what the Palestinians have been calling for since 1948 regarding the nation of Israel—wiping it off the map (“From the river to the sea…”). True, the poisoning of serial generations of Palestinians with anti-Jewish hate is certainly what I would call a “pre-genocidal condition,” but nonetheless, genocide means, according to the U.N. (which is ironically, also anti-Semitic), in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Article II), genocide requires a specific intent (dolus specialis) to physically eliminate a protected ethnic, racial, national or religious group. It does not mean “winning a war.”
The United States was not trying to wipe the Japanese people off the face of the Earth after Pearl Harbor (though the actions of Democratic Party icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt in locking up Japanese-American U.S. citizens would support that interpretation). Here’s an easy rule of thumb for my old, estranged EA friend: If surrender will end the killing, it’s not genocide. The Jews could not have “surrendered” to end the Holocaust.
Increasingly the Mad Left has come to the bonkers decision that modern warfare is some kind of a weird game. No, the only rational way to win a war—and a war declared on a group that has attacked a nation and its population without warning or justification is a just war—is by making existence so costly, unbearable and terrifying for the entire population responsible that it gives up, surrenders, and is no longer in a position to attack again. The people of Gaza are responsible for the actions of the government they elected.
Tough talk during a war, which is Ampersand’s primary evidence of “genocidal things” is also not evidence of a genocidal motive. Nikita Khrushchev was not threatening genocide when he said, during the Cold War, that the USSR would “bury” the United States. Making statements designed to inspire fear and dread in an enemy’s population during a war is part of standard war-waging strategy, and has been for thousands of years. This isn’t an “Everybody does it” argument. It is a “this is the only way to do it” argument. General Sherman can explain it to you.
Ampersand is a fascinating case of how progressive cant infantilizes those who allow it to seep into their consciousness. “Oooh, war is bad, only mean people fight wars, they are trying to kill everybody!” is the logic of an 8-year-old, but this is the level of critical thought the supporters of Hamas and the critics of Israel have adopted.
The American Jews who will vote for Democrats on November 4 don’t even reach that level of coherence.
On the one hand, there are many people whose politics rank ahead of religious identity. If we look at Catholics, who are split somewhat evenly between the parties, this becomes clear. The Democratic Party has long set itself against so many things the Catholic Church teaches as immutable that no Catholic in good conscience should vote Democratic, and yet here we are.
On the other hand, I’m actually somewhat surprised that this poll has Jews breaking 64% Republican, when Jews have historically been that strong or stronger Democratic. This poll is such an outlier that it probably should be examined closely for whether or not it accurately sampled the broad spectrum of Jewish subdivisions, instead of focusing, say, on Orthodox Jews. But if the poll is accurate, then a massive party shift like this actually shows the Democrats alienating a historically reliable block of voters en masse.
As for Ampersand, all I can say is that maybe the problem with two sides seeing completely different realities lies in how much we preload biases before even viewing the data. It certainly seems to me that there’s a logical distinction between someone say, “We will wipe them out because of who they are,” and saying, “If they will not return the hostages they took, we will eradicate all these murderers.” If there’s a conditional, look at the condition. But if you have “genocide” preloaded, you can’t see the distinction when a conditional is attached. And then, for so many of those quotes in Ampersand’s comic to have crucial text omitted that show the conditionals is unconscionable. If you have to distort the text to get the evil-appearing soundbite you want, maybe you’re the one who isn’t getting reality right.