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In his article “If it isn’t a genocide in Gaza, then what is it?,” Gideon Levy tried to deflect the discussion away from the question of the legal definition of genocide to the acts themselves.

“What do you call the mass killing … what to call dying children … and hungry elderly civilians fleeing for their lives?” Do the 2.3 million people living there care if what is happening to them is called genocide or not? he asked. “Will the legal definition change their fate?”

Levy preaches to Israelis, claiming that they will breathe a sigh of relief if the court rejects the suit filed by South Africa. For Israel, if it’s not genocide, her conscience will be put to rest again. If The Hague says it’s not genocide, we’ll once more be the most moral people in the world, writes Levy.

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He is right in saying that it doesn’t matter to the poor Gazans and that the legal definition will not change their fate. But he is ignoring the part played by South Africa and the court in deflecting the important debate on what is going on in Gaza to a morbid discussion which the whole world, including Levy, was anxious to hold, revolving around the question of whether the descendants of Holocaust victims are themselves perpetrating one.

Anyone wishing to hold a serious discussion about what is happening in Gaza, including the examination of the legality of some of the military operations undertaken by Israel, does not choose demonstratively to accuse Israel of the greatest crime committed against Jews and associated with them in the role of victims. In fact, if our conscience will be put to rest again if the court in The Hague decides that it’s not genocide, South Africa and the court will have only themselves to blame.

The attempt to ascribe to Israel a plan or intent to commit genocide will always clash with the patterns of the Holocaust memory, leading to a “not genocide” verdict. If Israel is found guilty of genocide, then the world will be lying, since Israel did not plan a final solution for the annihilation of the Palestinian race, and that’s what we have in our heads when we hear about genocide, regardless of what South Africans explain to us.

If Israel is found to be not guilty of genocide, it will celebrate its blamelessness and resume its sense of singularity in occupying the slot of the only victim of genocide in the Western world.

The attempt to reverse the roles is the backdrop for the discussion in The Hague, no matter how much they’ll try to make us accept that the Holocaust was not the only manner of genocide, and that Mein Kampf or the “final solution” are not the only ways of expressing intent. But whereas for the world this is a psychological yearning, in the case of Hamas it was a calculated move. They learned from the Zionist experience and from the contribution the Holocaust made to the establishment of the State of Israel.

For Hamas, recognition of a genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people could make the world and United Nations act in the same manner it did following the Holocaust, and to finally advance the establishment of a Palestinian state. After all, the world always takes action belatedly, only after its conscience has been fed with bleeding images of collective suffering, images it is hungry for. A real discussion cannot ignore the fact that Hamas laid a genocide trap for Israel.

It constructed for itself a network of tunnels to be used exclusively by its people as shelters. It planned and executed a murderous attack in the style of a pogrom, which this time, for the first time in the history of pogroms, finds Jews with an army that can strike back. And when Israel responds with the intensity of “never again,” the ones waiting for the response and sustaining most of the fire were not Hamas terrorists, who were protected in their tunnels, but the “people,” who were deliberately left exposed to the “genocide” that would surely follow.

Returning to Levy’s questions: Is it important whether what is happening to Gazans is called genocide or not? Will the legal definition change their fate? For Hamas, the answer to these two questions is obviously in the affirmative. So important was it to them that they went out of their way in an attempt to do this to their own people.