The Gaza ‘genocide’: a 21st-century blood libel

It was a grim role reversal from the very start. Almost immediately after Hamas’s genocidal massacre of Israeli Jews on 7 October 2023, accusations of genocide were levelled against Israel – long before Israel went into Gaza to defeat Hamas and liberate the hostages it took.

On 13 October, as Israelis were still reeling from the worst atrocity in their nation’s history, Raz Segal, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, wrote in Jewish Currents that Israel’s initial response – carrying out airstrikes against Hamas while evacuating civilians – was ‘a textbook case of genocide’. Barely a month after the massacre, on 16 November 2023, UN special rapporteurs issued a call to the international community ‘to prevent genocide’. Most absurd of all, South Africa brought a complaint against Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in December 2023 for a supposed violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. A year later, NGOs Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both issued reports charging Israel with genocide against Palestinians. Israel has always firmly denied these accusations, asserting that its military operations are lawful self-defence.

These constant accusations of genocide from politicians and NGOs rest on a supposed ‘scholarly consensus’ of genocide experts. In late August this year, it was widely reported that the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) had adopted a resolution categorising the war in Gaza as genocide. Less widely reported was the fact that membership of the IAGS requires no academic credentials – just payment of a $30 membership fee.

In truth, the ‘scholarly consensus’ stems from a coterie of ideologically motivated academics who have promoted an alternative theory of genocide for decades. These academics have long been known for their hostility towards Israel and what they see as an inordinate focus on the Holocaust in the field of genocide studies.

As the genocide libel continues to fuel attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions around the world, it is imperative to critique the use and abuse of this term. To do so, it’s worth looking at the work of the Journal of Genocide Research (JGR) in particular, which launched a forum in January 2024 to discuss the ‘Gaza genocide’. This forum has provided much of the intellectual fuel for the genocide accusation.

The JGR is the official publication of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INOGS). The INOGS was founded in 1999 by genocide scholars who explicitly sought to refocus the field away from the Holocaust. As Holocaust scholar Israel Charny put it in a 2016 paper, the minimisation of the Shoah has been central to the INOGS project. As Charny records, the JGR has published articles denying that the Nazis explicitly targeted Jews and arguing that the Wannsee conference, where the Nazis formulated the Final Solution, was actually developing German policy towards minorities as a whole.

The current editor of the JGR is Anthony Dirk Moses, a genocide scholar whose work, The Problems of Genocide, initiated a fierce debate in Germany in 2021 over the uniqueness of the Holocaust. As historian Verena Buser explains, Moses proposes removing the intent to destroy a group from a definition of genocide. In Moses’s view, genocide is a function of the effects of violence against civilians: ‘What difference does it make to civilian victims whether the violence against them is carried out with genocidal or military intentions?’ (1) Moses based his theory on the concept of ‘illegitimate permanent security’, in which a state’s pursuit of absolute invulnerability to threats justifies the destruction of its enemies. The idea of ‘permanent security’ is based on the line of arguments advanced by Otto Ohlendorf, SS-Gruppenführer and commander of Einsatzgruppe D, at the Nuremberg trials. Ohlendorf claimed that the Jews threatened Germany, which necessitated their complete elimination. Having murdered adult Jews, Ohlendorf argued that he could hardly have been expected to spare the children, as they would grow up to hate Germany and seek revenge. One can already see how Moses’s framework blurs the line between war, however tragic, and the deliberate destruction of a group. This sets the stage for genocide accusations against Israel.

Another central player in the INOGS is Omer Bartov, an American-Israeli Holocaust scholar. Since November 2023, he has published three articles in the New York Times, claiming that, as a scholar of genocide, ‘I know it when I see it’. While labeling Israeli actions as genocide, Bartov has said the ‘despicable attack by Hamas must be seen as an attempt to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinians’.

The JGR’s ‘Gaza Forum’ articles downplay Hamas’s anti-Semitic and genocidal ideology. Sociologist Martin Shaw laments that some ‘misrepresent Hamas’s victims only as Jews – when they were primarily targeted as Israelis’. Activist Zoe Samudzi says it is absurd to attribute Hamas’s attack to ‘anti-Semitism inherent to Islam or Arab nationalism rather than situating it in expressed Palestinian opposition’. Journalist Abdelwahab El-Affendi takes umbrage at the description of Hamas’s massacre as genocide rather than terror, as Hamas wanted to communicate its displeasure to Israel via mass violence.

All of this is to distort the true nature of Hamas. It is an Islamic jihadist organisation, sworn to Israel’s destruction. As Meir Litvak, a Middle East expert, puts it:

‘In the view of Hamas, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not merely a territorial dispute between Palestinians and Israelis: it is first and foremost a “war of religion and faith” between Islam and Judaism and between Muslims and Jews… It is a war between good, personified by the Muslims representing the party of God (hizballah), and “the party of Satan” (hizb al-shaytan) represented by the Jews. Consequently, the conflict is considered an “existential battle, rather than a dispute over borders” (ma‘rakat wujud wa-la hudud).’

Elsewhere, freed hostage Eli Sharabi has recounted how his captors repeatedly told him that Jews had no place in Palestine and would be sent back to their parents’ or grandparents’ native countries. In 2021, Hamas organised a conference on what follows Israel’s destruction, entitled ‘The Promise of the Hereafter’. And when the late Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s military leader, ordered the 7 October attack in a letter to the al-Qassam Brigades, he reminded militants of ‘Allah’s promise to disgrace the Jews and destroy them at the hands of Allah’s servants’. Omitting Hamas’s clear Islamist and anti-Semitic motives should raise eyebrows as to the credibility of these so-called genocide experts.

They not only minimise Hamas’s anti-Semitism, they also downplay the threat it poses to Israel. El-Affendi, Mark Levene, Raz Segal and other contributors to the Gaza Forum all either imply or state explicitly that Israel is overreacting to 7 October. But even Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar himself believed that the 7 October attack would incite a larger regional war, with Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, Israeli Arabs, Hezbollah and Lebanon banding together to overwhelm Israel. Hamas may not have had the actual ability to destroy Israel, but it proved it was capable of wreaking mass death and causing economic and social disruption. These are all very good reasons for Israel to fight a defensive war against Hamas, and it is doubtful that any other state would have accepted a bloody massacre of its civilians with equanimity.

Various contributors to the JGR forum suggest jettisoning the legal definition of genocide to tailor a new definition to Israel’s measurements. For Shaw, ‘criticism based on the legal conception of genocide… did not fully engage with the dynamics at work’. Levene argues for the need to dispense with ‘the flawed, Holocaust-overwhelmed concept of genocide in favour of a new and distinct approach to international law in which criminality is vested in the quest for permanent security’. International-relations expert Alonso Gurmendi even claims that ‘the conventional concept of genocide’ provides impunity to Israel’s actions.

This revisionism has now spread far beyond the JGR, of course. Amnesty International, in its December 2024 report, claims that current genocide case law provides ‘an overly cramped interpretation’. It’s a sentiment echoed by Ireland’s deputy prime minister, who at the end last year called for the International Court of Justice to expand its ‘narrow interpretation’ of genocide to cover Israeli actions. Ireland has pushed, in particular, for the ICJ to drop the ‘only reasonable inference’ test of genocidal intent. This is the equivalent of an accuser changing the definition of a crime to fit the accused.

For these genocide experts, politicians and NGOs, the smoking gun of Israel’s genocide is a highly selective and teleological view of Zionism itself. Mark Levene states that genocidal logic is inherent in Zionism – ‘the notion that somehow the indigenous population might be whisked away’. Historian Elyse Semerdjian points to political Zionism’s father, Theodor Herzl, and his supposed plans to deport local Arabs. Martin Shaw argues that today’s genocide is merely the continuation of the genocide that began with what Arabs called the Nakba (catastrophe) – a reference to the displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians following Israel’s independence from late 1947 onwards. What such an account tends to ignore is the fact that Israel was fighting Arab armies and local Arab gangs, which had launched a war against it after it declared independence. Quite how that can be deemed an Israeli genocide is unclear.

Despite a continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel, and Zion’s key role in Jewish thought and ritual, the genocide accusers paint Israeli Jews as European settlers pushing out indigenous Middle Eastern peoples. Israel is therefore ‘a settler-colonial state’, they say. This is a gross distortion of history. The 1947-48 war did lead to the mass displacement of Arabs (and Jews, too). But as historian Benny Morris has shown, there was no deliberate expulsion policy by the Jewish leadership. An order dated 24 March 1948 from Israel Galili, head of the Haganah National Command, explicitly instructed brigades to protect Arab communities within the Jewish state, except in rare military emergencies. Later, brigade leaders had the authority to expel or retain Arab populations based on local circumstances, resulting in different outcomes: in Haifa, Arab leaders requested evacuation despite Jewish appeals to stay; in Tiberias, no expulsions occurred; in Jaffa, flight followed military pressure; and in Safed and Acre, most departures were not due to explicit expulsion orders.

The rest of the evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent is shoddy. The academics rely heavily on misrepresented quotes by Israeli leaders. One of their favourites is Israel’s then-defence minister, Yoav Gallant, stating that Israel is fighting ‘human animals’. They claim that Gallant was dehumanising all Gazans, preparing the ground for their murder. Yet the full quote shows that Gallant was referring to Hamas:

‘I have released all restraints… You saw what we are fighting against. We are fighting human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza. This is what we are fighting against… Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything. If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week, it will take weeks or even months, we will reach all places.’

Another heavily relied-upon quote is a statement from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 28 October 2023, in which he told the public, ‘Remember what Amalek did to you’. In Jewish discourse, Amalek represents ultimate evil, hatred and commitment to the destruction of the Jewish people. Inscribed on the Holocaust memorial in the Hague, only a short distance from the ICJ, is ‘Remember what Amalek did to you’. It is doubtful that even the Israelophobic scholars would understand this as public incitement to genocide against Germans.

This anti-Israel clique is also determined to undermine international law, especially the laws of war. The academics claim that Israel may not even be entitled to act in self-defence against Hamas terrorists. According to one so-called expert, even acknowledging Hamas’s well-documented and systematic use of human shields is ‘the logic of genocide’. Philosopher Jessica Whyte approvingly quotes US-sanctioned UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s March 2024 report, in which she says that Israel’s adherence to international law is in fact ‘humanitarian camouflage’ for its genocidal violence in Gaza.

Finally, there is the crux of the genocide argument against Israel – namely, that it has intentionally created ‘conditions of life’ that threaten to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. To make their case, anti-Israel academics uncritically cite casualty reports provided by Hamas, despite serious reasons to doubt their accuracy and the fact they do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Moreover, the civilian death toll is not necessarily indicative of non-compliance with the laws of war. An attack would be legal even if a high number of civilians were killed and injured, assuming that the value of the military target was proportional. Without being privy to that information, there is no way to assess the legality of an Israeli attack.

The war in Gaza has certainly led to widespread devastation of homes, schools, hospitals and farmland. Yet urban combat is inherently destructive, as seen in the Western coalition’s operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria in the mid-2010s. In 2016-17, Mosul, a key ISIS stronghold, faced a military operation by a coalition including the US, the UK and France. Military experts have described the battle for Mosul as the heaviest urban combat seen since the Second World War, leaving over 80 per cent of Mosul uninhabitable. The scale of devastation was likened to that of Dresden during the Second World War, with then US secretary of defence James Mattis calling the campaign against ISIS a ‘war of annihilation’. Raqqa, another ISIS city, was rendered ‘unfit for human habitation’, with approximately 80 per cent of the city damaged or destroyed. The US military fired more rounds in Raqqa over five months than any marine artillery battalion since the Vietnam War. Yet despite the scale of devastation visited upon Iraqi and Syrian cities, no serious accusations of genocide were ever levelled at the Western powers.

The goal of the genocide libel, repeated and repackaged by myriad academics and journalist is to legitimise the dissolution of the Jewish State. Just as the 7 October massacre was rationalised by the supposed ‘context’ of Israeli oppression and occupation, the eradication of Israel will be painted as just recompense for their ‘genocide’ in Gaza.

Most of the same claims that originated in the JGR have found their way into other, seemingly authoritative sources. Earlier this month, a UN commission of inquiry, set up by the UN Human Rights Council, issued a report finding Israel guilty of genocide. The commission’s lead members, Navi Pillay, Miloon Kothari and Chris Sidoti, have a long history of anti-Israel posturing. While the factual basis of the report is beyond the scope of this essay, the genocide claims have been conclusively debunked in a 300-page paper, led by Israeli professors Danny Orbach and Yagil Henkin.

Orbach and Henkin show that claims of deliberate starvation in Gaza before March 2025 are based on flawed data. Furthermore, they explain how UN agencies and human-rights groups have created an ‘echo chamber’ through circular citations and ignored corrections. Surveys indicate very few non-violent child deaths, contradicting starvation claims and instead pointing to disruptions in the medical system caused by the war and Hamas’s misuse of health facilities. Indeed, Hamas’s tactics include an unprecedented 500-kilometre tunnel network integrated into civilian infrastructure and the use of human shields to inflate casualties.

Moreover, Orbach and Henkin find no evidence of systematic civilian targeting or deliberate bombings. They note that isolated potential war crimes exist but they are outliers, not indicative of Israeli policy. Most of the UN report’s claims lack forensic proof and rely on unreliable sources. IDF measures, such as unprecedented evacuations and vetoed strikes for proportionality, aim to reduce harm, though some cases do suggest negligence on Israel’s part.

The UN report regurgitates many of the JGR Gaza forum’s themes. It dismisses the idea that Hamas posed an ‘existential threat to the State of Israel’. It implies that the 7 October massacre was a natural response to ‘the fact that [Israel] has taken [Palestinian land] by force and is unlawfully occupying and settling Palestinian territory by continuing violence, denying the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination’. And it also relies on the same misinterpreted and misrepresented remarks from Israeli politicians, from Netanyahu’s Amalek comment to Gallant’s ‘human animals’ statement, in order to establish Israel’s supposed genocidal intent. For the UN commission, even humanitarian measures like letting civilians escape are ‘proof’ that Israel is committing genocide.

Underlining the UN report’s lack of credibility, it features truncated remarks by Israeli president Isaac Herzog in the immediate aftermath of 7 October, when he said that ‘it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians who were not aware and not involved. It is absolutely not true.’ It omits the rest of Herzog’s words in which he stressed that: ‘There is no excuse for murdering innocent civilians in any way in any context. And believe me, Israel will operate and always operate according to the international rules. And we do the same in this battle, too.’ In any case, belligerent rhetoric during wartime is hardly proof of genocide. President Obama spoke of the war against ISIS in terms of ‘eradicating a cancer’.

The genocide accusation has consequences. It has already fuelled lethal attacks on Jews around the world, including in Washington, DC and Boulder, Colorado. And yet the supposed consensus around Israel’s genocide stems from a small cadre of highly partisan academics who have long ago decided upon Israel’s guilt. Their theory is unfalsifiable, as even Israel’s adherence to international law is taken as proof of genocide.

For these experts, Israel essentially ‘had it coming’. They claim that the 7 October massacre was the end result of decades of ‘Jewish supremacy’ and occupation, despite the fact that Israel completely left Gaza in August 2005. They have convinced themselves that the supposed genocide in Gaza is an essential feature of Israel itself, a desire inherent to Zionism. They are certain above all that Israel is evil.

This is not an academic theory or analysis – it is a comprehensive belief system. And it is thoroughly delusional.

Avraham Russell Shalev is a senior fellow at Kohelet Policy Forum and specialises in public law.

(1) Nach dem Genozid: Grundlage für eine neue Erinnerungskultur by Dirk Moses (Matthes & Seitz, 2023), p10