By Harry Storm
International Association of Genocide Scholars weighs in
After an all-too-brief lull in genocide accusations, a non-governmental organization with the grand-sounding name The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), lent academic gloss to the genocide claim in an August 31, 2025 resolution.
The resolution accusing Israel of committing genocide, which IAGS said was supported by 86% of its membership, quickly drew strong backlash from critics who noted that (a) only 28% of the organization’s membership actually voted on the resolution; (b) the resolution was void of academic rigour and included little if any original research, relying instead on statements by other non-governmental organizations and UN bodies, all of which had long histories of anti-Israel activism (e.g., Amnesty International, The UN Commission, UNRWA).
The resolution cited the ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant as though they were already convicted, and the South African application to the ICJ – and like so many others – getting the preliminary ICJ decision on “plausibility” totally wrong, willfully ignoring statements by the then-president of the ICJ. It “acknowledged” that leading global international law organizations and UN bodies, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Forensic Architecture, DAWN, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, and the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (i.e. Francesca Albanese), had conducted extensive investigations and issued reports concluding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. And it further “acknowledged” that a number of Israeli, Palestinian, Jewish, and other scholarly experts working in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and in International Law had concluded that Israeli governmental and military actions constitute genocide.
Unsurprisingly they did not acknowledge that every organization they listed had a long history of hostility toward the Jewish state and either an unwillingness or an inability to be impartial with regard to it, or that several other Holocaust and genocide scholars have rejected the genocide charge entirely.
Critics of the resolution noted the 59,000 death toll in Gaza referred to in the opening paragraph of the resolution did not differentiate between combatants and civilians and was provided by the “Gaza Health Ministry” (i.e. Hamas). Critics also noted that the membership did not only comprise scholars of genocide (all that was required to join was a $30 fee) and included harsh anti-Israel critics such as the previously mentioned UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, whose credentials as a genocide scholar are non-existent.
Critics of the resolution also point out that the key issue of intent, which is required to support a determination of genocide, was not established. In order to establish that a genocide has occurred, there must be no other explanation for the death and destruction that has occurred other than the intent to commit genocide. And there is one glaring explanation entirely ignored by the resolution – and also by most if not all supporters of the genocide claim – namely, the actions of Hamas and associated groups and individuals among the Gaza population.
Specifically, the embedding of Hamas fighters among the general population, placing civilians directly in harm’s way, which violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which specifically states that, for example, if a combatant uses a hospital as a base from which to conduct military operations, the hospital loses the protections that would otherwise be afforded to it. After issuing a prior warning to the hospital in question – which Israel has done repeatedly in Gaza, and not just to hospitals – that hospital can become a valid military target, even if civilians are present.
Given the slipshod nature of the resolution and the dubious qualifications of many of the “experts” who voted in favour of it, it’s no wonder that the resolution’s authors, including IAGS president Dr. Melanie O’Brien, were motivated to squelch dissent by members and former members of IAGS and its advisory board.
According to former IAGS advisory board member Sarah Brown, “the process was a disaster from start to finish. Those of us against the resolution tried to submit our concerns for discussion but were blocked by the leadership. We were promised a town hall, which is a common practice for controversial resolutions, but the president of the association reversed that. The association has also refused to disclose who were the authors of the resolution.”
UN Commission of Inquiry: A foregone conclusion
A few weeks after the IAGS released its dubious report, a UN “commission of inquiry” weighed in. The UN’s anti-Israel bias is well-known but still worth repeating. In 1975, Zionism became the only “ism” to be labelled as racist by the General Assembly. (The resolution was quietly revoked in 1991.) More recently, between 2015 and 2023, the same General Assembly passed a total of 225 resolutions. Of these, 154 were against Israel and 71 against all the other countries in the world combined.
Let that sink in for a moment. Despite Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, China’s persecution of one million Uyghurs, religious repression and draconian disregard of its obligations to Hong Kong and intimidation of Taiwan, North Korea’s effective enslavement of its entire population, and the Islamic world’s repression of women, non-Muslims and apostates, it’s tiny, western and democratic Israel that receives the vast majority of GA resolutions.
Then there’s the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which is every bit as politicized and replete with countries with poor human rights records as the UN agency it replaced (the UN Commission on Human Rights) and dominated by countries that routinely vilify Israel. As well, Israel is the only country that is a permanent item on the UNHRC’s agenda. The UNHRC also appoints “special rapporteurs” on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians – all of whom come with a long developed animus toward Israel – a position currently held by the worst of them, Francesca Albanese.
It was the UNHRC that appointed a three-person “Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory – the Commission’s name alone gives the bias away – which in September issued a report (even though all three members resigned following funding threats from U.S. president Donald Trump) that unsurprisingly concluded that Israel was indeed committing genocide.
That this conclusion was predetermined from the outset was never in doubt, given the background of its three members: Navi Pillay, Chris Sidoti and Miloon Kothari. Pillay, who chaired the commission, has a history of anti-Israel statements that goes back more than a decade. During Israel’s 2014 Protective Edge operation against Gaza (prompted by the firing of hundreds of rockets into Israel), Pillay charged Israel with deliberately targeting children after seven children were killed on a Gaza beach. She also criticized US funding of the Iron Dome program, noting that “no such protection has been provided to Gazans against the shelling,” a statement that prompted a response from 100 U.S. legislators.
More recently, in response to a question from a Politico reporter, Pillay implied that Israel forced civilians in Gaza to remain where they are (when in fact it’s Hamas that doesn’t allow them to leave, Egypt that doesn’t allow them to enter, and, most shamefully, the UN High Commission for Refugees urging them to remain in a warzone, a first for this agency, presumably to prevent Israel from implementing whatever nightmare scenario it concocts). She then noted that no neighbouring country will take them but defended that position as “principled,” because the “Palestinians don’t want to leave their land.” (The Politico reporter she was responding to apparently failed to notice or remark on how contradictory Pillay’s answers were.)
Her two fellow Commission members clearly share Pillay’s antipathy toward Israel. Chris Sidoti, an Australian human rights jurist, has called Israel’s army “one of the most criminal in the world,” and recently called Israeli responses to its critics “boring.” The third member of this troika, Milloon Kothari, has gone further, stating in a 2022 interview with anti-Israel online magazine Mondoweiss that he “would go as far as to raise the question of why [Israel is] even a member of the United Nations. Because… the Israeli government does not respect its own obligations as a UN member state.” During the same interview, he stated that much of social media was controlled by the “Jewish lobby.”
Unsurprisingly, the verdict of genocide by this Commission inquiry suffers from the same deficiencies as those by Albanese and AI, namely inaccurate referencing, downplaying or ignoring evidence that would refute the allegation of genocide, and relying on anecdotal evidence from unreliable sources to support a wideranging claim of genocide.
The September 2025 report relies in large part on previous Commission reports. If the information in those earlier reports were accurate, this would not be problematic. However, that is not always the case. An interim Commission report issued on March 13, 2025 is referenced again and again in the December report.
Here’s an example of the quality of the research in that report. Paragraph 23 begins as follows: “Among those confirmed as killed are some 7,216 women, making up around 18 percent of all persons killed in Gaza since 7 October 2023.” The reference for this “confirmed” information is an OCHA bulletin from December 17, 2024. The very first words in the bulletin are: “Disclaimer: Figures that are yet-to-be verified by the UN are attributed to their source. Casualty numbers have been provided by the Ministry of Health (MoH)…” [i.e. Hamas]. So much for confirmation.
The Commission’s conclusion of genocide is based in part on what it describes as “Israel’s systemic use of sexual and gender-based violence” that it detailed in previous reports, including the March 2025 interim report and a September 11, 2024 report for the UN General Assembly.
But far from being “systemic,” the report consists almost exclusively of individual incidents by one or a handful of soldiers. In fact, the report begins the section on sexual and gender-based violence by noting that the Commission “documented more than 20 cases of sexual and gender-based violence against male and female detainees in more than 10 military and Israel Prison Service facilities, in particular in Negev prison and Sde Teiman camp for male detainees and in Damon and Hasharon prisons for female detainees.”
More than 20 cases! During a ground invasion that involved as many as 100,000 Israeli troops. Some of the cases documented in the report could be described as abusive, though others, such as stripping captured Gazan males were justified because combatants were known to have concealed weapons in their clothing. A few cases might even possibly be considered war crimes. But fewer than 30 cases can hardly be considered to be evidence of genocide.
As with all the other reports accusing Israel of genocide, much of the evidence consists of statements made by Israeli political and military leaders in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, without considering that emotions might be running high after the atrocities committed by Hamas and other Gazans. However, the authors of the Commission report seem especially oblivious, given that they open their argument for genocidal intent with “as early as 7 October 2023, Israeli officials made statements that indicated their intention to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a group.”
As early as Oct. 7? This betrays a willful ignorance of human behaviour following an atrocity on the scale of Oct. 7. The Commission appears shocked that the statements they claim are genocidal actually began on the day of the massacre, even though that is precisely when one would expect emotions to run the highest. It’s difficult to reconcile a statement so devoid of human understanding with an impartial probe, especially when the subject is as serious as genocide.
William Schabas “twists and maneuvers”
In addition to IAGS and the UN Commission, well-known scholars also added their imprimatur to the genocide charge, though upon closer inspection, these too turn out to be much less than they first appear. Take one William Schabas, a Canadian scholar whose paternal grandparents were murdered by the Nazis in Galicia, a fact he refers to often (full disclosure: My paternal grandmother and two uncles were also killed by the Nazis in Galicia).
Schabas is a well-credentialed scholar who in the past has argued that the world has only seen three true genocides: the Armenian genocide of 1915, the Holocaust, and the Rwandan Genocide in 1995.
He excludes catastrophic events such as the Holodomor, during which as many as 10 million Ukrainian peasants starved to death as a result of forced collectivization ordered by Stalin, and the Cambodian killing fields under Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. He believes that the atrocities in Bosnia, such as the Srebernica massacre, are better labelled as ethnic cleansing rather than genocide.
Similarly, according to Schabas, more current incidences of mass murder and/or expulsions of populations, in Sudan, Yemen, Congo and Myanmar, fail to reach the level of genocide, despite well-reported ethnic cleansing and mass murders that occurred.
However, while excluding these events, many of which involved the deaths of millions, Schabas has now added a fourth genocide to his tiny list: Gaza. Schabas goes further, stating that the case brought against Israel by South Africa before the ICJ is “arguably the strongest case of genocide that has ever come before the court.”
Why? According to Schabas, evidence of genocidal intent can be inferred not only from Israel’s military conduct but also – once again – from statements by senior Israeli officials, such as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s remarks about cutting off food, water, and electricity in Gaza. “We have more than just a pattern of conduct – we also have statements and clear indications of policy. All of these must be considered together when making a final judgment,” Schabas says.
However, Schabas never precisely spells out what this supposed “pattern of conduct” actually is. He says Israel’s actions are “disproportionate,” but even if true, that hardly proves a pattern of conduct so vile as to be considered evidence of genocide. He calls Israel’s claim to be acting in self-defence “bogus.” Schabas claims to have “thought a lot about this,” which says more about his analytical skills than anything else.
Schabas relies on absurd analogies to make his case, and here is a case in point: “The International Court of Justice has declared the occupation of Gaza to be unlawful. You cannot claim self-defense while engaging in unlawful actions. It’s like a bank robber who fires on the police because they’re firing on him—he can’t go to court and invoke self-defense, because he is, by definition, acting unlawfully. In the same way, I don’t think Israel can credibly rely on self-defense here.”
This is ridiculous, even more so as it comes from a supposed “world class scholar.” Leaving aside the nonsensical contention that Israel was occupying Gaza on Oct. 6, 2023 – Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005 – Schabas is comparing Israel’s operations in Gaza to a bank robbery, completely ignoring Oct. 7 and the slaughter Hamas inflicted on that day. Bank robbers are motivated by greed. Israel’s response was rooted in self-defense.
Schabas believes the Israeli response has been disproportionate, which he’s in no position to judge, but even if that were true, it wouldn’t negate the fact that Israel’s actions were taken after a heinous attack on its territory that resulted in the slaughter of more than 1000 people and the taking hostage of another 250.
Schabas appears to be a scholar of the type who epitomizes George Orwell’s comment that some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals could come up with them. For example, Schabas says “one of the arguments we hear from those defending Israel is that ‘they could have killed more people, and they haven’t,’ suggesting that this proves there is no intent to commit genocide. We have encountered similar claims in assessments of the Holocaust….”
What? Has there ever been an assessment of the Holocaust in which anyone dared to suggest “the absence of even greater killings indicates a lack of intent,” as Schabas claims? Would anyone have the nerve to say that exterminating 90% of Poland’s three million Jews indicated a lack of intent because more weren’t killed? Is Schabas living on this planet?
Perhaps not, given his dismissal of Israel’s contention that it is at war, not committing genocide. “Going back to the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians during the First World War or to the Nazi genocide of the Jews in the Second World War, both of these, and others, were carried out in the context of a war.”
As if the Jews and the Armenians had initiated hostilities with Germany and the Ottomans and slaughtered their citizens wholesale, as was the case on 10/7. As if the Armenian genocide occurred while Armenians were at war with the Ottomans during their genocide, or the Jews were at war with Germany during the Holocaust.
Another measure of his “scholarship,” better described as willing (and stunning) naivete, can be discerned by the following statement he made regarding Gaza and Hamas in 2014, when he said: “If we look at the poor people of Gaza … all they want is a state – and they get punished for insisting upon this, and for supporting a political party in their own determination and their own assessment that seems to be representing that aspiration.” As anyone who’s read its charter well knows, the only state Hamas is interested is one that incorporates all of Israel.
The explanation for these absurd lines of argument is simple: an obsession with the Jewish state. Like most of the scholars who’ve joined the pile-on to label Israel’s actions “genocide,” Schabas has a long history of anti-Israel activism and statements. In 2011, the same year Schabas attended the Center for Human Rights and Cultural Diversity conference in Tehran, he said in a speech that he believes Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be “in the dock of an international court.” In 2012, he wrote that Iran “very arguably has a claim to require nuclear weapons for defensive purposes”. And in 2013, during a speech at the Russell Tribunal that talked about so-called Israeli “crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression,” he blatantly stated, “With a bit of luck and by twisting things and maneuvering we can get them before the courts.”
In short, Schabas’ past history of anti-Israeli activism and statements put his declaration that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza into serious question. His chief defence against charges of bias, that he serves on the advisory board of the Israel Law Review, hardly exempts him from being classified as just another anti-Israel zealot using his family history during the Holocaust to lend fake legitimacy to his claims.
Israeli genocide scholars add to the chorus
Joining Schabas in the genocide blame game are three Israeli scholars of genocide and the Holocaust. Like Schabas, these three Israeli academics have histories of anti-Israel activism and statements. And, like him, they are frequently cited as being “Jewish Holocaust and genocide scholars,” providing cover against charges of anti-Israel or anti-Semitic bias.
Of these, perhaps the best known is Omer Bartov, whose New York Times essay – entitled “I’m a genocide scholar. I know it when I see it” did the most damage to Israel’s reputation. Bartov is the latest Israeli genocide scholars to hop on the bandwagon; in 2009, for instance, he defended Israel against charges by another genocide scholar, Martin Shaw, who claimed that Israel had committed genocide during its war of independence in 1948.
Of late, however, Bartov has been comparing right-wing Israeli soldiers returning from Gaza to Wehrmacht soldiers returning from the Russian front – an obscene comparison, given the events of October 7. One also has to wonder that of all the analogies Bartov could have used to describe the attitudes of Israeli soldiers – Russians and Japanese during the Second World War weren’t exactly angels – Bartov, like so many of the anti-israel obsessives he has begun to emulate, immediately jumps to the Germans.
In his article, Bartov, citing his own bona fides as a genocide teacher, not only mimics those hostile to Israel, he quotes them, including Francesca Albanese, Amnesty International and South Africa’s application to the ICJ.
The ICJ case also figures prominently in the arguments of Amos Goldberg, a historian and Holocaust specialist. Goldberg says he “painfully” concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza in April 2024, after noting that “many legal experts” had made the same determination. Who were these experts? None other than the ICJ, whom Goldberg says labelled Israel’s actions in Gaza a “plausible” genocide. (In fact, as noted previously in this article, the ICJ determined no such thing.)
Like all those accusing Israel of genocide, Goldberg cites quotes from Israeli ministers and the symbolic president, Isaac Herzog, immediately after the slaughter of 10/7. Goldberg then goes on to do what virtually all those accusing Israel of genocide do – namely citing other people accusing Israel of genocide. These include, once again, notorious Israel-hater Albanese, as well as “hundreds of other genocide scholars” (i.e., the IAGS). Goldberg calls Israel’s actions in Gaza a criminal overreaction, without providing any idea about what Israel should have done instead, something none of the accusers ever provide.
Both Goldberg and Bartov rely on “investigations” by other agencies also infected with the anti-Israel virus. This cannot be said about the third Israeli academic, the aforementioned Raz Segal, who couldn’t rely on others for his determination, because, as noted previously, he has the dubious claim to fame of being the first person to refer to a genocide in Gaza, just days after 10/7 and before Israel had even launched its ground operations.
Since the publication of Segal’s notorious Oct. 13, 2023 article, he has been busy pushing the genocide narrative in articles, at conferences, and in “conversations” posted by many anti-Israel websites, such as Middle East Eye.
Segal has implied that Israel was contemplating transferring the entirety of the population of Gaza into Egypt. (No such population transfer has taken place.) Segal also maintained that the condemnations of Hamas after Oct 7 “dehumanized Gazans.” Like all genocide claimants, Segal uses the statements of Israeli politicians and leaders in the days immediately following 10/7.
Military experts disagree
All the organizations and scholars who accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza ignore the testimonies and evidence provided by well-respected military personnel who have visited Gaza, including former NATO commander Gen. John McColl, British army Col. Richard Kemp and frontline conflict researcher and former British army veteran Andrew Fox, all of whom have testified that Israel rigorously followed the rules of war.
Fox notes that most images and videos of the war are Hamas-approved videos devoid of context. Airstrikes were able to be filmed precisely because the IDF sent warnings, buildings were evacuated, and there was time to set up cameras to film the bombings.
Fox also notes that the Hamas-provided death toll of close to 70,000 includes approximately 25,000 combatants, and even those number are, Fox says, “replete with methodological flaws” (which hasn’t stopped UN affiliates and other genocide claimants from citing them uncritically). He also disputes the widely reported claims of starvation (which, it should be noted, had begun as early as December 2023, in South Africa’s submission to the ICJ).
According to Colonel Kemp, in Gaza “buildings are connected by a vast tunnel network, allowing Hamas fighters to move swiftly and set up ambushes; every structure, road, and alleyway must be assumed to be rigged with explosives. Gaza City is the largest urban area in the Strip [making it] a very complex and dangerous military operation.”
General McColl, who based his views about the Israel-Hamas war on “UK media coverage,” arrived in Israel critical and skeptical of their military operations, expecting to see evidence of Israeli war crimes. Instead, what he and other NATO military observers “with decades of combined experience in leading NATO armies, were told and saw was the most complex and demanding operational environment any of us had come across, including in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
“I have seen war and know how difficult it can be to minimize civilian casualties,” McCall said. “In areas cleared by Israel, the vast and extensive tunnel network included tunnel shaft entrances in houses, in children’s bedrooms, mosques, schools and hospitals.” Additionally, he noted that “many of the houses and tunnel entrances are booby trapped and civilians are used as human shields.”
“The IDF commanders explained that underneath Gaza they have 200 km (125 miles) of tunnels, but believe that there could be close to 500 km (310 miles). The areas they have cleared have tunnel shaft entrances in houses, in children’s bedrooms, mosques, schools and hospitals. The tunnels are used for fighters to move around the urban areas, appearing behind and on the flanks of troops. Suicide bombers are a constant threat. Many of the houses and tunnel entrances are booby-trapped and civilians are used as human shields.”
Despite that, McColl said, the procedures designed to protect civilian life were “at least as rigorous as those applied in the UK armed forces.” He also noted that “phone calls and text messages to Gazan residents, loudhailers, leaflet drops and ‘knocking’ on the roofs of targeted buildings with small non-lethal munitions to warn of an imminent strike are part of the IDF’s tactics to minimise civilian casualties.”
None of this sound military analysis ever appears in any UN or other agency or individual accusation of genocide.
Nor do any of those who accuse Israel of genocide note that after two years of war, the Gazan civilian population has increased. All are happy to publish – as is much of the Western media – unverified numbers of deaths provided by Hamas that fail to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and also include natural deaths in their figures.
These and many other exculpatory facts are downplayed or outright ignored by all those who accuse Israel of genocide. Some facts that would disprove the genocide claim are even inverted and presented as proof of genocidal intent. For example, the reports often describe Israeli efforts to evacuate civilians from areas where military action will occur as “population transfer.” Yet the same reports will also condemn evacuation attempts for being too slow and/or poorly handled. One is reminded of the old Jewish restaurant joke: “the food is terrible, and the portions are so small.”
The reports also invariably accuse Israel of causing mass starvation and using it as a weapon of war, while failing to note that while hostilities were ongoing, Israel sent millions of tons of humanitarian aid into Gaza. They ignore the fact that evidence of widespread famine, such as photographs of groups of starving Gazans, have never been produced, even though such photos are normally commonplace when and where widespread famine occurs. Instead, they rely mainly on reports from other agencies compromised by longtime hostility to Israel, and ignore Hamas’ culpability in weaponizing a non-existent famine as part of its (very successful) campaign to dupe the West into blaming Israel for events of its own doing.
Genocide claimants also ignore completely the low ratio of civilian to combatant deaths achieved by the IDF, which has been estimated at somewhere between 1.5 and two civilians to one combatant. In other urban combat zones, not as complex as Gaza, such as the cleansing of ISIS in Mosul, civilians were killed at nine times the rate of combatants.
Claimants also shrug off Hamas’ strategy of leveraging the urban landscape and civilian presence to counter Israel’s conventional military superiority. They ignore the urban environment created by Hamas, which integrates tunnels, booby-trapped residences, and hospitals and schools with weapons caches, rocket launchers and/or command centres either in, under or near these civilian centres. The tunnel network, with its thousands of access points, allows Hamas combatants to move throughout Gaza unseen, launch surprise “hit-and-run” attacks on Israeli forces, and escape to safe areas or reinfiltrate cleared areas.
It’s also noteworthy that the same NGOs that are quick to accuse Israel of breaking international law when civilians are killed rarely, if ever, note that hiding military equipment or military command centres in buildings containing or close to civilians is also a crime under international law, and renders the structure (a hospital, for instance) as a legitimate military target.
Interestingly, on January 20 of this year, MSF, another NGO that has accused Israel of genocide, suspended all non-critical medical operations at Nasser Hospital, currently the largest functional medical facility in Gaza, due to the presence of armed men, some masked, at the hospital. Since the ceasefire, MSF teams have reported a pattern of unacceptable acts, including the presence of armed men, intimidation, arbitrary arrests of patients, and a recent situation of suspicion of movement of weapons.
Meanwhile, on February 26, PIJ confirmed that Fadi al-Wadiya, a physical therapist working for MSF, was also a PIJ commander who served as the deputy head of its military manufacturing unit when he was slain on June 25, 2024.
Genocide claimants never seriously address Hamas’ and PIJ’s embedding its combatants among the civilian population (another war crime) and using civilians as human shields (other than to claim that still doesn’t give Israel carte blanche to kill civilians), which, when considered together with Hamas’ vow to continue to do Oct. 7s over and over, leaves Israel with a kind of Sophie’s choice: kill civilians in Gaza while fighting Hamas (because of Hamas’ military practices and its vow to carry on killing) or allow your own civilians to be slaughtered again Oct. 7 style.
Furthermore, those accusing Israel of genocide never indicate how else Israel ought to have responded to the Oct. 7 attacks. While some – though not all – perfunctorily condemn the Oct. 7 attacks, one is pressed to find sensible alternatives Israel might have pursued rather than the course of action it took.
And they never note that other conflicts where civilian deaths were far greater are rarely if ever described as genocide. In WWII, allies killed hundreds of thousands if not millions of civilians in Germany and Japan. Winston Churchill acknowledged that one of the goals in bombing Germany was to terrorize the population. Yet few historians, and none of Israel’s accusers, is on record referring to this bombing, which killed more civilians night after night and destroyed more infrastructure than Israel has in two years of fighting, as genocide.
Also ignored is the fact that the very number of bombs dropped by Israel mitigates against the claim that Israel was targeting civilians. Israel has dropped many thousands of bombs and is believed to have killed at most 50,000 civilians, whereas the UK/US killed more civilians in several single nights of bombing of German and Japanese cities, and in the case of Hiroshima/Nagasaki, bombs killed more civilians – far more in the case of Hiroshima – than Israel has killed in Gaza, a clear targeting of civilians, and further evidence that Israel did not purposely target them. Meanwhile, the current civil wars in Sudan, Yemen and Congo, as well as the recent civil war in Syria, all of which have caused more deaths than Gaza, are never labelled genocides (or discussed much at all).
Genocide claimants maintain that Israel is trying to expel Gazans, yet at the same time bemoan Gazans having “nowhere to go.” Nor do they blame Egypt for erecting a wall specifically to keep Gazans penned in. In fact, unlike any other conflict in memory, Gazans are urged by, among others, the UN High Council on Refugees, to remain in the war zone. This is likely the first time an agency tasked with caring for refugees has called on civilians in a war zone to stay where they are.
What is probably the most egregious by those who claim it is Israel that is committing genocide is their inversion of the accusation of genocidal intent. This ought to be properly levelled at Hamas and the Gazan population that followed it into Israel, given the acts of savagery they committed and the glee with which they committed them, as evidenced by their boastful go-pro videos, the treatment of the bodies of dead Israeli women brought back to Gaza, and the pride with which they announced the killing of Jews. It is hard to argue against the notion that had Hamas had the means, it would have slaughtered every Israeli in the country in the days following its Oct. 7 invasion.
And yet, despite the downplaying, outright ignoring or even inverting the massive amount of of exculpatory evidence and explanations, and despite the fact that the only real evidence for the genocide claim are vague references to proportionality, appeals to (compromised) expertise, and statements by a few angry ministers in the hours and days after Oct. 7, this consensus, originally manufactured on the left, has of late begun to seep into elements on the right (especially the so-called “woke right”) further solidifying the genocide claim, making it seem near airtight. As conservative commentator Matt Walsh has said, the near unanimous worldwide consensus among elites makes people think “it has to be true,” a conclusion Walsh seems to have reached himself.
What Walsh appears unaware of, likely because he hasn’t actually read the genocide claim reports, is just how thoroughly all the reports downplay, dismiss or invert exculpatory evidence, leaving only the authors’ pre-determined assumptions about Israel’s guilt.
The efforts of the Irish government to change the definition of genocide in order to accuse Israel of it is just an extreme example of this tendency. Another example that emerged recently is that OXFAM, another NGO long hostile to Israel, had planned the genocide claim for years, and Israel’s response to the Oct.7 massacre provided OXFAM with the opportunity to use it.
That revelation came about when the now ex-CEO of OXFAM, herself a longtime critic of Israel, told British TV that the organization was “disproportionately working around the crisis in Gaza,” to the detriment of “showing consistency with other crises that are taking place in the world,” and that there was “quite strong push back when we were not ready yet to use the word ‘genocide’ in relation to Gaza” before receiving evidence or proper legal counsel.
In response, OXFAM said that the decision to use the word “genocide” was made “only after a thorough legal review and following widespread research and consideration of credible analysis by organizations and experts mandated to make such legal verdicts such as the International Court of Justice [sic], the UN Commission of Inquiry and Amnesty International.”
In other words, OXFAM did no original research of its own to “conclude” Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, and, like so many other NGOs, organizations and scholars opining on Israel’s behaviour in Gaza, relied instead on the verdicts of other organizations also long hostile to Israel. (Note: The ICJ has not accused Israel of genocide.)
This phony consensus about Israel and genocide has given the word a new, much more diluted meaning – though this meaning only applies to the Jewish state (and perhaps, in future, to other Western countries engaged in war). Based on the accusations in these reports, genocide can be applied to situations in which civilians are killed, where rogue soldiers commit war crimes, regardless of how few, and where a country’s leadership publicly declares its war aims.
Jews have faced false consensuses before. The slanders and libels against Jews historically have never been true, and as often as not, their accusers aren’t particularly concerned about their veracity. Their goal is to intimidate and separate Jews, and ultimately to commit violence against them and drive them out. This could well describe how those in the agencies who have produced these libelous reports – and many in the media – feel about the Jewish state. The goal is to delegitimize Israel, make it a pariah among states, and ultimately see it destroyed.
The brilliant Israeli scholar and former Knesset member Einat Wilf tell us that when Jews were being emancipated – and vilified – in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Ahad Ha’am, a pre-Herzl Zionist, reminded Jews that historically, worldwide opinion stacked against them has been false.
Ahad Ha’am, who was concerned Jews hearing all the vilification around them might come to believe it, instead urged Jews to remember their history; specifically, in the middle ages when all Europe was convinced by the blood libel – that the blood of Christian children was used in Jewish rituals – and that Jews poisoning wells had caused the Black Death, because despite the consensus about those accusations, Jews knew the charges were false.
Ahad Ha’am suggested that Jews could take solace in knowing that despite what the world has come to believe, the charges against them are false and absurd, even as the world turns against the Jewish state and the storm about genocide continues to rage worldwide.
