The Genocide Libel

Israel is not perpetrating genocide. And the accusation is not mere wordplay. It is a deadly strategy to provoke the genocide of Jews by accusing Jews of genocide.

In a modest attempt to chip away at an Everest of disinformation with a spoon, I recently called out somebody on social media for accusing Israel of “genocide,” pointing out that the person clearly does not know the definition of the term.

Predictably, the tables of self-righteousness were quickly turned.

I, it turns out, was nitpicking over nomenclature while children were being murdered.

Words matter, I replied. And accusing the Jewish state of the worst crime humankind has ever imagined is no trivial linguistic sideshow. It is a deliberate and dangerous tactic with an ancient history.

Genocide has a very specific definition in international law. It is the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” through one or more of five specific actions.

It is not a catch-all term for a lot of people dying in war.

More precisely, genocide is not a war of defense intended to neutralize the military of a terror regime.

My interlocutor (if that is not too lofty a term for somebody with whom you trade snark on social media) may not have understood this. He may indeed believe that Israel is perpetrating genocide, in which case he is gullibly misinformed.

The anti-Israel activists who invented and spread the genocide libel, though, know exactly what they are doing.

The term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin to describe the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, so applying it to the descendants of the victims is a particularly revolting form of sadism – although, of course, if it were true, the genesis of the term would be irrelevant. If Israel were committing genocide, the world should be shouting it from the rooftops.

In fact, Israel is not committing genocide – but the world is still shouting from the rooftops that it is. Actual genocides are taking place today, but global awareness of those brutalities are almost wholly eclipsed by the global shrieking over Israel’s execution of the war Hamas started on October 7.

Obviously – or it should be obvious to anyone who understands both the meaning of the term genocide and what is happening in Gaza – nothing remotely like genocide, in scope or intent, is happening to Palestinians. So why do ostensible humanitarians ignore actual genocides while disseminating a false narrative that Israel is perpetrating one? Why is the allegation ubiquitous on social media, repeated in mainstream commentary, and sputtered from the braying mouths of the anti-Israel mobs on the streets of Toronto and Cape Town and Berkeley?

There is a very specific, and remarkably simple, reason why this allegation, among all possible canards, is so widespread.

First, though, to be clear: there is only one place in which the word genocide plays a role in the current conflict — and that is in the unambiguous genocidal expressions by Hamas and in the incessant rhetoric of Palestinian religious, political, academic and cultural leaders, even many who are welcomed in the international community as legitimate voices of the Palestinian people. These blood-curdling threats of annihilation, calling for the eradication of not just the Jewish state but of Jewish people, are dismissed by Western observers as insignificant fodder for domestic audiences, even as fabricated assertions of genocide by Israel are spread as terrifying truth.

The best defense is an offence, of course, so it is an age-old strategy to accuse the enemy of precisely what your side is perpetrating. But there is more to it even than this.

Genocide is the greatest crime known to humankind. Not incidentally, Jewish people throughout history have been subject to uprisings and mass murder based on repeated, false accusations of the greatest crimes known to humanity.

The oldest, yet still not dead, allegation is deicide. Until the 1960s, official doctrine of the Catholic Church maintained that the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, that they were literally God-murderers, enemies of the very essence of goodness. Across millennia, this allegation led to mass murder and incalculable numbers of lesser crimes. (The irony of the pious Christian blaming others for the crucifixion is that it betrays the very core of their professed faith. If you are a believer, you should know that Jesus died for your sins – you, not Jews, are the reason he died. But anyway.)

In the Middle Ages, unexplained deaths from plagues demanded rationalization and, since Jews were the only “other” in most European societies, at them was the finger of blame most commonly pointed. Because Jewish ritual cleanliness may have resulted in a lower proportion of Jews dying from things like the black plague, combined with complete ignorance of bacteriology, Jews were accused of poisoning the water supplies.

Around that same time, when a child would mysteriously die or go missing, blame again tended to focus on the community of outsiders, Jews. “Blood libels,” the fanciful but fatal mythology that Jews kill Gentile babies to ritually consume their blood, led to countless incidents of mass hysteria in which Jews were set upon and murdered by their neighbors, again and again, century after century.

For a parent, there is no greater crime than the murder of their child. In theology, there could be no crime greater than deicide.

In the modern world, there is no crime greater than genocide. Murder is the greatest abomination against humanity, and genocide is this crime in extremis, not merely greater in scope, but motivated by the most atrocious human instinct: to eradicate an entire people based on their identity.

Allegations that Jews are responsible for the most heinous acts have been used throughout history to desensitize the masses and dehumanize Jews in order to perpetrate atrocities against them.

The Nazis created a narrative in which the Jews needed to be eradicated before they could despoil the racial purity of the nation which, in the context of fascist race ideology, was the supreme sin.

Since October 7, we have seen remarkably large numbers of activists and commentators defending and celebrating the atrocities perpetrated that day against Israelis. There is an identifiable constituency who are not appalled by such atrocities but view them as legitimate “resistance.” Call them the pro-rape community, immolation-supporting activists or decapitation enthusiasts, whatever. We see clearly now, in a way we did not before October 7, that there are people who unashamedly, openly celebrate atrocities against Jews and hope for more of them. This is the constituency that the genocide libel seeks to embolden and expand.

The strategy is plain: if we can convince ourselves that Jews (or the Jewish state; as we see in hate crimes, the differentiation is moot to many activists) are planning a genocide, it would be an act of social justice to destroy them before they can destroy others.

This fits into a very long history of seeding the ground for anti-Jewish atrocities with the most atrocious allegations of Jewish malevolence.

That's what the false allegation of genocide is all about. It is to prepare the soil for the genocide of Jews by convincing people that, if we don't do it to the Jews first, they will do it to others.

This is not nitpicking over language like the Twitter twit I foolishly engaged with claimed. This is a dangerous, deadly attempt to incite hatred and violence. It is an attempt, even, to provoke genocide of Jews by accusing Jews of genocide.

By convincing ourselves and others that Jews, or the Jewish state, are planning genocide, we set the stage for a preemptive assault on Jews. A genocide in the name of social justice. A massacre to prevent a massacre.

If this sounds paranoid to you, you really should open a history book. The genocide libel is the blood libel of our time.