The Forever Genocide
The genocide accusation against Israel did not begin after October 7. It merely entered its latest chapter.
Did you ever wonder how it is that Islamic activists and progressive organizations were ready to protest Israel for “genocide” on October 8, 2023—the day after Hamas massacred more than 1,200 Israelis and before Israel had even begun its military response?
I will tell you: The accusation of genocide did not begin after October 7. It was already waiting.
The protesters correctly assumed that Israel would respond militarily to the deadliest attack in its history. But the extent of that response was beside the point. Whatever Israel did would automatically be described as genocide because the conclusion had already been reached. With their furious and outsized response, the protestors were able to distract attention from Hamas’ grotesque slaughter and keep the focus on Israel .
Israel has been accused of genocide in one form or another by various genocide “experts” since its infancy.
The term “genocide” began to politicized in the 1960’s when Soviet and American leftists characterized the Vietnam war (among other events) as a genocide.1 These groups were strangely silent when the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia killed 2 million people between 1975 and 1979.2 These are the same types who accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza, but cannot summon any outrage over the PLO and Hamas charters which call for the dismantling of the Jewish state through “armed struggle” let alone the countless murders of civilians they have committed in support of this goal.
Following the 1967 Six-Day War, Soviet and Arab propaganda increasingly portrayed Zionism as a genocidal movement as part of a broader Cold War campaign to delegitimize Israel, recast it as the aggressor, and isolate it diplomatically. These accusations increased during the 1982 Lebanon War. The Soviet Academy of Sciences even established a commission dedicated to exposing and criticizing Zionism. Many of the same lies circulating about Israel today were promoted by Israel’s enemies in earlier claims of genocide. For example, just as the Gaza Health Ministry inflates the number of women and children casualties resulting from the war, at the September 1982 Arab Summit, Yasser Arafat claimed there were 49,600 civilian dead. However, a Lebanese study after the war counted 17,825 which included combatants. 3
By the 1990s and 2000s, the charge had migrated from Soviet propaganda into academic literature, NGOs, and Palestinian advocacy. Long before October 7, “genocide” had become the default description of virtually every Israeli military action.
How is it then that after 60 years of relentless genocide the Palestinian population increased from roughly one million in 1967 to approximately 5.5 million today?
Israel’s critics minimize this fact by pointing out that the legal definition of genocide does not explicitly require a declining population. Under the Genocide Convention, the central question is intent to destroy a protected group, not demographic outcomes.
On the other hand, wouldn’t a diminution in population signal that the particular nation was at risk for extinction? In the meantime, the proponents of the genocide libel are the first to point to the supposedly high casualty figures in Gaza as evidence of this most recent “genocide,”4 which likewise is not a legal element of genocide.
Every genocide widely recognized by historians has produced catastrophic population loss during the period in which the genocidal campaign was occurring.
Here is a comparison chart showing the population changes resulting from other alleged genocides:
If a people have supposedly been subjected to an ongoing genocide for six decades, shouldn’t there be some demographic indication that they are, in fact, being destroyed?
The question is especially relevant as Israel has presented extensive evidence that it has attempted to reduce civilian casualties: issuing evacuation warnings, establishing humanitarian corridors, facilitating aid deliveries, and documenting Hamas’ use of hospitals, schools, mosques and other civilian infrastructure for military purposes putting the civilians in the direct line of fire. The burden now shifts to the accusers to rebut the evidence Israel presented.
But all of this is ignored or explained away by Israel’s accusers.
Whether or not one believes Israel’s precautions to protect civilians were sufficient, they simply cannot be reconciled with an intent to destroy the Palestinian people as such.
Also ignored is the fact that in the recognized genocides, the victims posed no existential military threat to the perpetrators. Israel, by contrast, was responding to an organization that openly declared its intention to destroy the Jewish state and had just carried out the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
How do they get away with this?
Because the accusation does not depend on facts. It has developed over many years to function as a moral label rather than a legal conclusion. Israel’s very essence is deemed to be genocidal making evidence that particular acts constitute genocide unnecessary. That is the hallmark of the antizionist/antisemitic movement. Legal analysis, military documentation, and scholarly rebuttal are dismissed out of hand because the conclusion was predetermined. I have noticed that anti-Israel commentators rarely address the counter evidence directly. Rather they keep repeating the same tired line many of which are lies (e.g., 70% of Gazan fatalities are women and children). That’s how an accusation of genocide against a people whose population has grown exponentially can be explained away.
Look at some of the other extraordinary allegations against Israel that have been spread so easily. Claims that Israeli soldiers deliberately target children, that Israel uses dogs to sexually assault Palestinian prisoners, circulate widely despite being outlandish and lack any credible supporting evidence. But they are accepted because they reinforce an already established narrative.
Now some of the more deranged commentators are blaming Israel for the influx of thousands of migrants who crossed the border from Morocco into Ceuta. There is no evidence whatsoever to support this absurd contention. But again, any conspiracy theory that targets Israel is automatically given the benefit of the doubt. Literally anything goes.
Here in New York City, the Mayor took the time out of his busy schedule to create a video explaining to his constituents that the Prime Minister of the Jewish state is a “war criminal” and just plain evil. All in a days’ work for a city mayor. Apparently, Bibi is “not welcome in New York City.” Subtext- supporters of his nasty regime are supporting a criminal and are not welcome in New York City either.
When the Jewish state is routinely portrayed as uniquely evil, the distinction between hostility toward Israel and hostility toward Jews is easily blurred. If people are ready to believe that Israel is committing the crime most closely associated with Nazi Germany, then suspicion, exclusion, and hatred directed toward Jews become legitimate.
The genocide accusation against Israel did not begin after October 7. It merely entered its latest chapter.
That is why it has proved so resistant to facts—and why it is likely to outlive this war as well.
Sources for Data:
Holocaust Encyclopedia, Remaining Jewish Population of Europe in 1945 encyclopedia.ushmm.org.al
Holocaust Encyclopedia, The Armenian Genocide (1915-16): Overview. Encyclopedia.ushmm.org
Marijke Verpoorten, “The Death Toll of the Rwandan Genocide: A Detailed Analysis for Gikongoro Province,” Population 60, no. 4 (2005): 331–367.
Norman J. W. Goda, The Genocide Libel: How the World Has Charged Israel with Genocide, ISCA Research Paper 2025-3 (Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, Indiana University Bloomington, February 2025 p.21
Goda, The Genocide Libel, p.21
Goda, The Genocide Libel, p.25, citing The 1982 Israeli Invasion of Lebanon: The Casualties Race & Class v..24, n.4 (April 1983) 340-42 and Richard A Gabriel, Operation Peace for Galilee: The Israeli PLO War in Lebanon (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984), 164
The Gaza Health Ministry does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in reporting casualty figures and include all deaths whether or not caused by Israel, which sheds doubt on the reliability of their reporting.
The idea that Jews are child-killers is already deeply embedded in the Western psyche, so the people have been primed, at least unconsciously, to accept it.
Similarly, the genocide accusation is the modern version of the deicide accusation. In both cases, it is the biggest crime that society could possibly imagine, striking against what it holds most sacred (God for Medieval Christians; human rights law and ethnic diversity for modern Westerners).
Six days after October 7th, "Jewish Currents," a left-wing publication which uses the title formerly run by the Communist Party USA, published a 25 page article by a "genocide scholar," Raz Segal, explaining how Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza. Given the length of the article and the date of publication, I have to assume that Segal wrote the article before October 7th, had it on is his computer, touched it up and had it published before Israel had even reacted to the events of October 7th. Incidentally, Segal is employed at a no-name college in New Jersey, was offered the directorship of a Jewish institute at the University of Minnesota, which he lost, when the local donors rose up against his appointment. So there is some small measure of justice in the universe for so-called "scholars."