The use of “Gaza Genocide” is spreading around the world. This word, denoting the worst of crimes, is being used casually and routinely now and may soon become entrenched.
If Israel’s enemies succeed in permanently affixing the “genocide” label on the Gaza war, such that even neutral parties wind up casually using it, this will be the biggest victory in decades of delegitimization efforts, and will devastatingly affect Jews all over the world.
What is needed is a concerted and proactive communications and lobbying campaign to deflect the genocide charge, aimed at politicians, academics, think tanks, civil society, and, of course, social media, featuring multimedia materials, research, and white papers, featuring prominent figures and ordinary people, third-party advocates, and Israelis of note.
To be effective, it will need to be reasonable and moderate. It cannot constitute an across-the-board defense of everything Israel and the IDF have done over the past two years, and it definitely cannot defend the government specifically. It may have to concede that there may have been abuses and mistakes.
Instead, Israel seems content to ignore the danger and angrily reject all criticism as the result of propaganda, ignorance, idiocy, or antisemitism. Devastatingly, I wrote last week, it does not even try to provide a coherent version of its brutality in Gaza.
Israel indeed faces a determined propaganda campaign, originating from Western anti-Zionist and Arab circles, that was primed and ready to go even before it launched its response to the Oct. 7 massacre. Some of it takes the form of quasi-scholarly arguments, but most of it is driven by social media agitation. It has gathered steam in recent months.
'Gaza genocide' label hardens in global lexicon, UN echoes
The “International Association of Genocide Scholars” in September voted that Israel’s “policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.” There was cause for skepticism, since almost anyone can join the group, and the vote procedure was not rigorous.
Yet a UN Commission of Inquiry soon echoed the charge and urged states to step in. Media outlets reported on this uncritically, and US Senator Bernie Sanders then declared that the Genocide label ”is inescapable.”
We are now in the second wave in which the “Gaza genocide” is simply referenced as an indisputable fact, with no effort to argue the point.
In nominating Gaza journalists for the Sakharov Prize, “The Left” faction of the European Parliament issued a press release standing “in full solidarity with Palestinians subject to the genocide in Gaza.” The Nordic Summer University issued a statement several months ago, “in light of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian population of Gaza by the Israeli military.”
The Uppsala Declaration of European academics, a group containing thousands from all over the continent, condemned Israel’s “genocide with intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza,” and Oxford University has run podcasts and events with titles like “Genocide and Accountability in Gaza” and “Gaza Genocide as a Symptom.
Academic articles regularly carry titles like “The Gaza Genocide in Five Crises.” In these spaces, the word now appears unitalicized, unquoted, almost bureaucratic.
Yes, there is some pushback in the US at the use of the term, but the direction of travel is the same. A Brookings Institution poll from August found that 45% of American voters agreed Israel was committing genocide and only 31% disagreed, with support for the term even higher among youth.
The impact could be huge. The word genocide determines which nations are remembered as perpetrators and which as victims. Once the label is affixed, it rarely comes off. That would legitimize widespread hostility toward not only Israel but its supporters, and would be devastating to efforts to fight antisemitism.
The horror in Gaza is undeniable. But genocide, as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention, is not synonymous with mass killing. It is the deliberate attempt to annihilate a people as such. It has achieved (near) consensual use only in a handful of cases: The Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, and the tragedies in Cambodia in the 1970s, Rwanda in the 1990s, and arguably in Bosnia.
If every catastrophic war becomes a “genocide,” the word ceases to carry weight. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was plainly designed to erase Ukraine as a sovereign nation, yet almost no one speaks of “the Ukrainian genocide.”
You cannot forbid people from calling Gaza a genocide, which one can imagine the Trump Administration trying, but you can argue the case. Israel must tell its story with evidence, not indignation.
As a starting point, the IDF should release targeting data, surveillance footage, and credible explanations of every major event in the war, including all evidence of Hamas’s operations from hospitals and schools. Evidence, not just claims.
Israel, remarkably, has ceded the information battlefield, for two years barring foreign journalists from Gaza, creating a vacuum that Hamas filled with images and data from its own Health Ministry. The world thus learned of Gaza’s devastation almost exclusively through Hamas-controlled sources. Israel, in part because it feared bad publicity, effectively ensured it.
When the Supreme Court on Oct. 23 ordered that foreign media must be allowed in, it postponed compliance by 30 days, as if to delay the inevitable reckoning.
Now, as reporters prepare to enter, Israel faces the decisive battle over narrative. Their findings will help determine if the world concludes that there was a democracy confronting a nihilistic terror group that hid beneath hospitals and schools (tragic), a vengeful army punishing a captive population (war crimes), or an effort to annihilate the Palestinians (genocide).
What the world cannot accept are the images without the context: the tent camps bombed, the staggering civilian death toll, the unrelenting siege. Without narrative, they read as vengeance at a minimum.
If Israel does not move fast to document its actions and open its evidence, to show how targets were chosen, what Hamas infrastructure was struck, and how civilians were warned, the term “Gaza genocide” will harden into the global lexicon, taught in universities and referenced in law. History will have made up its mind.
The word genocide is a verdict. And unless Israel reclaims its own story, transparently, persuasively, and soon, that verdict will stand.