A troubling and increasingly influential narrative has taken hold worldwide, one that seeks to delegitimize Zionism, demonize Israel, and justify rising hostility toward Jews. Israel is now routinely accused of committing genocide against Palestinians.
This charge has become the rhetorical backbone for claiming that anti-Zionism is wholly distinct from antisemitism. It circulates across social media, on university campuses, and even in mainstream news, often accompanied by language portraying Israelis and Jews as inherently barbaric or subhuman.
But such sweeping and inflammatory accusations demand scrutiny. According to the UN Genocide Convention, genocide requires intent to destroy “in whole or in part” a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The critical question – rarely asked – is: where is Israel’s intent to destroy the Palestinian people?
It was Hamas, not Israel, that initiated the current war with the atrocities of October 7. Those attacks were not spontaneous, nor were they merely acts of resistance. They were the brutal enactment of a long-standing ideological commitment – one that is openly genocidal.
Hamas’s 1988 founding charter proclaims:
- “Israel will exist until Islam will obliterate it.”
- “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”
- All of Palestine is a permanent Islamic endowment that cannot be ceded.
- Jews are portrayed as behind wars, revolutions, and world disasters.
These are not stray phrases; they reflect the organization’s worldview. Even the 2017 revised charter – often described as a “moderate revision” – does not renounce violence, does not accept Israel’s existence, and still frames the conflict as a religious struggle requiring “resistance” until “liberation.”
Hamas operates within an ideological network that reinforces and legitimizes its eliminationist aims. Iran’s Islamic Republic has long portrayed Jews as enemies of Islam and Israel as an entity that must be removed. Ayatollah Khomeini asserted that Jews conspired against Islam from its earliest days; Ayatollah Khamenei has repeatedly referred to Israel as a “cancerous tumor that must be eliminated.”
Hezbollah, Iran’s primary regional proxy, echoes this view in its 1985 manifesto: “Our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated.” These are direct, unambiguous statements of intent, not political hyperbole.
Where genocidal intent actually lies
The events of October 7 were thus the predictable outcome of a doctrine that glorifies death and treats civilians as tools. Hamas embeds fighters, rockets, and command centers in densely populated areas – schools, mosques, hospitals – precisely to maximize civilian casualties. Every Palestinian death is exploited to indict Israel while shielding Hamas from responsibility.
This is not a miscalculation; it is a method. One Hamas spokesman infamously declared: “The wombs of our women will replace the martyrs many times over.” Human life becomes a renewable military resource, not a sacred value.
Yet despite this documented ideology, the accusation that Israel is committing genocide dominates international discourse. This is a profound moral inversion. Israel is responding to an attack intended to kill as many Jews as possible. It faces an enemy that embeds itself among civilians and openly seeks the destruction of the Jewish state.
But on many campuses and in protests across Western democracies, Hamas’s explicit genocidal aims are ignored or rationalized, while Israel is cast as the primary villain. This distortion does more than misrepresent the conflict; it fuels the delegitimization of Israel and normalizes antisemitism, now cloaked in the mantle of human rights and social justice. It also erodes the moral framework needed to protect civilians, Israeli and Palestinian alike.
A truthful accounting begins with a basic, vital fact: Genocidal ideology lies at the core of Hamas’s project, not Israel’s.
To deny this is to reward extremism and encourage further violence. Mislabeling Israel’s war against Hamas as genocide not only distorts reality; it obscures the true obstacles to peace and incentivizes the forces most committed to perpetual conflict. The Jewish people – who have endured millennia of persecution culminating in the Holocaust – now see their national home portrayed as uniquely illegitimate, even murderous. Meanwhile, the openly genocidal intent of Israel’s enemies is dismissed as irrelevant or excused as resistance.
The world urgently needs clarity – not slogans. Confronting Hamas’s ideology honestly is essential for protecting civilians, upholding human rights, and preserving any hope for coexistence. Only by rejecting this dangerous inversion of truth can we begin to move toward a more just and peaceful future for both Palestinians and Israelis.
Thank you.
The writer is a professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University. The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of FAU.