It is as if we are caught in a surreal time warp back to the 1930s, when the Jew was the ubiquitous villain, blamed for capitalism and communism alike, the perpetual culprit of humankind’s ills.
Now, the global call to antisemitism manifests itself in the latest blood libel—that Israel, in its war against Hamas, is engaged in genocide. The lie has spread across universities, news outlets, and international forums, fueling harassment of Jewish students and faculty on elite American campuses from Harvard to UCLA.
But this accusation is not merely false. It is a total inversion of reality.
Far from being genocidal, Israel has been at the forefront of saving lives—dispatching humanitarian aid across the world to victims of natural disasters, pioneering medical breakthroughs, and sustaining global agriculture and water technology.
Even in war, Israel exercises more care than any military in history to minimize civilian harm. As John Spencer, a leading U.S. expert on urban warfare at West Point, concluded: “Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that’s fought an urban war.”
And yet, none of this prevents Israel’s enemies from fabricating the charge of genocide.
International law is clear: to prove genocide, there must be genocidal intent—the deliberate aim to eliminate an ethnic or religious group. That intent is utterly absent in Israel’s conduct.
The International Court of Justice itself has recognized genocide in only one case in its history: the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. Even in Darfur, Biafra, and the Yazidi slaughter, the ICJ refrained from using the term. Yet, somehow, Israel is branded with this gravest of crimes—precisely while it pleads with civilians to flee fighting zones, pauses operations for humanitarian corridors, and allows in millions of tons of food and aid.
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked at the U.N. General Assembly: “Would a country committing genocide plead with the civilian population it is supposedly targeting to get out of harm’s way?”
Perhaps the most grotesque abuse of the term comes from the so-called Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, which repeatedly accuses Israel of genocide—while using the name of Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish jurist who coined the term itself.
But Lemkin, a staunch Zionist and multiple Nobel Peace Prize nominee, would have recoiled at such slander. His relatives and the European Jewish Association are now pursuing legal action to stop the hijacking of his legacy.
The contrast could not be starker. The Nazis slaughtered unarmed Jews solely for their existence. By contrast, Israel faces an enemy—Hamas—that openly seeks its annihilation and launched the Oct. 7 pogrom with widespread Palestinian support.
Netanyahu nicely summed up the obscenity: “Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization whose charter calls for the murder of all Jews on the planet, this genocidal organization is given a pass ... while Israel, which does everything it can to get civilians out of harm’s way—Israel is put in the dock.”
So true. So sad.
