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On the Use of the Term “Genocide”

C. Gourgey, Ph.D.


It has become fashionable lately, almost de rigueur in left-leaning political circles, to accuse Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza. There can be no doubt that since October 7, 2023 the conflict has taken a devastating toll on both Palestinians and Israelis. It was the latest phase in an ongoing war that has continued since Israel’s founding. The scenes that unfolded every day on TV screens were shocking. The terrorist acts committed by Palestinians (not just Hamas; many others joined in) that ignited this latest phase were beyond excessive, violating every norm of human decency. Some of Israel’s actions were also questionable. That happens in war, and there is no use trying to hide it. But is “genocide” an appropriate or even an acceptable way of describing Israel’s response?

Some say so. The scenes of Gaza under siege were horrendous. There is no war in which awful things do not happen. But not every action in a war is genocide.

Let’s look at some of the worst genocides of modern times.

“Genocide,” literally the killing of a race or tribe, implies the intentional effort to wipe out a target population by killing as many of its members as possible. All of the above examples involved an attempt to exterminate a given group, killing its members without limit. It is also important to note that in most if not all of these genocides mass rape was used as a tactic, to intimidate and demoralize the population thus weakening its resistance.

Now one might debate the merits or demerits of the way Israel has been managing the Gaza war. But this article is not about that. In my own view, while I am not invested in defending every action Israel has taken, I think the initial attack put Israel in an untenable moral position, having to fight an enemy that embedded itself within its own civilian population. There is no way to do that cleanly, something Israel’s critics have not adequately addressed. Those who believe Israel is grossly at fault may continue in that belief (although I wish they would show more appreciation of the moral complexity of the situation). Right now I am only questioning the use of the word “genocide” to describe what Israel has been doing. We have the Rwandan Genocide, the Armenian Genocide, the Cambodian Genocide, the Darfur Genocide, and the Yazidi Genocide. We do not have the Palestinian Genocide.

If Israel wanted to exterminate the Palestinian people, given Israel’s technical ability the Palestinian casualties of this war would be astronomically higher, much higher even than the inflated figures from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry that were reported consistently without question. This is not to trivialize the death toll on both sides, and especially the suffering of the Gazan population. There is no diminishing the horror of this war. But nations who commit genocide do not send advance warnings of impending strikes or establish evacuation corridors, as Israel has. One may question the efficacy of these measures; still, they are not typically characteristic of genocides.

The Use of Language

Words have power, and language can and often is used as an instrument of war. The term “genocide” is being used to delegitimize Israel, just one part of the Palestinian effort to deny Israel’s right to exist. It equates Israel with all the other genocides mentioned, especially Hitler’s. How often have I heard this: “Jews may have once been victims of genocide, but now they are just as bad. Maybe Hitler was right.” And before we know it, Jews all over the world are subject to retaliation. This is captured in the Palestinian slogan “Globalize the Intifada”: What else can that possibly mean but spread the “resistance” beyond Israel’s borders, to any Jews suspected of supporting “Zionism.” For these reasons accusing the Jewish people of genocide is a very serious matter, and if one does so one should have evidence that is absolutely beyond dispute.

Just what does “genocide” mean anyway? According to the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, genocide means “any of specific acts committed with the clear intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” Taken too literally, this definition is vacuous, and could include any hate crime committed with a murderous intent. An attempt to kill someone because of national, ethnic, racial, or religious backround, as reprehensible as it may be, is not a genocide. The man who fatally shot two staff members of the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. was not committing genocide, even though you could say it was an attempt “to destroy in part a national or religious group.” The definition of genocide should be intended to cover situations like that which prompted the creation of the term in the first place.

The term “genocide” was coined in 1942 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin. This was during World War II, largely in response to Hitler's efforts to exterminate the Jewish people, but also having in mind other mass atrocities like the genocide of the Armenians at the hands of the Turks. In other words, “genocide” refers to the complete destruction of a people or a nation. That is what the word literally means: the “killing of a race or national group,” and this is what people naturally think of when they hear the word. Unfortunately the word has been parsed to death by academics and anti-Zionists trying to make it apply to Israel. But Israel has never committed genocide against the Palestinian people. Dropping leaflets warning of impending strikes, telegraphing the locations, trying to establish safe corridors for endangered civilians, are not what one does when one is perpetrating a genocide. But Israel has done all of this.

Some scholars have proposed redefining genocide in a way that expands it but loses its original intent. And such definitions have often been crafted for political purposes. But scholarly definitions of genocide are irrelevant. What matters is the rhetorical force of the language. What matters is the weaponization of language to achieve political ends. There will be much more to say about this when we consider the origin of the term. But for now, let's begin with the observation that when most people think of genocide, they associate it not with scholarly definitions but with mass extermination. Words like “genocide” are chosen and used not for any formal definition but for their emotional impact.

Israel has never mounted a campaign to exterminate or imprison every Palestinian. Not even close. But one party to this conflict has done exactly that. In the area that Hamas invaded on October 7, 2023 its fighters did try to kill or take hostage everyone in sight, old and young, male and female. The brutality and sadism with which they executed this attack, on all but especially against the women including systematic rape, sexual mutilation, and dismemberment of women’s bodies, is hardly imaginable. And yet it is barely even noticed in progressive circles. According to Hamas and many of its progressive allies (one American college professor even called the attack “exhilarating”), all Israelis, even the women and chidren, are “settler-colonialists” and deserved what they got.

Also escaping notice is that the intent was never to limit the carnage to southern Israel, but to assault the entire country and finally wipe it out. Unfortunately for the perpetrators, coordination with Hezbollah in the north did not succeed and so that plan was not realized. But Iran, a driving force behind all of this, has been calling for a genocide against Israeli Jews for years. Hamas too declared that as soon as given the chance, it would repeat what it did that day many times over, until it eliminated Israel’s entire Jewish population. October 7 was the grand attempt to carry it out. It almost succeeded.

And yet Hamas’s open call for genocide is largely ignored, while Israel is accused of a “genocide” it did not commit.

Hamas is using the word “genocide” for political purposes, giving it a cynical twist. It says the State of Israel came into being because of a genocide, known as the Nazi Holocaust, and now Palestinians also have a genocide. So they too should get a state out of it.

Imagine the founding of a Palestinian state with October 7 celebrated as its Independence Day. Palestinian extremists executed the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust, and now they want to be rewarded for it. But there is a much more important reason for concern. A totally sovereign Palestinian state under present conditions will undoubtedly become another front for attacking Israelis, just as Gaza before it. Hamas has ambitions to control that state just as it controls Gaza, and we know what happened there: rocket attacks and other terrorism targeting Israel year after year, decade after decade. But this one would be much worse: much larger, and right next to Israel’s central cities. Hamas makes no secret of its ultimate war aims. It is also no more likely to share power with the Palestinian Authority than it was in Gaza, when it pushed out the PA in a bloody civil war.

The Ultimate Irony

Palestinians as a people have never accepted the existence of two coexisting states. They might have had their own state but rejected several reasonable offers, notably the Peel Commision in 1937, the UN Partition Plan in 1947, and Camp David 2000. (I wonder how many anti-Zionists are fully aware of this history.) Their ultimate aim has always been the liquidation of the Jewish state. And Hamas’s promise to repeat the carnage of October 7 whenever and wherever it can prioritizes genocide over peaceful ccoexistence.

We have only barely mentioned the role of Iran, a prime mover in the attempt to subject the Israeli population to genocide. The Iranian regime makes no secret of its intention, publicly displaying a “doomsday clock” counting down the hours to Israel’s destruction. For years Iran was content to strike at Israel through its proxies, most notably Hamas in the south, Hezbollah in the north, and the Houthis in Yemen. More recently Iran attacked Israel directly, aiming primarily at civilian targets. Iran has been conducting, and planning for, a program of religiously inspired genocide against Israel’s Jews. Yet one would hardly know it from the cloud of warped rhetoric that has come to surround this conflict. And that is the irony: Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah make no secret of their genocidal intent, yet only Israel is accused of genocide.

The virtually exclusive focus on Israel by the international community ignores factors which, if not confronted, will make a lasting peace impossible. Chief among these is the religiously inspired hatred of Jews that is epidemic in Muslim and especially Palestinian society. This has been documented. For years Palestinian textbooks have harped on the evils of the Jews, and even children’s television programs have encouraged similar hatred. This level of systematic incitement makes peaceful coexistence impossible. Both sides must value living together in peace in order for it to work.

The Real Significance of Genocide Language in This Conflict

We have seen the irony of accusing Israel of genocide when it never actually committed one, while not mentioning the real and open genocidal intent of many who make this charge. This is not new. It has a long history, and many who are quick to accuse Israel of genocide may not be familiar with it. Understanding this history greatly shifts the perspective through which we should judge the genocide charge in the present.

The present charge of genocide against Israel is just the latest chapter of a very long story that goes back to the Six-Day War. Under the leadership of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan began massing troops along Israel’s border threatening to liquidate the Jewish state. With the promise of more to come, Nasser committed the first act of war by blockading the Strait of Tiran and closing it to Israeli shipping. Israel did not wait for the next blow and launched a preemptive strike on the Egyptian air force. In less than a week Israel won the war.

Holocaust inversion. The quick defeat of the Arab forces proved a profound humiliation to their major supporter, the Soviet Union. So to save face, the Soviet KGB launched a disinformation campaign using Nazi slogans and imagery, designed to discredit Israel and Zionism. They even circulated a myth that “Zionists” collaborated with Hitler to sacrifice European Jews in exchange for a state. The Soviets also accused Israel of genocide, treating Palestinians exactly as the Nazis had treated the Jews. This was intended to deprive Israel of any moral legitimacy as a refuge for survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. Israel was now, in this portrayal, the new Nazi Germany.

This strategy of portraying Israel, and by extension Jews, not as victims of the Nazis but as Nazis themselves, became known as “Holocaust inversion.” Jews became seen not as victims but as perpetrators of the new Holocaust, thus worthy of the same condemnation given to the real Nazis.

Holocaust inversion rhetoric persisted and has been used to describe just about every flareup of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1967, ignoring the Palestinian terrorism that played a major role. It is a smear not only of Israel, but of Jews in general, who are presumed to support Israel and thus equivalent to Nazi sympathizers.

For this and similar reasons, anti-Zionism and antisemitism cannot be separated. Whenever anti-Zionism flares, it is virtually always accompanied by antisemitic acts. These include attacks on synagogues, Jewish businesses, and people in the street simply for looking Jewish. These give the lie to the notion that anti-Zionism and antisemitism have nothing to do with each other.

At this point we must make a critical distinction, which Israel’s supporters often do make but are routinely unheard. Not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. There is nothing wrong with criticizing the policies of the Israeli government, as one might criticize those of any other nation. That is true enough. But it is not anti-Zionism.

Anti-Zionism, and the use of the word “Zionist” as if it meant Nazi, is not just criticism of Israel’s policies. It is opposition to the existence of the Jewish state itself. It means support for dismantling the State of Israel and throwing its Jewish citizens to the mercy of a hostile Arab majority. Jewish refugees from Arab lands can tell you exactly what that means. The current Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, is an ardent anti-Zionist. He claims to deny the legitimacy of any state defined by religion, totally ignoring the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. Additionally, Jews cannot be citizens of Jordan or Saudi Arabia, but Muslims can be and are citizens of Israel and are even represented in the government. This double standard, imposing restrictions that apply to Jews only, is blatantly antisemitic. Yet Mamdani does not even see his inconsistency.

Jewish supporters of Israel are frequently accused of trying to silence their critics by calling every criticism of Israel antisemitic. This accusation is false, as we have already noted. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) has proposed a useful working definiiton of antisemitism, part of which states: “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” Yet those who accuse Jews of too easily invoking antisemitism often fail to recognize that supporters of Israel do make this distinction. Many anti-Zionists react as if no criticism of Israel can be antisemitic, in effect prohibiting any discussion of antisemitism at all. It is now very difficult for anyone who supports Israel to discuss antisemitism even when it does exist. Trying to do so is likely to trigger the accusation. It has happened to me several times.

There is no sharp line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. They tend to bleed into each other. The campus demonstrations of recent years are a case in point. Those demonstrations were often justified as anti-Zionist rather than antisemitic. Nevertheless they featured slogans like “From the River to the Sea,” “Burn Tel Aviv,” and “Globalize the Intifada,” all of which are calls for violence against Jews. either through the destruction of Israel or taking the aggression beyond Israel’s borders. And Jewish students have been verbally and physically harrassed, their movements on campus restricted, some even physically assaulted. The fact is hard to escape: Anti-Zionism has now become the socially acceptable form of antisemitism.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has a long history, and is extremely complex. And that complexity must be respected, not reduced to slogans and sound bites. Above all, those who feel compelled to weigh in on it should first study their history. They should know what genocide really means, and that accusing Israel of genocide falls directly into the tradition of Holocaust inversion, and so supports antisemitism.

The use of words as weapons costs lives. This conflict has caused too much suffering on both sides. It should never be trivialized through the inappropriate and sometimes reflexive use of words like “genocide.”

July 2025, revised August 2026