There is no more poisonous accusation in modern politics than that of "genocide" against Israel. It is the crime of crimes, summoning the gas chambers of Auschwitz, the killing fields of Rwanda and the slaughter of the Armenians. Yet for three years it has been hurled at the Jewish state with such abandon that much of the Western world now treats it as established fact.
So successful has the propaganda become that today, referring to "the genocide" has only one meaning: the thing that never was one. That is a stunning inversion, and it represents the grotesque theft of a word and its cynical appropriation.
This week, Ron Dermer, the former Israeli minister and one of Benjamin Netanyahu's closest confidants, hit back with a word of his own. In a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition summit, he took the charge apart, concluding that we have seen nothing but a "fake-ocide". These are familiar arguments to many readers, but Dermer's pithy and insightful presentation rewards further attention.
It should go without saying that the suffering in Gaza – for which Hamas bears ultimate responsibility – has been immense. But the suffering of war is not in itself proof of genocide, which has a specific meaning in international law. Moreover, given the circumstances in which the war arose, the defensive campaign, as desperate and messy as it was, is evidence of the evils of Hamas, not the other side.
That is to say, look at the evidence rather than the scale of the devastation, as Dermer does, and the charge collapses. Let's follow his lead.
First, the demographics. In 1939, on the eve of the Holocaust, there were about 16.6 million Jews in the world. Six million were murdered, including roughly two-thirds of European Jewry. More than eight decades later, the global Jewish population has still not clearly recovered to its pre-war level; that is what a systematic campaign of extermination looks like when seen through the grim lens of demographics. Gaza, Dermer argues, is the opposite: more Gazans are alive today than on October 7, 2023, he says. That alone sets it apart from true genocides such as Rwanda and Darfur.
Second, as we know, Israel repeatedly warned civilians before it struck. It dropped leaflets, sent text messages, made phone calls and announced evacuation routes. Dermer maintains that such precautions are fundamentally incompatible with a deliberate attempt to wipe out Gaza's population, and he has a point. Why would an army bent on killing civilians go to such lengths to warn them to get out of the way?
Granted, evacuation orders were sometimes contradictory, and in the chaos of war, areas designated for the displaced have been known to come under fire. Those failures do not erase the warnings, however, which cannot simply be airbrushed out of the record in order to support a pernicious propaganda narrative.
Third, as tragic as it is, the death toll alone is not proof of genocide. The widely reported casualty figures from Gaza, issued by the damnable Hamas-run health ministry, have not distinguished civilians from combatants. Israel says it killed tens of thousands of Hamas fighters, and there have been plenty of high-profile cases of combatants being passed off as "journalists".
Dermer argues that Israel's ratio of civilian to combatant deaths compares favourably with other urban wars. Such comparisons are imperfect, of course, since different conflicts count casualties in different ways and no two battlefields are the same. Still, the legal question hinges on the motivation behind the loss of life, whether the attacks complied with the laws of war and whether genocidal intent existed (it didn't), rather than on the raw number of dead taken in isolation.
Fourth, Hamas turned Gaza's civilian landscape into a battlefield. It built a vast tunnel network, operated from inside densely populated neighbourhoods and planted military infrastructure in and around homes, schools and hospitals. Had it wished, it could have sheltered civilians in those tunnels; instead, it kept them for its fighters. The result was to blur the line between military targets and their civilian surroundings, deliberately.
Israel still had to abide by the laws of war: distinction, proportionality and precautions in attack. A legitimate target does not make every strike lawful. But any honest account of the civilian toll has to reckon with Hamas's military infrastructure and the choices it made, without which the death toll would have looked very different.
Dermer also argues that the world's reaction gave Hamas a perverse incentive: as its objective was always propaganda, the more Palestinian civilians suffered, the greater the pressure on Israel to give up the campaign before it had achieved victory. Although Israel remains answerable for its own military decisions, it is impossible to understand this war without understanding Hamas's strategy, and that strategy is where the blame ultimately lands.
Fifth, Israel allowed aid into Gaza. Large quantities of food, medicine and other supplies entered the territory throughout the war, and Israel took part in arrangements for vaccination campaigns and other humanitarian operations; as we know, the main obstacle to its distribution was Hamas. Dermer cites all this as evidence against the idea that Israel sought the physical destruction of Gaza's people.
Sixth, consider Israel's military superiority. The IDF's firepower dwarfs anything Hamas possesses. Dermer's point is simple: had Israel's aim been to kill as many Palestinians as possible, it had the means to inflict far greater destruction. The aim of genocide, in other words, could have been fulfilled in a single afternoon.
Seventh, the International Court of Justice has not found Israel guilty of genocide, a fact that routinely gets lost in the noise. In the case brought by South Africa, the court ordered provisional measures requiring Israel to take steps to prevent prohibited acts and protect Palestinians in Gaza. It issued no ruling that genocide had occurred. The proceedings are still under way, and it remains to be seen whether Israelophobia will succeed in turning the court into an instrument of propaganda, as it has the UN.
Eighth, war crimes and genocide are different things. A military campaign, and tragically most of them do, may involve unlawful attacks, disproportionate harm to civilians, collective punishment or other grave violations without amounting to genocide.
Some Israeli soldiers may have committed war crimes. Some commanders may have authorised unlawful operations. Some politicians' rhetoric, often in the heat of the moment, was deplorable. Every such allegation should be investigated and, where the evidence supports it, those responsible punished.
As Ze'ev Jabotinsky wrote, in a line I often quote: "As one of the first conditions for equality we demand the right to have our own villains, exactly as other people have them." Quite so. Prosecuting individual crimes is a world away from proving that Israel set out, as a matter of state policy, to destroy the Palestinians as a people.
Which brings me to the consequences of the accusation itself.
"Genocide" carries a unique moral and historical weight, far beyond that of an ordinary superlative. Levelled at Israel, it has become the centrepiece of the argument that the Jewish state is illegitimate at its core, part of a long campaign to bring about its destruction. That is why it must be confronted at every turn.
Back in 1976, Saul Bellow observed: "You get the feeling that Israel is something like an insecure tooth on which the Russians don't choose to use the pincers. They will work it back and forth and when it is sufficiently loose they will take it out with their fingers." It was true then, and it is true now. The "fake-ocide" libel is how they are loosening the tooth.
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