The BBC’s rotten decision to repeat the grotesque genocide charge against Israel on October 7

And those numbers themselves ought to have made any competent journalist suspicious. An organisation devoted to the study of genocide produces an extraordinarily consequential resolution, yet fewer than three members in ten participate, while those who do vote overwhelmingly in one direction. That pattern alone should certainly have provoked questions. The obvious journalistic response is scepticism, not blind repetition.

Who joined? Who voted? What were their qualifications? How representative were they of the field? Had the composition of the organisation changed recently? What process produced the resolution? What dissent existed? Instead, the institutional label does all the work – after all, what could sound more definitive than something called the International Association of Genocide Scholars?

Look closer, though, and you might start to see a different story emerge. Membership is not confined to professors of genocide studies, specialist historians or international lawyers. IAGS itself includes activists, students, artists, educators, museum professionals, policymakers, independent scholars, NGOs, survivors and others. It may organise itself however it wishes, but the BBC has no right to present a ballot of that broad membership as though it represents a settled judgement of specialist genocide academics.

In fact, membership can be obtained for a comparatively small fee. On the figures above, roughly 110 affirmative votes produced an international media claim of enormous reputational consequence. At $30 per membership, 108 members would represent a mere $3,240 investment to smear a country in the international media.

We can’t know if that’s what happened, though. The identities and credentials of voters were not published. The ballot was anonymous. Nobody outside the organisation can therefore establish how many affirmative votes came from recognised genocide researchers, international lawyers, activists, students or any of the other categories IAGS welcomes.
The document itself contains another serious problem. It says the International Court of Justice found “that it is plausible that Israel is committing genocide”. Wrong. The ICJ found that certain rights asserted by South Africa were plausible, including Palestinians’ right to protection from acts of genocide and South Africa’s right to seek Israel’s compliance with the Genocide Convention. The distinction is elementary, and enormous.

And the BBC knows this. Joan Donoghue, President of the ICJ when the provisional-measures order was issued, later explained on the BBC’s own HARDtalk programme that the widespread claim that the Court had found a plausible case of genocide was wrong. The BBC itself subsequently acknowledged that it had repeated that erroneous interpretation. Yet it now invokes an IAGS resolution which repeats precisely the formulation the BBC has already had reason to correct.

The resolution is three pages long. It is not a judicial determination. There were no adversarial proceedings, no cross-examination, no process remotely comparable with a court weighing competing evidential claims. It proceeds through assertions and references to NGO and UN material before concluding that Israel’s conduct meets Article II’s definition of genocide. Genocide requires specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group as such. Civilian deaths, displacement and devastation may form part of such an inquiry, but they do not settle it. Intent remains central.

Nor was the IAGS declaration some uncontested scholarly endpoint. A counter-statement ultimately attracted 537 signatories, including genocide and Holocaust specialists, former war-crimes prosecutors, lawyers and former officials. You would never know any of that from the BBC’s little sentence.

This is how reputational warfare operates. A politically charged resolution acquires an impressive institutional name, a news organisation compresses it into a line, and then that line is repeated. Repetition becomes authority, and authority hardens into common knowledge. Most readers will never inspect the turnout, the membership rules, the anonymous ballot or the disputed ICJ language. They will simply remember that “genocide scholars” declared Israel genocidal.
Since October 7, 2023 there has been a sustained struggle over the meaning of the massacre and the war that followed it: over legitimacy, language, law and memory. Activist networks, campaigning organisations, political movements and media institutions have participated in that struggle to different degrees and for different reasons. The consequence has been a reputational assault running alongside the physical one: Israel was attacked, and was then accused of embodying the very crime historically directed against Jews; its war against those who massacred its citizens was recast as extermination. It represents reputational programme designed and coordinated to be executed simultaneously with the physical one carried out by the Palestinians.
Some people driving that process know exactly what they are doing. Others merely repeat what prestigious institutions place before them. But the BBC has less excuse than most. It calls itself a public-service broadcaster governed by accuracy, proportion and impartiality. It speaks with an authority few media organisations possess. On October 7, of all days, it chose to spend some of that authority this way.