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The research paper, “The Genocide Libel: How the World Has Charged Israel With Genocide,” was authored by Professor Norman J.W. Goda, the Norman and Irma Braman Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida, and published by the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) at Indiana University as part of the Beinner Family Research Series on Antisemitism.
The following is the introduction of the paper, with a link to the full text at the bottom:
This essay concerns the post-October 7 accusation of genocide against Israel. Genocide is the crime of crimes. States committing genocide are viewed as permanently illegitimate. By itself a genocide accusation is not antisemitic. During the Cold War, the charge was leveled dozens of times by government officials, legal scholars, and activists against France, Portugal, Nigeria, China, Cambodia, the US, and other states.[1] Since the end of the Cold War, judicial proceedings for genocide have been carried out against officials from former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and elsewhere both in ad hoc tribunals and at the International Criminal Court.[2]
Genocide accusations against Israel are different. First, Israel, unlike other states, has been charged with genocide throughout its existence.[3] The genocide accusation is tied to charges of racism, colonialism, and other accusations leveled against Israel since the 1960s.[4] Second, the speed and fury with which the accusations exploded after the Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023, are unusual in the annals of lawfare.[5] And yet regarding Israel’s 2023 war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, there has been not only a rush to judgment but an effort to redefine genocide itself so that the constitutive elements of the crime itself are lowered.
The genocide libel also deploys a range of antisemitic tropes. One is the linkage of genocide to violent passages in the Hebrew Bible, a linkage which plays on the theme of Jewish chosenness at the expense of others’ existence and which even claims that God is genocidal. Another is the whitewashing of Hamas’s own genocidal intent in lieu of tropes concerning the outsized Jewish thirst for vengeance in the form of disproportionate response.[6] A third is the coupling of the genocide charge with the deliberate killing of children, images of whom are ubiquitous on NGO, social media, and other platforms that charge Israel with genocide.[7] A fourth is the attribution of special powers to the Israeli government by which it and its supporters have fooled western governments into believing that Israel’s actions are legitimate and that the history of the Israeli- Arab conflict is too complex for snap judgments.[8]
A fifth, and this is what makes the genocide libel particularly dangerous, is the association of all Jews with the crime. Jews worldwide are all in on it, either as Zionist enablers, as dishonest back-room lobbyists, or as community leaders who, we are told, “weaponize” the charge of antisemitism to silence the truth-tellers.[9] Other genocide charges over time have not targeted Hutus living in Belgium or Serbs living in Germany. But the genocide libel, fueled by everything from electoral campaigns to public demonstrations to social media, drives rage against Jews throughout the world.
In North America, Europe, and Australia, antisemitic incidents have been too numerous to count, ranging from physical threats against Jews in New York City, to a pre-planned pogrom in Amsterdam, to synagogue attacks stretching from Montreal to Melbourne.[10] And as the Conseil represéntatif des institutions juives de France [CRIF] noted in a January 2025 report concerning the nearly 1,600 antisemitic acts in France the previous year, “The hammering of the false genocide accusation, and its corollary of accusing Israel’s supporters of being ‘pro-genocide,’ have helped to demonize the image of Jews in France and justify hostile . . . behavior towards them.”[11]
My aim, though, is not to discuss why the genocide charge is antisemitic. Nor is it to point to the numerous instances of mass violence in Syria, Sudan, and elsewhere for which activists can never seem to summon the outrage. Nor is it, here anyway, to dismantle the South African genocide charges against Israel from December 2023 or the subsequent ruling of the International Court of Justice that it is “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Rather my aim is to discuss some of the history of how the genocide accusation has been leveled at Israel and the Jews. By looking at the history, which began even before the genocide convention was completed, we can begin to deconstruct the charge itself, how it has been used against Israel over time, and the stunningly bad faith behind the genocide accusation.
Please read “The Genocide Libel: How the World Has Charged Israel With Genocide” in full HERE.
