Fighting the Genocide Libel – Two Years After October 7

Two years ago – it seems unbelievable to say – Hamas terrorists and civilians from Gaza launched a mass attack on land which has always been Israel. Hopped-up on the Syrian-made drug Captagon, several thousand Hamas Qassam Brigade members broke the ceasefire in force and went on a trail of rampage. At the end of the day over 1100 Israelis were dead, and about 250 taken hostage – by private individuals and Hamas.

However, two years later, it seems clear that the familiar tactics of Hamas – murdering and taking hostages – were only the beginning of the plan. The next stage of the plan was to label Israel’s response as genocide, whatever it would be. The fact such a charge would prove nonsensical from a legal and moral perspective would prove only mildly inconvenient for many.

Israel’s reaction to the October 7 attacks was intense, as the attack’s planners surely realized it would be. The damage, both to Hamas and civilians, was tremendous, and the cameras were ready. Where things were not real they were staged, but there was real death and suffering for Hamas and, sadly, for civilians. And as of this writing there are still Israeli hostages in a subterranean hell built with materials and funds meant to improve the infrastructure and lives of the residents of Gaza but which were stolen and instead were mostly funneled to the construction of a massive underground military complex. The usage of hospitals and schools by Hamas as launch points for rockets and military strongholds has been known for decades, and Hamas continued that practice as expected.

The legal response of Hamas and its sponsors was next. Public international law prohibits the standard Hamas practice of using hospitals and schools as launch points for rockets and military strongholds, and permits strikes on civilian institutions – including hospitals and schools – if they are being used for military purposes. This complicates claims that Israel’s response was a war crime when Hamas was obviously engaged in war crimes on a mass scale. However, this was not their plan. Their plan from the morning of October 7 was to label the Israeli response a genocide.

The Genocide Convention of 1948 was the first human rights treaty adopted by the UN, and was directly crafted in the wake of the largest genocide in recent memory, of which Jews had been the primary victims. Unsurprisingly, the Jewish state, which had only recently been declared, and which had just won a war of independence against an enemy whose aims had been explicitly genocidal, signed. Israel has not signed other international human rights treaties since, understanding that international bodies were increasingly under the sway of undemocratic actors and were active participants in an organized campaign of lawfare against Israel. The war crimes of Hamas, including taking hostages, using facilities of international relief organizations and civilians as cover, and taking all measures necessary to prolong Israel’s response and increase human suffering, were not just standard-issue barbarism. They were an intentional effort to prolong the conflict to mount a case.

The term “genocide” was being applied to Israel’s response extremely early by individuals who would call Israel whatever they could, but it got a patina of legitimacy less than three months after the October 7 attacks, when South Africa commenced proceedings against Israel for violation of the Genocide Convention, in an 84-page document purporting to lay out a case which surely was in the works for some time. To call South Africa’s prosecution of an action against Israel for genocide a cynical perversion of the genocide treaty is a gross understatement. It is simply nonsensical to argue that Israel’s attempts to destroy the terrorist group Hamas constitute “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group,” as the Genocide Convention requires.

As the conflict has continued arguments proffered for genocide have shifted – an argument was made for starvation more recently – once again particularly perverse as Israel was trying to deliver food aid without involving Hamas proxies. Perhaps simply refusing to embrace the existence of a genocidal death cult like Hamas is a form of genocide under this logic? Clearly the flawed comparison of Israel’s policies to “apartheid” had insufficient teeth so an even grosser misrepresentation was needed.

There are allegations – at this point unproven – that the nearly bankrupt governing party in South Africa had received a huge financial stimulus from Iran shortly before the action was brought. And this is not just a bit of trivia, it’s the key to understanding what scholars are increasingly calling the “genocide libel.” The genocide libel is a sophisticated invention, combining ancient hatreds with modern lawfare. The fact that it is legally nonsensical isn’t terribly important to those who are pushing it. As long as you tell a lie enough times, people start to believe it or at least equivocate.

And it’s worth asking: why genocide? It’s such a ill-fitting description of even the worst case of what Israel has done. And this gets to the ultimate goal of the operation and the darkness at its heart. The goal is to erase Israel, and for decades Iran in particular has seen the Holocaust as central to Israel’s justification and existence. For this reason Iran has attempted Holocaust denial in various forms for decades with this in mind, including repeated international conferences to minimal success. Likewise, attempts to equate the suffering of Palestinians in the formation of the Israeli state to the holocaust have mostly fallen flat. But if you redefine genocide into simply civilians being collateral damage in a military conflict you’ve done several things, all of which Iran views as central to their mission to eliminate Israel and its Jewish population by any means necessary. Suddenly in the eyes of many, Israelis are not the victims of a genocide; they are the perpetrators of one. Even beyond this, though, the Holocaust is reduced by analogy to the destruction in Gaza. One would have to be a moral idiot to think the death of 60,000, many of them fighters, is worth comparing or mentioning in the same breath as the industrial murder of 6,000,000 based on ethnicity, but simply labelling both as “genocide” allows people to avoid that realization.

And Hamas and their Iranian allies too have been surprisingly effective in convincing a segment of the world that this is the case. They’ve carefully brigaded various internet sites including X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and Reddit, helped by both Qatari money and media sources including the Qatari state television network Al Jazeera. Not only have they successfully infiltrated a certain segment of the left, in the past year right-wing influencers have sprung up with a speed that can only be called artificial to parrot the talking points of Qatar and Iran. This electronic assault has drawn in decent people of good conscience who don’t have the time or background to understand that the genocide claims are a farce, let alone that the actual genocidal goal is Iran and Hamas’s goal of removing the Jews from the region. Two years after October 7 the genocide libel is among the greatest dangers Israel faces, and it is a directly planned continuation of the actions taken by Hamas on that day.

Two years after that terrible day, we can hope for the return of the remaining hostages as soon as possible, and as of the writing there seems to be more chance than there has been in a while of that happening. However, the genocide libel is now believed by millions of people, and undoing it is a task which needs to be taken seriously.