What’s been most shocking over the last nearly three years, since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, has been the willingness of people in positions of power and responsibility to accept and repeat obviously untrue claims about Israel and Jews. Now, at least the worst of those, the libel that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, is having one leg after another kicked out from under it.
The claim that the International Court of Justice (which, in fact, is not even a court at all) found it “plausible” that Israel was committing genocide was debunked by its own retiring president, Joan Donoghue. This followed credible allegations by the legal NGO Shurat HaDin that South Africa’s ruling party, which had brought the claims at the ICJ, had done so in exchange for bribes from Iran. To underscore the frivolous nature of the case, South Africa just sought and received an extended briefing schedule that will delay it until 2029.
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The “International Association of Genocide Scholars” was revealed to be a sham membership organization that “anyone with a credit card can join” and then “participate in [its] decision-making process.” Its resolution that Israel was committing genocide was based on a vote of only 129 out of 500 members, taken “without any debate.”
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Even the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, compromised by Qatar as he may be, has now said twice that the evidence against Israel cannot support a claim of genocide.
Yet, the calumny persists, even among those who should be more responsible with their words, such as Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD).
In medieval and early modern Europe, the absurdly false claim that Jews murder Christian children for their blood was so widely believed that it made its way into writings by Chaucer and Martin Luther. In one well-known case in Trent, Italy, in 1475, an “entire Jewish community was arrested and forced to confess under torture [for the ritual murder of a 2-year-old boy] before they were sentenced to death and burned at the stake.” The belief persisted in Europe into the 20th century. But the fact that a belief is widely held, even promoted by the elites of society, doesn’t make it true.
Today, rational people correctly regard the medieval blood libel claim as absurd, and those who expound it as raving lunatics. Yet, the genocide libel against the Jewish state is nothing more than a revised version of it. A fact-free accusation that babies and children are being intentionally harmed has the same emotional resonance today as ever.
Without the archetypal memory of the ritual murder charge, it’s not likely that the modern genocide libel would have caught on at all. As one scholar has pointed out, “during the Cold War, the [genocide] charge was leveled dozens of times by government officials, legal scholars, and activists against France, Portugal, Nigeria, China, Cambodia, the US, and other states.” Only in the case of the Jewish state has such a false accusation gained traction.
The “Gaza genocide” is a libel that was made up for the purpose of justifying attacks against Jews. It percolated even prior to the Israel-Hamas War and has gained the ring of truth merely through frequent repetition. In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attempted genocide, the claim that the victims of that attack were actually perpetrating a genocide picked up steam on college campuses and in left wing publications like the Nation. Eventually, it made its way to the pages of the Washington Post and the halls of Congress, even as actual experts pointed out that Israel’s actions failed to meet the definition of “genocide” under international law.
Those who claim to oppose this made-up genocide are, wittingly or unwittingly, promoting antisemitism as much as those who oppose using the blood of gentile babies in matzah — the only reason to “oppose” something that is not happening is to promote the false claim. Jews are being taunted now with a fabricated crime, and it’s used to justify violence against us or pushing us out of civic life. Jews who are attached to Israel as a matter of religion or identity should not have to continue to argue this point as a condition of participation in society, any more than we should have to prove that we don’t drink baby’s blood, don’t control the weather, and don’t have space lasers.
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The genocide libel should be treated as the wild conspiracy theory that it is, and not a matter that is subject to debate. It’s detached from reality. People who promote it should not be taken any more seriously than those who profess a belief that the Earth is flat or that the moon landing was faked.
It’s time to finally move on from this baseless and bigoted canard.
Karen Bekker is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Truth About Israel (FTIsrael.org), a new organization headed by Andrea Levin, dedicated to combating false information about Israel and the Jewish people.
