https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/21/the-gaza-genocide-a-21st-century-blood-libel/
It was a grim role reversal from the very start. Almost immediately after Hamas’s genocidal massacre of Israeli Jews on 7 October 2023, accusations of genocide were levelled against Israel – long before Israel went into Gaza to defeat Hamas and liberate the hostages it took.
On 13 October, as Israelis were still reeling from the worst atrocity in their nation’s history, Raz Segal, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, wrote in Jewish Currents that Israel’s initial response – carrying out airstrikes against Hamas while evacuating civilians – was ‘a textbook case of genocide’. Barely a month after the massacre, on 16 November 2023, UN special rapporteurs issued a call to the international community ‘to prevent genocide’. Most absurd of all, South Africa brought a complaint against Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in December 2023 for a supposed violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. A year later, NGOs Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both issued reports charging Israel with genocide against Palestinians. Israel has always firmly denied these accusations, asserting that its military operations are lawful self-defence.
These constant accusations of genocide from politicians and NGOs rest on a supposed ‘scholarly consensus’ of genocide experts. In late August this year, it was widely reported that the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) had adopted a resolution categorising the war in Gaza as genocide. Less widely reported was the fact that membership of the IAGS requires no academic credentials – just payment of a $30 membership fee.
In truth, the ‘scholarly consensus’ stems from a coterie of ideologically motivated academics who have promoted an alternative theory of genocide for decades. These academics have long been known for their hostility towards Israel and what they see as an inordinate focus on the Holocaust in the field of genocide studies.
As the genocide libel continues to fuel attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions around the world, it is imperative to critique the use and abuse of this term. To do so, it’s worth looking at the work of the Journal of Genocide Research (JGR) in particular, which launched a forum in January 2024 to discuss the ‘Gaza genocide’. This forum has provided much of the intellectual fuel for the genocide accusation.
The JGR is the official publication of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INOGS). The INOGS was founded in 1999 by genocide scholars who explicitly sought to refocus the field away from the Holocaust. As Holocaust scholar Israel Charny put it in a 2016 paper, the minimisation of the Shoah has been central to the INOGS project. As Charny records, the JGR has published articles denying that the Nazis explicitly targeted Jews and arguing that the Wannsee conference, where the Nazis formulated the Final Solution, was actually developing German policy towards minorities as a whole.
The current editor of the JGR is Anthony Dirk Moses, a genocide scholar whose work, The Problems of Genocide, initiated a fierce debate in Germany in 2021 over the uniqueness of the Holocaust. As historian Verena Buser explains, Moses proposes removing the intent to destroy a group from a definition of genocide. In Moses’s view, genocide is a function of the effects of violence against civilians: ‘What difference does it make to civilian victims whether the violence against them is carried out with genocidal or military intentions?’ (1) Moses based his theory on the concept of ‘illegitimate permanent security’, in which a state’s pursuit of absolute invulnerability to threats justifies the destruction of its enemies. The idea of ‘permanent security’ is based on the line of arguments advanced by Otto Ohlendorf, SS-Gruppenführer and commander of Einsatzgruppe D, at the Nuremberg trials. Ohlendorf claimed that the Jews threatened Germany, which necessitated their complete elimination. Having murdered adult Jews, Ohlendorf argued that he could hardly have been expected to spare the children, as they would grow up to hate Germany and seek revenge. One can already see how Moses’s framework blurs the line between war, however tragic, and the deliberate destruction of a group. This sets the stage for genocide accusations against Israel.
Another central player in the INOGS is Omer Bartov, an American-Israeli Holocaust scholar. Since November 2023, he has published three articles in the New York Times, claiming that, as a scholar of genocide, ‘I know it when I see it’. While labeling Israeli actions as genocide, Bartov has said the ‘despicable attack by Hamas must be seen as an attempt to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinians’.
