The Genocide Lie

In today’s debate over Israel, hatred wears the mask of justice. Scroll, march, or listen on campus—everywhere, the same word appears in red: genocide.

This idea is not only false; it is obscene. To call Israel’s war against Hamas a genocide is to empty that term of all moral meaning. It weaponizes history’s most serious crime against the very people who suffered it. The word, once a solemn warning to humanity, has become a slogan—a way to invert victim and aggressor, to make Jewish self-defense itself the ultimate sin.

Under international law, genocide requires a specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Nothing that has occurred in Gaza meets that standard. The facts point in precisely the opposite direction.

Israel did not begin this war; Hamas did, with the mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of more than 1,200 civilians on October 7, 2023. The war’s objective was immediately clear: to dismantle a terrorist army and to free the hostages it took. The fighting ended as soon as those hostages were returned. If the aim were extermination, the killing would have continued. The logic of the war itself refutes the charge.

A genocidal state does not drop leaflets warning civilians to evacuate. It does not open humanitarian corridors or pause operations for aid and prisoner exchanges. It does not call on its enemy to surrender in order to save lives. These are not the acts of a nation seeking to destroy a people, but of one struggling—however imperfectly—to uphold its humanity, its humanity while defending its existence.

And yet the word persists. On campuses, in marches, and across digital platforms, genocide has become a ritual incantation: a way to brand Jews as monsters and to invert the meaning of justice itself. The people who shout it loudest rarely cite the Genocide Convention or engage with evidence. The accusation is not analytical; it is irrational. It implies that Jewish survival, rather than Jewish destruction, is the crime.

Psychologist Steven Pinker recently called this language what it is: a blood libel. “The application of the word genocide to refer to tens of thousands of war deaths,” he wrote, “is a kind of blood libel… It really is a terrible blood libel, and it’s a sign of how people’s moralizing in the service of demonizing and dichotomizing can flatten their ability to think clearly.”

Pinker’s point is devastating because it recalls an older pattern of hate. In medieval Europe, Jews were accused of murdering Christian children and poisoning wells. In modern times, they were blamed for capitalism and communism alike. Now, the same impulse reappears in progressive dress: Jews are accused of genocide, of mass killing by nature or creed. Only the vocabulary has changed; the logic of moral inversion remains the same.

To insist on the genocide label despite the evidence is to cross a moral line. It transforms legitimate criticism of Israel’s conduct into a collective indictment of Jewish existence. It suggests that people defending themselves from annihilation are themselves the annihilators. That inversion is antisemitism, pure and simple.

True moral clarity demands precision. In Rwanda, entire villages were slaughtered with machetes. In Bosnia, civilians were executed en masse. In China, Uyghurs are subjected to forced sterilization and cultural erasure. These are genocides. To equate them with Israel’s defensive war against a terrorist regime cheapens the very word and desecrates the memory of real victims.

Even critics of Israeli policy should see the danger here. When every conflict becomes a genocide, the term loses its power to rally conscience when it is truly needed. The moral inflation of language produces numbness. It teaches students and citizens alike that all violence is equal, all grievance is sacred, and all restraint is hypocrisy. The result is cynicism, not compassion.

Language matters. When genocide becomes a slogan, not a legal category; when “resistance” replaces murder; when victimhood and villainy trade places—our ability to reason collapses. The purpose of moral vocabulary is to distinguish, not to blur. Without distinction, justice becomes vengeance dressed in moral rhetoric.

There is no genocide in Gaza. There is a tragic, ugly, and deeply human war—a war that began with terror, continued for the sake of hostages, and paused the moment they came home. That fact alone reveals the truth: Israel’s goal was not destruction but deliverance.

To call that genocide is not justice. It is a lie. And, like all lies told about the Jews, it poisons the moral life of everyone who repeats it.

The world’s obligation is not to cheapen the word “genocide” but to preserve it, to keep it sacred for the moments when it must name true evil. To do otherwise is to betray both history and conscience.

Samuel J. Abrams is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on questions of related civic and political culture and American ideologies. He is concurrently a professor of politics and social science at Sarah Lawrence College, and a faculty fellow with New York University’s Center for Advanced Social Science Research.

Reprinted with permission from AEI.org by Samuel J. Abrams.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.