by Avraham Russell Shalev, spiked
Partisan academics, politicians and journalists have concocted a myth to demonise Israel.
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.