The Endless ‘Genocide’ Lie: How The World Has Smeared Israel Since 1948

Israel has been hit with false genocide charges nonstop since virtually the day the Jewish state was reborn, and the latest barrage after the October 7 Hamas massacre of more than 1,200 Israelis is the ugliest chapter yet.

In a detailed essay, Norman J.W. Goda, professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Florida, traced how the world’s oldest and most relentless smear against the Jewish state got started and why it keeps coming back stronger.

Goda notes that accusing a country of genocide is supposed to be the ultimate stain. Plenty of countries have faced the charge over the decades, from the U.S. in Vietnam to China, Cambodia, and others.

But Israel is different. Alone among nations, it has been labeled genocidal almost continuously since its founding in 1948. The charge has always been linked to claims of racism and colonialism that took off in the 1960s. After Hamas’s October 7 massacres, the accusations exploded with unusual speed and fury, complete with attempts to stretch and lower the legal definition of genocide itself so it fits whatever Israel does in self-defense.

The tropes that come with it are pure antisemitism. Critics drag in violent passages from the Hebrew Bible to paint Jews as uniquely bloodthirsty and “chosen” at everyone else’s expense. They soft-pedal Hamas’s own open calls for Jewish destruction while fixating on images of dead Palestinian children. They invent vast Israeli powers to brainwash Western governments.

Worst of all, they tar every Jew worldwide as complicit in the false “genocide.” The result has been a global spike in attacks on Jews, from New York streets to Amsterdam pogrom to synagogues from Montreal to Melbourne. French Jewish leaders have cited the endless “genocide” accusations to the surge in antisemitic incidents.

The Genocide Convention was being drafted at the exact moment Israel was born. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term, wanted a broad definition covering cultural destruction. UN diplomats narrowed it to mean intentional physical destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. War itself, they insisted, does not equal genocide. Heavy civilian losses in combat do not either. Intent is everything.

Arab and Muslim leaders, meanwhile, were talking in apocalyptic terms about wiping out the Jews even as they tried to write their own version of the convention. Saudi Arabia floated a draft that would have classed terrorism and the “moral debasement” of a group as genocide, language that appeared aimed at Jewish underground groups like the Irgun and Lehi. Syria pushed to include forced displacement so the Palestinian refugees could qualify.

Both efforts failed. The convention stuck to physical destruction with clear intent. Historians like Benny Morris have shown there was no pre-planned Zionist policy of mass expulsion in 1948; panic, fighting, and some local expulsions produced the refugee wave. Arab states not only refused peace, they refused to resettle the refugees.

Fast-forward to 1982 and Israel’s war against the PLO in Lebanon. That conflict produced the loudest early wave of genocide charges. Communist states, Arab regimes, and the Non-Aligned Movement piled on at the UN. They inflated death tolls, trafficked in blood-and-chosen-people language, and accused Israel of Nazi-style crimes. After the Sabra and Shatilla incidents, carried out by Lebanese Christian militias, the General Assembly voted that the killings were “an act of genocide.” Legal scholars later called the resolution pure politics, not law. A private MacBride Commission, stacked against Israel, openly admitted it was using a “different form of genocide” that included destroying Palestinian “national will.” Serious law journals ignored the report, but Palestine-focused outlets ate it up.

The modern version of the charge got its theoretical upgrade in the 1990s and 2000s. People like Patrick Wolfe redefined genocide as an ongoing “structure” of elimination rather than a specific crime requiring intent and mass killing. Time, place, and even death itself become optional.

The Holocaust has been treated as an inconvenient distraction. Herzl’s writings have been misquoted. Biblical stories of Amalek and the Canaanites are weaponized as the original sin. Netanyahu’s 2023 reference to Amalek was instantly treated as a confession of genocidal intent, despite the fact that he also told civilians to move to safer areas and has used the same language about Iran.

In Gaza, the “slow genocide” narrative took off with the post-2007 blockade aimed at stopping Hamas weapons smuggling. Activists and figures like Richard Falk labeled restrictions a “holocaust in the making.” Population growth continued. Food crises never matched the rhetoric.

After the 2008-09 and 2014 Gaza wars, UN-linked investigators and the revived Russell Tribunal flirted with the genocide label but usually stopped short of formal findings until after October 7. UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, Amnesty International, and others used the structural theory to stitch 1948 to today into one continuous crime. Social media and the slogan “It’s not complicated. It’s genocide” do the rest, shutting down any talk of Hamas’s charter, human shields, October 7, or the actual text of the Genocide Convention.

Goda is clear in his essay: this is lawfare dressed up as moral clarity. It is designed to put Israel and its supporters outside the bounds of civilized debate.

The Gaza war will eventually end.

The propaganda will not.

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