Global campaign launched to counter claims of Israeli genocide in Gaza

A Toronto pedestrian walks past signage stating "End The Genocide In Gaza" as a truck with digital displays of the Israeli citizens taken hostage by Hamas terrorists with signage stating "Bring Them Home" drives by back in November 2023. (Photo Peter J. Thompson/National Post)

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More than 35 organizations from around the world have joined together in a campaign aiming to debunk “Hamas genocidal propaganda” about the Gaza war.

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International Legal Forum CEO Michal Cotler-Wunsh says Hamas’s claim threatens foundational principles of law by hijacking the term genocide to spread what she calls “a modern blood libel,” accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinian people.

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Other organizations involved in the “Gaza GenoLIE” campaign include the American-based Anti-Defamation League, the International Legal Forum, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the World Jewish Congress.

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“The term ‘genocide,’ along with other international legal terms, has been deliberately and systematically hijacked, redefined, inverted, and weaponized to demonize, delegitimize, and apply double standards to ‘the Jew’ among nations,” Cotler-Wunsh said in a statement. “This well-orchestrated campaign to spread a modern blood libel accusing Israel of ‘genocide’ began before any Israeli response to Hamas’ genocidal war crimes and crimes against humanity of October 7.”

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The GenoLIE website asserts that the genocide claims began on Oct. 8, 2023, the day after Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians. The word genocide was already in wide use, even though Israel’s ground operation did not begin until Oct. 27.

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Amnesty International, certain UN bodies and other international groups have found there is evidence Israel committed genocide during the Gaza War. But Israel insists such investigations are fatally biased, and that the nation has done all it can to limit civilian casualties in a war in which the enemy hides behind its civilian population.

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Israel acknowledges more than 70,000 people have died in the war. Gaza’s population was about two million prior to the war.

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The Gaza GenoLIE website says it is an educational initiative about the “generated and orchestrated genocide lie promoted by anti-Zionists and antisemitic networks in the U.S., Europe and around the world.”

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Genocide was defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention, drafted after the Holocaust. Under Article II, genocide refers to certain acts, such as killing, causing serious harm, inflicting destructive conditions of life, committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

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The GenoLIE campaign argues the most crucial element is the word “intent,” noting that the convention does not merely ask whether people died, or whether they died in large numbers, it asks whether the perpetrator acted with the specific purpose of destroying a protected group because of its membership in that group.

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The groups argue that Israel waged war to dismantle Hamas and secure the release of the hostages, and the civilian death toll was a consequence of urban combat against an enemy that “purposely and cynically embed(ed) itself” among its own population.