Joe Oliver: The lie that Israel’s committing ‘genocide’ is fuelling antisemitism

A protesters wears a sticker reading "Gaza = Genocide Boycott Israel," in Venice in 2025. Photo by TIZIANA FABI/AFP

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The false accusation that Israel is guilty of genocide for its actions in Gaza has been repeated so often that it has become normalized in the media, academia, politics and civil society. Yet it is a mendacious blood libel that inverts the truth by absolving those who seek to wipe out Israel, for the cynical purpose of delegitimizing the world’s only Jewish state, a refuge for Holocaust survivors, and threatening diaspora Jews. Furthermore, it does a disservice to actual genocides that have been committed around the world.

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The authoritative legal definition of genocide is set out in Article II of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defines genocide as specified acts committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

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Genocide requires the specific intention to destroy the protected group, rather than an intent to defeat an enemy, seize territory, displace a population or even conduct military operations with reckless disregard for civilian life.

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That distinction is crucial, or the allied bombing of German cities during the Second World War and the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would mean the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia were guilty of genocide.

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Israel’s war is not against Gazans but Hamas, itself a genocidal terrorist organization whose overarching mission is to eliminate the State of Israel, which it tried to do on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering, burning, raping and torturing 1,200 men, women, children, infants and disabled people and taking 251 hostages, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

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No other country in the world would fail to respond to such an attack, do everything to recover its hostages and destroy the enemy who vowed to attack it again and again. Ironically, no other country would be subject to the opprobrium Israel has endured for doing so, including from countries that claim to recognize its right to defend itself.

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Uniquely, Israel warned enemy civilians about bombings (thereby telegraphing its plans to the enemy) and provided food, humanitarian aid, humanitarian corridors and delayed ground operations to allow the population to move.

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Protecting civilians in this type of urban warfare environment is especially difficult given Hamas’s calculated use of civilians as human shields, including urging them not to respond to Israeli warnings, and the extensive tunnel system that non-combatants were barred from using.

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This does not suggest that civilians did not suffer — they did, some terribly. Nor does it imply that people cannot have different opinions about Israel’s conduct during the war, although criticism should be comparable to how other countries are held to account. However, Israel’s defensive war did not, by any objective measure, constitute genocide in action, intent or result.