There are too many excellent points to note in University of Florida Professor of Holocaust Studies Norman JW Goda’s masterful essay in The Telegraph, “How ‘genocide’ lost all its meaning.” But the central arguments are:
- “Genocide” has been stripped of its precise legal meaning in the Gaza debate. Historically, genocide requires proof of specific intent to destroy a protected group, not simply mass casualties, destruction or even serious violations of the laws of war.
- He says the genocide charge against Israel has become a political tool rather than a rigorously proven legal conclusion. He accuses activists, NGOs and some scholars of cherry-picking evidence, redefining genocide through ideological frameworks and using the accusation to delegitimize Israel and invert the historical legacy of the Holocaust.
Here are some excerpts:
Yet there is a new and notable self-assurance with which Israel is accused today of genocide, and has been since 2023. It comes from ceaseless allegations – at teach-ins, on talk shows and social media – which echo the carefully constructed illusion of authority that “genocide experts”, many of whom are not experts at all, are in consensus on the matter. In fact, the “consensus”, though noisy, never existed.
The intensity also comes from a misrepresentation of Israeli military operations together with a deliberate untethering of genocide from its legal definition to one created by the academic obsession with settler colonial theory – a social-justice-driven understanding of European settlement that ostensibly creates a long-term, white-supremacist genocidal structure which steadily eliminates indigenous peoples. As Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories and the troubadour of genocide accusations against Israel, puts it: “The current genocide is part of a century-long project of eliminatory settler-colonialism in Palestine.”
Albanese’s harangues show that anyone can allege anything. Indeed, one of the chief advantages of endlessly repeating accusations while leaning on the slender reeds of settler-colonial theory is that facts can be displaced by righteous rhetoric. In Israel’s case, allegations of Western settler colonialism erase Jewish indigeneity to the region, ignore that the descendants of Middle Eastern Jewish people who fled Arab countries after 1948 comprise up to half of Israel’s population, and delete that Zionist leaders accepted the 1947 UN partition resolution (and other peace initiatives) while Arab leaders rejected them.
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It is possible to cobble together a more legalistic genocide accusation in similar bad faith. One can ignore that Hamas fights among the Palestinian civilian population and that it uses mosques, schools, and hospitals for everything from arms depots to headquarters. One can dismiss Israeli efforts at civilian harm mitigation. One can imagine, as a reenactment of medieval blood libels, that Israel targets children (and even embryos) rather than armed fighters. One can maintain that the destruction of buildings in Gaza has nothing to do with the fortified tunnels beneath them or the booby-traps within them. One can insist that Israel somehow intended to cause a famine by allowing 2,174,489 tons of aid into Gaza between October 2023 and today. And one can imagine that Israeli efforts to spare civilians are all part of a vast scheme called “humanitarian camouflage”, by which Israel commits genocide beneath a faux canopy of lawfulness. Or one can simply pretend that Gaza is the Warsaw Ghetto.
The problem with all this is that genocide is defined not by proclamation, but by international statute and that ultimately, proof is required to render accusations into adjudicated crimes. The text of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention took two years to write. It received a unanimous affirmative vote in the UN General Assembly, and it has been ratified by 154 states, all of whom presumably read the text before signing. Briefly put, genocide is defined by one or more of five defined acts, headed by killing, “committed with intent to destroy” an ethnic, national, or religious group in whole or in part. The criterion is physical and biological destruction. UN debates between 1946 and 1948 reveal awareness that the definition was imperfect. There were concerns, legitimate as it turned out, that a looser definition could open the door to politically inspired accusations.
This piece deserves to be seen beyond The Telegraph’s subscribers. Which is why we’ve gifted it to you here.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
