Jews, the ‘genocide’ charge, and irony

Last weekend, the organisation which calls itself the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) held its annual Genocide Memorial Day, this year focusing on what it called “the genocide in Gaza.” Spurious claims that Israel is committing genocide began long before 7 October , and they intensified dramatically after Israel’s military response to Hamas’s mass‑murder attack on Israeli civilians in October 2023. Over the years, the IHRC has become known for its pro‑Iranian regime sympathies; its officers frequently appear at demonstrations carrying images of Ayatollah Khomeini.

At the event in London, around 50 attendees heard speakers including Raza Kazim of Middlesex University, who insisted that a “live‑streamed genocide” is taking place in Gaza. Another speaker, former SOAS academic Haim Bresheeth, went further. He described the situation as a “nationalised genocide,” contrasting it with the secrecy of the SS while also emphasizing the non‑Jewish victims of the Holocaust—“5.5 million other people,” as he stressed.

Because the Holocaust is invoked so readily by those accusing Israel of genocide, it is worth revisiting where the term genocide came from and what it actually means. In August 1941, while Nazi forces advanced toward Moscow and the Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews en masse, Winston Churchill addressed the nation. Without explicitly naming Jews, he referred unmistakably to their fate when he described “methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale” as unprecedented in Europe since the Mongol invasions. He concluded that the world faced “a crime without a name.”

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That name would be given by Raphael Lemkin, the Polish‑Jewish jurist who fled the Nazis and reached the United States in 1941. From exile, he watched the Nazi genocide consume nearly his entire family. Lemkin became obsessed with ensuring that this previously unnamed crime was recognised, defined, and prosecuted under international law. Perhaps his seminal work was the 1944 publication Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It was the book in which he coined the term genocide and outlined the legal criteria for identifying it.

In 1948, largely thanks to Lemkin’s tireless advocacy, the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention. In 2024, that same convention was invoked against Israel in response to its military campaign following the Hamas atrocities. It is difficult to imagine that Lemkin, who insisted on strict legal definitions and the need to carefully distinguish between civilian harm and the intentional destruction of a people, would have approved of its use here. As Lemkin wrote in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation:

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“Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”

By Lemkin’s own definition, one might ask whether his criteria apply more clearly to the intent and doctrine of Hamas than to Israel. Hamas’s charter openly calls for the killing of Jews, stating that the Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight and kill them. According to reporting by the New York Times, orders from Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar instructed Hamas terrorists to target both soldiers and civilians and to broadcast the violence to terrorize Israelis and destabilize the country. Yet despite this explicit genocidal ideology and conduct, it is Israel that stands accused of genocide by opinion formers and policy makers around the world.

Here lies the central irony: a concept created by a Jew in response to the near‑annihilation of the Jews is now routinely weaponized to accuse Jews of committing the very crime that almost destroyed them. And the irony deepens. That an organization sympathetic to the Iranian regime, a regime responsible for murdering tens of thousands of its own civilians and for helping sustain years of mass slaughter in Syria, should host a conference on genocide dedicated solely to attacking Israel, while ignoring Iran’s own record, stretches credulity.

Meanwhile, Israel remains a singular obsession. Major media outlets took more than a week to give serious attention to the popular uprising in Iran, yet accusations of Israeli genocide spread instantly across political and journalistic circles. In the court of public opinion, Israel has been declared guilty before the evidence is even weighed.

Truth appears irrelevant. And Raphael Lemkin, one suspects, would be turning in his grave.

Marc Goldberg is a British-Israeli citizen and author