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Combating the Lie of Israeli ‘Genocide’ and ‘Ethnic Cleansing’
Ione Belarra, a far left minister in the Spanish government, has accused Israel of committing “genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza. Photo: Reuters/David Canales
No single element of “pro-Palestine” propaganda has gained as much traction as the charge that Israel is carrying out a genocide against Palestinians. The accusation predates October 7, but it has become a staple at anti-Israel demonstrations everywhere; protesters are also pronouncing the Biden administration complicit in genocide for supporting Israel. In November, a group of Palestinians even sued the Biden administration for genocide.
Not content with fabricating and perpetuating the charge that Israel is an apartheid state, South Africa’s ANC Party ramped up its hostilities against the Jewish state on December 29, 2023, when it filed charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). On January 26, 2024, the ICJ refused to throw out the case.
Considering Germany’s history, its objection that “This accusation has no basis whatsoever” should hold special significance to the ICJ.
Berlin’s statement that it “firmly and expressly rejects the accusation of genocide that has now been made against Israel,” also acknowledged South Africa’s “political instrumentalization” of the term.
There is no shortage of academics who bolster these claims. A professor of genocide studies named Raz Segal argues that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute “a textbook case of genocide.” A “historian of genocide” named Omer Bartov warns that while the Netanyahu government hasn’t yet committed genocide, it has shown “genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action.”
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, argued recently that Israelis “see Palestine as the Promised Land, which belongs to them, but this does not mean that they can destroy the Palestinian people.” She also claims that “in the name of self-defense Israel is seeking to justify what would amount to ethnic cleansing.”
The problem for South Africa, the UN, and many academics is that neither the genocide accusation, nor its brother, the ethnic cleansing accusation, stand up to scrutiny.
The word “genocide” was coined by Rafael Lemkin in 1944, when he combined the Greek word geno (race or tribe) with the Latin suffix -cide (from caedere, kill), to denote Nazi Germany’s systematic attempt to kill all Jews and thereby destroy an entire people.
In 1948, the UN approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, defining Lemkin’s neologism as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” In addition to mass murder, other indicators of genocide and ethnic cleansing are “measures intended to prevent births” such as forced sterilization, and “transferring children.”
Accusing Israel of genocide is part of a strategy called Holocaust inversion, whereby Israeli counter-terrorism measures directed against Palestinian terrorist organizations are compared to the crimes committed by Nazi Germany.
Thankfully, most people see through the hyperbole and distortion. Biden’s National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, called South Africa’s case against Israel “meritless, counterproductive, and without any basis in fact whatsoever.”
The ICJ case even united 210 members of the US Congress to “vigorously denounce South Africa’s deeply hostile stance towards Israel and thoroughly reject its charge of genocide.”
No data supports the charge of “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide” against Israel. On the contrary, the Palestinian population has grown steadily since 1948, sometimes remarkably so. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) itself acknowledges that the “Palestinian population has increased 8-fold since the [1948] Nakba.”
This is not what a genocide looks like.
In 2016, the United Nations warned that “rapid growth in the Palestinian population” that it had documented would soon create a “crisis in unemployment” and “a strained infrastructure.”
In 2022, the Arab News reported that “the high growth rate among Palestinians” will “cause concern for Israel.”
This is not how ethnic cleansing works.
Non-Jewish citizens of Israel are treated exactly the same as Jewish citizens by the government, and no one is trying to prevent them from having babies. Arab Muslim citizens of Israel work the same jobs as Jewish citizens. Many volunteer to serve in the IDF, though they are not required to do so. There are Arab Muslim members of the Knesset and the Supreme Court.
The irony of the absurd claim is that Hamas (along with most of the Palestinian “resistance”) harbors verifiably genocidal intent towards Jews.
The Hamas charter states clearly that “Israel will exist and continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently noted that Israel’s enemies “continue to openly call for the annihilation of Israel and the mass murder of Jews.”
Israel’s enemies have long openly called for the annihilation of the Jewish state and the mass murder of Jews.
The so-called “founder of the Palestinian national movement,” Haj Amin al-Hussaini, invited Hitler to expand his “final solution” to the Middle East. As the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1937, he commanded all his “Muslim brothers” in a Proclamation to the Islamic World: “Do not rest until your land is free of the Jews.”
On October 11, 1947, less than six weeks before the UN Partition vote on Israel, the first-ever Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, threatened “a war of extermination and momentous massacre” should there be a Jewish state established “in Palestine.”
Pasha, whose real name was Abdul Rahman Azzam, also gave a hint of the long strategy to come: “The Arab is superior to the Jew in that he accepts defeat with a smile: Should the Jews defeat us in the first battle, we will defeat them in the second or the third battle … or the final one… whereas one defeat will shatter the Jew’s morale!”
When given the opportunity, the enemies of Israel have followed through with their threats. Amos Oz, who lived through the 1948 War of Independence, wrote in his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2003), that during the war, “Arabs implemented a more complete ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the territories they conquered than the Jews did … The settlements were obliterated, and the synagogues and cemeteries were razed to the ground.”
Even the Palestinian leadership doesn’t believe its own propaganda. Consider the case of Saeb Erekat, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and senior PLO negotiator, who himself charged Israel with genocide. When Erekat was gravely ill in October 2020, he chose to be treated in an Israeli hospital. Would he have done so if he truly believed Israel was guilty of genocide against his people? I doubt it.
Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) Senior Fellow A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Ginsberg-Milstein fellow. A version of this article was originally published by IPT.
The post Combating the Lie of Israeli ‘Genocide’ and ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Security Warning to Israelis Vacationing Abroad Ahead of holidays
A passenger arrives to a terminal at Ben Gurion international airport before Israel bans international flights, January 25, 2021. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
i24 News – Ahead of the Jewish High Holidays, Israel’s National Security Council (NSC) published the latest threat assessment to Israelis abroad from terrorist groups to the public on Sunday, in order to increase the Israeli public’s awareness of the existing terrorist threats around the world and encourage individuals to take preventive action accordingly.
The NSC specified that the warning is an up-to-date reflection of the main trends in the activities of terrorist groups around the world and their impact on the level of threat posed to Israelis abroad during these times, but the travel warnings and restrictions themselves are not new.
“As the Gaza war continues and in parallel with the increasing threat of terrorism, the National Security Headquarters stated it has recognized a trend of worsening and increasing violent antisemitic incidents and escalating steps by anti-Israel groups, to the point of physically harming Israelis and Jews abroad. This is in light of, among other things, the anti-Israel narrative and the negative media campaign by pro-Palestinian elements — a trend that may encourage and motivate extremist elements to carry out terrorist activities against Israelis or Jews abroad,” the statement read.
“Therefore, the National Security Bureau is reinforcing its recommendation to the Israeli public to act with responsibility during this time when traveling abroad, to check the status of the National Security Bureau’s travel warnings (before purchasing tickets to the destination,) and to act in accordance with the travel warning recommendations and the level of risk in the country they are visiting,” it listed, adding that, as illustrated in the past year, these warnings are well-founded and reflect a tangible and valid threat potential.
The statement also emphasized the risk of sharing content on social media networks indicating current or past service in the Israeli security forces, as these posts increase the risk of being marked by various parties as a target. “Therefore, the National Security Council recommends that you do not upload to social networks, in any way, content that indicates service in the security forces, operational activity, or similar content, as well as real-time locations.”
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Israel Intensifies Gaza City Bombing as Rubio Arrives
Displaced Palestinians, fleeing northern Gaza due to an Israeli military operation, move southward after Israeli forces ordered residents of Gaza City to evacuate to the south, in the central Gaza Strip September 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
Israeli forces destroyed at least 30 residential buildings in Gaza City and forced thousands of people from their homes, Palestinian officials said, as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived on Sunday to discuss the future of the conflict.
Israel has said it plans to seize the city, where about a million Palestinians have been sheltering, as part of its declared aim of eliminating the terrorist group Hamas, and has intensified attacks on what it has called Hamas’ last bastion.
The group’s political leadership, which has engaged in on-and-off negotiations on a possible ceasefire and hostage release deal, was targeted by Israel in an airstrike in Doha on Tuesday in an attack that drew widespread condemnation.
Qatar will host an emergency Arab-Islamic summit on Monday to discuss the next moves. Rubio said Washington wanted to talk about how to free the 48 hostages – of whom 20 are believed to be still alive – still held by Hamas in Gaza and rebuild the coastal strip.
“What’s happened, has happened,” he said. “We’re gonna meet with them (the Israeli leadership). We’re gonna talk about what the future holds,” Rubio said before heading to Israel where he will stay until Tuesday.
ABRAHAM ACCORDS AT RISK
He was expected to visit the Western Wall Jewish prayer site in Jerusalem on Sunday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hold talks with him during the visit.
US officials described Tuesday’s strike on the territory of a close US ally as a unilateral escalation that did not serve American or Israeli interests. Rubio and US President Donald Trump both met Qatar’s Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani on Friday.
Netanyahu signed an agreement on Thursday to push ahead with a settlement expansion plan that would cut across West Bank land that the Palestinians seek for a state – a move the United Arab Emirates warned would undermine the US-brokered Abraham accords that normalized UAE relations with Israel.
Israel, which blocked all food from entering Gaza for 11 weeks earlier this year, has been allowing more aid into the enclave since late July to prevent further food shortages, though the United Nations says far more is needed.
It says it wants civilians to leave Gaza City before it sends more ground forces in. Tens of thousands of people are estimated to have left but hundreds of thousands remain in the area. Hamas has called on people not to leave.
Israeli army forces have been operating inside at least four eastern suburbs for weeks, turning most of at least three of them into wastelands. It is closing in on the center and the western areas of the territory, where most of the displaced people are taking shelter.
Many are reluctant to leave, saying there is not enough space or safety in the south, where Israel has told them to go to what it has designated as a humanitarian zone.
Some say they cannot afford to leave while others say they were hoping the Arab leaders meeting on Monday in Qatar would pressure Israel to scrap its planned offensive.
“The bombardment intensified everywhere and we took down the tents, more than twenty families, we do not know where to go,” said Musbah Al-Kafarna, displaced in Gaza City.
Israel said it had completed five waves of air strikes on Gaza City over the past week, targeting more than 500 sites, including Hamas reconnaissance and sniper sites, buildings containing tunnel openings and weapons depots.
Local officials, who do not distinguish between militant and civilian casualties, say at least 40 people were killed by Israeli fire across the enclave, a least 28 in Gaza City alone.
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Turkey Warns of Escalation as Israel Expands Strikes Beyond Gaza
Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a press conference with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis (not seen) at the Presidential Palace in Ankara, Turkey, May 13, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas
i24 News – An Israeli strike targeting Hamas officials in Qatar has sparked unease among several Middle Eastern countries that host leaders of the group, with Turkey among the most alarmed.
Officials in Ankara are increasingly worried about how far Israel might go in pursuing those it holds responsible for the October 7 attacks.
Israel’s prime minister effectively acknowledged that the Qatar operation failed to eliminate the Hamas leadership, while stressing the broader point the strike was meant to make: “They enjoy no immunity,” the government said.
On X, Prime Minister Netanyahu went further, writing that “the elimination of Hamas leaders would put an end to the war.”
A senior Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity, summed up Ankara’s reaction: “The attack in Qatar showed that the Israeli government is ready to do anything.”
Legally and diplomatically, Turkey occupies a delicate position. As a NATO member, any military operation or targeted killing on its soil could inflame tensions within the alliance and challenge mutual security commitments.
Analysts caution, however, that Israel could opt for covert measures, operations carried out without public acknowledgement, a prospect that has increased anxiety in governments across the region.
Israeli officials remain defiant. In an interview with Ynet, Minister Ze’ev Elkin said: “As long as we have not stopped them, we will pursue them everywhere in the world and settle our accounts with them.” The episode underscores growing fears that efforts to hunt Hamas figures beyond Gaza could widen regional friction and complicate diplomatic relationships.