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Tragically, ‘genocide’ has become a meaningless word
One of the hallmarks of our degraded political discourse is the abuse of language. Consider some of the words that have either been drained of meaning or coined in order to mislead: terrorist, racist, fascist, anti-fascist, woke, grooming — and lately, in some cases, antisemitism.
And now, sadly: genocide.
Coined in 1944 to refer to the most heinous of crimes against humanity, the term ‘genocide’ has now become a meaningless shibboleth, a touchstone for virtue-signaling by the Right and Left.
And worst of all, some of Israel’s defenders are now joining in the degradation.
Israel’s critics started it. Israel’s military response to the atrocities of Oct. 7 had barely begun when critics began labeling it a genocide. On Oct. 20, 2023 — just a week into the war — I wrote in this publication that “if ‘genocide’ means any horrible action by one group against another, then it loses its specific moral and legal meaning. It becomes just another word that partisans use against one another.”
That didn’t win me any friends on the Left, but it was true.
But Israel’s tactics and statements of intent changed as the war dragged on. In May 2025, I wrote that Israel’s post-ceasefire tactics, including mass starvation and ‘sociocide’ (the destruction of a society’s physical and social infrastructure), and numerous statements from Israeli politicians in favor of ethnic cleansing, would likely qualify as genocide under the legal definition.
That didn’t win me any friends on the Right or the Center, but it was also true.
In both cases, the question was not whether one supported or opposed Israel’s actions or the suffering of innocent Palestinians. It was whether Israel’s actions were “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
There was almost no evidence of that in October 2023. There was a lot more evidence of it in May 2025. But it is still an open question, one that should be settled in courts of law.
Recently, however, it has become a litmus test. At political events, Democratic candidates are being asked to raise their hands if they think Israel’s actions in Gaza are genocide or not. Yes or No, those are the only choices available. Not “maybe — it has not been decided in court” or “there is evidence on both sides.” Just up or down. Indeed, the candidates are often not even allowed to speak.
And in progressive spaces, if you don’t raise your hand, you’re out.
This is a spectacular display of the ignorance of the mob. Imagine a forum in which candidates are asked to opine on whether someone has committed second-degree murder or manslaughter, or what the correct ratio of contributory negligence is in a multi-party tort action, or the appropriate emissions levels for sulfur dioxide pursuant to the Clean Air Act. That would be preposterous; these are complex legal questions that require careful deliberation based on the meanings of the statutes in question and the evidence presented on both sides.
Like it or not, the crime of genocide is the same.
The Netanyahu government’s actions in Gaza were, in my view, unambiguously horrifying. At least 70,000 lives were lost. Cities were destroyed; 80% of homes and 70% of farmlands as well. War crimes and crimes against humanity appear to have been committed many times over. It is extremely hard to justify the magnitude of the military action with reference to legitimate military objectives. And, particularly in 2025, several Israeli leaders made statements that would satisfy the ‘intent’ prong of the Genocide Convention if they were deemed to be speaking on behalf of the Israeli government. Even worse, polls from mid-2025 showed that 82% of Jewish Israelis support expelling all Palestinians from Gaza under threat of violence, which constitutes genocide under the legal definition.
But establishing whether that evidence is sufficient to conclude that genocide has taken place is a job of the International Criminal Court (for states) or International Court of Justice (for individuals), not a politician raising their hand at a campaign event.
And now, as if inspired by the ignorance and oversimplification of the Left, a group of centrist rabbis and journalists have joined them in the degradation of language, alleging in a petition now circulating online that “the lie that Israel committed ‘genocide’ in Gaza” is “the latest blood libel to be inflicted on the Jewish people.”
I hasten to point out that this petition does not come from the Hard Right — it includes journalist Yossi Klein Halevi and rabbis Yitz Greenberg and Shmuly Yanklowitz. Many who have signed are friends and spiritual mentors of mine.
Yet it is just as misguided as the misuse of language it seeks to condemn — perhaps even more so, as it now adds “blood libel” to the pile of terms rendered meaningless by misuse.
None of the evidence I have adduced above is mentioned in the petition. There is no mention of the inhabitability of Gaza today, or the insane plan to ethnically cleanse the territory and replace it with Trump-branded resorts. There are no citations to Ben Gvir and Smotrich’s clear statements of genocidal intent or the Israeli public’s support for genocide. Only Israel’s case is made.
Which would be fine, if the petition were a blog post in defense of Israel. But it is much more than that. It is a claim that to use the word genocide is, itself, a blood libel — a baseless, hateful and antisemitic claim.
Why is this helpful, in any way? What could this hateful, factually-challenged slander possibly hope to accomplish?
There are many thoughtful, reasonable people who believe Israel committed genocide in Gaza. There are many thoughtful, reasonable people who believe it has not. Scholars of genocide have made strong arguments on both sides, both backed up by evidence. This is a close case, a serious matter, and a serious charge. Denigrating the “other side” in such brutal and absolutist terms accomplishes nothing.
On the contrary, this petition is so extreme and so preposterous that, in attempting to exculpate Israel, it makes Israel look more guilty. There are arguments to be made in defense of Israel’s actions, and the petition makes some of them. But this accusation is so outlandish that it makes it look like Israel can’t possibly prevail on the merits and must, instead, depict its opponents as bigots.
It also defies common sense. Those who have accused Israel of genocide include many Jewish scholars, religious leaders, journalists and activists. Are they all complicit in vile, murderous acts of antisemitism? What about the Israeli organization B’Tselem and several Jewish progressive organizations? Perhaps they, like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Physicians for Human Rights are deluded, or wrong or careless about the facts. Perhaps they are all jumping on some progressive bandwagon, or improperly focused on Israel, or whatever. Fine. But blood libel?
Moreover, as Shaul Magid has recently written, the refusal even to engage with the horrors of Gaza — except in one self-congratulatory line about internal disagreement being “a sign of moral health” — itself bespeaks a profound loss of conscience. The level of destruction relative to legitimate military goals and the overt statements of genocidal intent by some Israeli leaders demand more than that. They demand teshuvah, not tochechah — introspection, not rebuke.
All of this degradation of discourse is deeply regrettable. The Left was wrong to make the word “genocide” into a Yes/No test of one’s political acceptability, and these would-be defenders of Israel are wrong to make it a test of whether one is an antisemite.
The accusation of ‘genocide’ is not a card played at a political poker game. It is a grave moral and criminal charge, rooted in the Holocaust, and it warrants a serious and objective investigation. Not the further diminishment of our humanity.
The post Tragically, ‘genocide’ has become a meaningless word appeared first on The Forward.
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With Marine Le Pen on the right and Defiant France on the left, French Jews face an impossible choice
Marine Le Pen is back. And once again, the French Republic and the democratic values it represents, has its back against the wall.
On Wednesday, the judges of a French appeals court reached something of a Solomonic decision. On the one hand, they confirmed the ruling of a lower court that Le Pen, for more than a decade, oversaw the funneling of several million euros, meant for her European Parliament staff, to her political party, the extreme-right National Rally. On the other hand, they shortened the length of her ineligibility to run for political office, thus allowing her to join the fray for next year’s presidential election.
Much can be said about the consequences of this decision. First, there is the stunningly brazen legal dimension. Just as Donald Trump was the first convicted felon to be elected president of the United States, Le Pen — who leads other announced candidates by at least 10% in opinion polls — stands a very good chance to be the first convicted felon, on far more serious charges than Trump’s, to become president of France. (Two earlier presidents of the Fifth Republic, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, were also found guilty of embezzlement, but only after their presidential terms ended.)
No less significant are the political ramifications. Le Pen’s announcement that nothing will stop her from running in turn stopped Jordan Bardella, her young protégé and president of the National Rally, dead in his tracks. Dismissed as an empty, though always svelte and shiny suit, Bardella proved to be, to Le Pen’s growing discontent, more popular in opinion polls than his mentor. Poised to run in her stead, this young man in a hurry, and with neither practical experience nor university education, was suddenly benched.
It is too early to predict how this will play out. On Wednesday, in their first public appearance together since the court’s ruling, Bardella, standing a few steps behind Le Pen, looked less like a partner than a prop while she bathed in the crowd’s attention. Adding to the tension are policy differences that had begun to appear between Le Pen and Bardella, with the former hewing to her populist image and Bardella leaning towards the traditional right. Tellingly, Le Pen supports the recent rollback of the retirement age to 62, while Bardella seems, like others on the traditional right, to prefer raising the age as high as 67.
More important, Le Pen’s entry may well turn the 2027 election into a choice between equally dismal options. For months, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the turbulent tribune of the extreme-left Defiant France, has portrayed himself as the one figure who can save the republic from Le Pen. In the latest IFOP poll, Mélenchon stands an even chance to finish in second place in the first round of the election. This will mean that for the two-thirds of French voters still allergic to Le Pen, they will have nowhere to go after the second round except to the leader of a party that has repeatedly flirted with antisemitism.
This brings us, finally, to the historical significance of this event. The National Rally is, of course, the party formerly known as the Front National. Equally obvious, the latter, founded by Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was a gaggle of goose-steppers, antisemites, and apologists for Vichy, the collaborationist regime which did its bit for the Final Solution. (By the time he died last year, Le Pen père, who coined the infamous line that the Final Solution was a “detail of history,” had racked up multiple guilty verdicts for Holocaust denial and inciting race hatred.)
Her father’s notorious verbal dérapages, or excesses, finally led his daughter, who had slapped a new coat of paint on the party by renaming it soon after her father gave her the keys, to banish her father from its fold. Undeniably, Le Pen’s relentless pursuit of a policy of “dédiabolisation” or “detoxification,” has largely rid the party of its Nazi-adjacent followers. (As part of this renovation, the more than one hundred National Front representatives who sit on the far-right in the National Assembly — by far the largest parliamentary party — always wear business attire. This makes for a striking contrast with their Defiant France colleagues, who tend to dress as my students do.)
But a bespoke suit does not mean one is not still beholden to racism. Le Pen and Bardella have labored to distance their party from its rancid and racist origin, most recently reflected in the latter’s controversial visit last year to Israel, where he spoke at a sparsely attended conference on antisemitism. (Many of the invitees, upon learning that Bardella would attend, snubbed the event.)
No less contentious was Le Pen’s decision for her party to join the march against antisemitism two years earlier in Paris, along with her vow that the National Rally would serve as the “bouclier,” or shield to protect French Jews. She did not say against whom her party would shield French Jews, but there was no need to: All of France understood who she meant. For her party, the Jew is no longer, if only for now, the dreaded other who threatens the unity and purity of the French people. The Arab or Muslim now fills that role. Hence the party’s insistent demand for a constitutional amendment for “la préférence nationale,” which would limit an array of social privileges to French citizens, as well as the consistent drumbeat of racist and xenophobic declarations on the part of its rank and file.
Apologists for Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of Vichy France, insisted that he too served as his nation’s shield against Nazi Germany. They conveniently forgot, of course, that this shield was used to separate French Jews from their non-Jewish compatriots. Between now and next year’s presidential election, the French will have time enough to reflect on the promise, or threat, of a party whose origins warn us against those who use shields to clobber those they decide do not belong to a nation.
The post With Marine Le Pen on the right and Defiant France on the left, French Jews face an impossible choice appeared first on The Forward.
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Graham Platner may be gone, but his Nazi tattoo is not fading away
(JTA) — Why did it take sexual assault allegations to collapse Graham Platner’s Maine Senate campaign when the Nazi-linked tattoo was there all along?
Progressive lawmakers, Jewish leaders and conservative commentators posed the question in dozens of exasperated iterations in the hours after Platner announced Wednesday evening that he would suspend his race amid allegations reported by Politico Monday that he had raped a former girlfriend.
“Graham Platner has dropped out of the Maine Senate race amid serious sexual assault allegations,” the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, wrote in a post on X. “But leaders should not have needed another scandal to act. The Nazi tattoo should have been enough.”
Platner, who won his Democratic primary in June on an anti-Israel progressive platform, faced mounting calls to leave the race after the Politico story ran from Democratic groups and progressive leaders who had formerly supported him, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. (Platner has denied the allegations.)
But others argued that those backers should have pulled their endorsements months earlier after it surfaced in October that he had a chest tattoo of a Totenkopf, a Nazi-era skull-and-crossbones design favored by SS officers.
At the time, Platner claimed that he had gotten the tattoo while “inebriated” as a young adult when he was on shore leave from a tour of duty in Iraq, without knowing what it meant. A number of people who knew him before his political ascent, including at least one of the women who accused him of sexual misbehaviour, said he had been aware of the symbol’s provenance. When the revelations emerged, he covered up the skull with a Celtic knot.
His campaign had dismissed as irrelevant noise the backlash the tattoo revelation received, as well as criticism over allegations that he had deployed race and gender stereotypes in the past as irrelevant noise.
“I said, ‘None of this will or should stop him from becoming a U.S. senator,’” Daniel Moraff, a progressive strategist who had headhunted Platner, told The Wall Street Journal last month, before the Politico revelations, about Reddit posts that included homophobic and ableist epithets unearthed in the vetting process. The firm that vetted Platner did not uncover anything about his Nazi tattoo, Moraff said.
The tattoo didn’t seem to be a dealbreaker for voters, either, since he coasted to victory in the June primary after his primary opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, suspended her candidacy in late April, saying her campaign could not afford to continue.
Now the Maine Democratic Party is considering replacements for the disgraced candidate, but the question of why his backers ignored warning signs still looms.
Brian Romick, the president and CEO of the Democratic Majority for Israel, told JTA in a statement that he didn’t understand why progressives had supported “a candidate with so many obvious red flags, including an allegation of sexual assault and a Nazi tattoo.”
And Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which did not endorse Platner, told the Forward ahead of Platner’s exit that “a lesson for Democrats is that we shouldn’t compromise.”
“There were red flags about Platner from the outset,” Soifer said. “They just continued to compound on each other as more stories came out. But the Nazi tattoo for us alone was one too many.”
On Tuesday, New Jersey Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer argued that warning signs had been apparent long before the latest allegation.
“I said it in June: Nothing about this guy was right. From the first abuse allegations to his Nazi tattoo, the red flags were there. His endorsers just chose to accept them,” Gottheimer wrote in a post on X.
New York State Sen. Julia Salazar, a Democratic Socialist, also argued that supporters had made a mistake by overlooking Platner’s tattoo.
“Sorry to the well-intentioned people who made the mistake of supporting this guy. But: having a Nazi tattoo doesn’t pass the sniff test for running for US Senate, nor did his excuses. And far worse that he faces a credible allegation of rape,” Salazar wrote in a post on X.
Jewish Republicans said the Democratic response to Platner’s campaign was too late.
“I didn’t support Graham Platner as soon [as] we all learned he’s a Nazi,” Republican Max Abrahms, a political scientist focusing on terrorism, wrote in a post on X. “For the Democratic Party his being a Nazi wasn’t disqualifying. They viewed it as an asset. Platner matters politically for what he says about mainstream Democrats.”
The Republican Jewish Coalition also took aim at Democratic leaders who had stood by Platner earlier in the race.
“American Jews will never forget that leading Democrats chose to stand with Graham Platner KNOWING FULL WELL THAT HE HAD A NAZI SS CONCENTRATION CAMP GUARD TATTOO,” the group wrote in a post on X. “There is only ONE party where American Jews can be proudly Jewish and loudly pro-Israel: @Republicans.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Graham Platner may be gone, but his Nazi tattoo is not fading away appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel reportedly tells US about new Iranian plot to assassinate Trump
(JTA) — Israel has shared intelligence with the United States that Iran had developed a new plot to assassinate President Donald Trump, according to media reports.
Citing an article by The Wall Street Journal Thursday and two people familiar with the matter, CNN reported that the intelligence revealed there was a “new” and “specific” threat. The details were not disclosed. However, the story added that U.S. intelligence agencies had not independently identified the threat or vetted it.
Israeli officials reportedly passed the intelligence to Washington in recent days or weeks.
CNN reported that U.S. officials have monitored ongoing threats against Trump since the 2020 U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Soleimani.
Trump told reporters Wednesday, “They want to take out the U.S. leader — me. I’m on whatever list. I saw this morning I’m on every single one of their lists. And so far, I guess I’ve been a bit lucky, but maybe that doesn’t last very long.”
The report comes as tensions between Washington and Tehran continue to be strained over Iran’s nuclear program and recent military strikes.
During Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s funeral on July 5, Reuters reported that demonstrators set fire to U.S. and British flags and held placards in English with the words “KILL TRUMP.”
Others held posters with the faces of Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The posters displayed each man in the crosshairs of a gunsight, with the words “There will be blood.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel reportedly tells US about new Iranian plot to assassinate Trump appeared first on The Forward.
