Accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza is a luxury belief— and utterly divorced from reality when there’s a real one happening in Ukraine

Accusing Israel of trying to annihilate the Palestinian people is a luxury belief. Liberals should call out Hamas and Russia instead of carping about Netanyahu and Zelensky.

Which do you care more about — victory, or your own moral superiority? Which do you prefer — defeating our foes, or your own home comforts? There are wars raging today. Two democracies — imperfect, no doubt, but free societies by comparison with their foes — are battling two allied tyrannies. Defeat for Israel and Ukraine would mean obliteration, extinction. For the US and the UK, and indeed for the EU, the destruction of Israel and Ukraine would be more than inconveniences. Such outcomes would significantly worsen the West’s strategic position and strengthen that of the axis of authoritarians: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

And yet our support for these two democracies is at best equivocal and at worst hypocritical. Twenty-two months after the slaughter of the innocents by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, murderous appendages of the Islamic Republic of Iran, western liberals join the Iranians and the apologists for Hamas by sanctimoniously and erroneously accusing Israel of genocide. To add insult to injury, the governments of France, Britain and Canada announce their intention — unconditional in the French case — to recognise a Palestinian state when the UN general assembly convenes in September.

Not content with passing this judgment on the government of the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, they then turn their pious scrutiny to that of President Volodymyr Zelensky, accusing him of being insufficiently tough on corruption — even while western companies continue to profit from their commerce with the vastly more corrupt fascist regime of President  Putin, and while the continued flow of western arms to Ukraine depends on internecine wrangles between government departments  in Washington.

These sentiments can be summed up together under one heading: the new defeatism. They are the moral posturing of politicians and publicists more concerned with flaunting their own confused ethics than with helping the democracies to beat the authoritarians.

The phrase “luxury beliefs” was coined by the brilliant young psychologist Rob Henderson to sum up the more preposterous ideas that progressives can afford to hold — “Defund the police!” “Open borders!” “Men can become women!” — because they are largely sheltered from the consequences when such ideas are put into practice. Accusing Israel of genocide and recognising a non-existent state are the luxury beliefs of western foreign policy, elicited in response to misleading photographs on front pages and fake fatality statistics, and utterly divorced from strategic reality.

Let us begin with the fallacious claim that Israel is engaged in genocide in Gaza — a claim long made by Iran and its proxies but now echoed on an almost daily basis by left-wing politicians, as well as a growing number of right-wing populists, and amplified by liberal media from the BBC to the New York Times. This claim is fast becoming consensus. In December 2024, Amnesty International published a report claiming that Israel “has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians” in Gaza. That is also the view of Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza. And the South African government has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

The worse the images from Gaza, the more people join the chorus, including now some reputable writers. The Israeli scholar of genocide Shmuel Lederman; Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars; the British scholar Martin Shaw; the Australian scholar A Dirk Moses; Raz Segal, programme director of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, New Jersey; the historians Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Last week Omer Bartov, an eminent historian of the Holocaust who teaches at Brown University, published a representative essay in the New York Times with the title: “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know it When I See it.” He argues that the Israeli government’s goal is “to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the territory  through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.” His “inescapable conclusion” is that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people”.

Well, as the author of War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (2006), I am qualified to disagree. The war in Gaza is brutal — a kind of siege that began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas went on its rampage of murder, rape and kidnapping. One can criticise the way Israel has waged this war. One can note the impossibility of simultaneously rescuing the hostages and destroying Hamas. One can lament the extreme difficulty of defeating an enemy that lurks in tunnels, habitually uses civilians for cover and steals much of the aid sent into Gaza. But one cannot call this nasty war genocide.

Genocide is a word dating back to 1944, when it was coined by Raphael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Lemkin was a Polish-Jewish refugee from Nazism, whose family was all but obliterated in the Holocaust (49 of his relatives died, including his parents; only his brother and his brother’s wife and children survived). In her 2002 book, A Problem from Hell, Samantha Power movingly described this haunted man’s single-handed campaign to turn his made-up word into a foundation of postwar international law.

In 1948 it seemed that Lemkin had triumphed when the UN general assembly unanimously passed the “Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” though it was not adopted by the US until 1985. Lemkin’s original definition of genocide was: a co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity […]

Article II of the UN Genocide Convention defines genocide to mean “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring  about its physical destruction in whole  or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

One may claim that the Israel Defence Forces are doing at least three of these things. But is it the IDF’s intention “to destroy, in whole or in part” the Palestinians as a people? John Spencer, professor of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, New York, has been to Gaza four times, embedded with the IDF. He has interviewed the prime minister, the defence minister, the chief of staff, the Southern Command leadership, and dozens of  officers and soldiers on the front lines.

In his words: “Nothing I have seen or studied resembles genocide or genocidal intent …  [Their orders] focus on destroying Hamas, rescuing hostages, and protecting civilians whenever possible … [Indeed] Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm. It warns before attacks using text messages, phone calls, leaflets and broadcasts. It opens safe corridors and pauses operations so civilians can leave combat areas. It tracks civilian presence down to the building level.  I have seen missions delayed or cancelled because children were nearby.”

Moreover, contrary to the propaganda that the IDF is wilfully inflicting starvation and famine on Gaza, “Israel has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history has provided to an enemy population during wartime.” Omer Bartov is a first-class historian. His book, The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (2001), is a searing work. He of all people should understand the fundamental difference between the IDF and Hitler’s murderous legions.

Now, if it is genocide you want to see, I recommend you pay a visit to the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. There I can easily demonstrate that the Russian government intends to eradicate a distinct Ukrainian identity. That has been explicit since Putin published his essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” in 2021. And all five methods of genocide are being deployed against the Ukrainian people, including “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”.

To be precise: in March of this year, the Ukrainian government was able to verify that 19,456 Ukrainian children had been taken from occupied Ukraine to Russia since the beginning of the war. Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab puts the number closer to 35,000. According to the Institute for the Study of War, “Russia is using at least 43 children’s camps throughout Russia to house deported children, at least 32 of which are explicitly ‘re-education’ facilities.” Evidence from Russian sources shows that many of these children are being put up for adoption, a process that strips them of their Ukrainian names and birthplaces. For teenage Ukrainian boys, forced Russification can lead to near-immediate conscription to fight in the Russian army against their fellow Ukrainians.

The Israeli government does not intend to kill Palestinian civilians. The Russian government does intend to kill Ukrainian civilians. In recent months, there has been an unprecedented level of missile and drone attacks on civilian targets all over Ukraine. According to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU), June saw the highest monthly civilian casualties in three years, with 232 people killed and 1,343 injured. Russia launched ten times as many missile and loitering munitions attacks against Ukraine as in June last year. In all, 6,754 civilians were killed or injured in the first half of 2025, a 54 per cent rise from the corresponding period in 2024. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, HRMMU has documented the deaths of at least 13,580 civilians, including 716 children.

I wish those people (including at least one well-known British historian) who spend a significant part of each day posting and reposting clickbait about the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza could spare a thought for the real genocide that is going on in eastern Europe right now. But Friday’s Guardian captured the twisted priorities of the liberal conscience. The lead: “The mathematics of starvation: how Israel caused a famine in Gaza.” Well down the running order (below “Justin Timberlake reveals Lyme disease diagnosis”): “Zelenskyy calls for ‘regime change’ in Russia after attack on Kyiv kills 16” and “Kyiv protesters celebrate as parliament votes to restore anti-corruption bodies’ power”.

That’s right: Ukraine is a democracy. Voters can take to the streets and force a change of government policy. The same is true of Israel, where protests against Netanyahu occur in Jerusalem more frequently than air raid warnings. But what about Gaza?

Beginning in March, brave Gazans dared to protest against Hamas’s reign of murder and theft. The difference is that these protests were met with violence and intimidation — and they changed nothing.

This is what makes French, British and Canadian talk of recognising a Palestinian state such a perfect example of a luxury belief. For nothing remotely resembling a Palestinian state exists today. Nor is one likely to exist at any point in the foreseeable future.

Thirty years ago, under the Oslo Accords, Israel agreed with the Palestine Liberation Organisation on the beginnings of Palestinian self-government — “a separate Palestinian entity short of a state”, in the words of the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. One of his successors, Ehud Barak, went even further at Camp David in 2000. But then PLO leader Yasser Arafat walked away from the table.

Have the Palestinians strengthened the case for statehood in the subsequent years? No. The Palestinian Authority (PA)  is an oxymoron; Palestinians despise it, and it has no authority. Hamas continues to enjoy significant support in both Gaza and (some polls suggest even more) the West Bank. True, satisfaction with Hamas in Gaza was down from 64 per cent a year ago to 43 per cent in May, according to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, but that was still higher than satisfaction with their rivals Fatah or the PA. 

Asked if they supported or opposed the disarmament of Hamas in order to stop the war, 64 per cent of Gazans said they were opposed. Yet the true nature of Hamas was laid bare on October 7, 2023, which should be regarded — and is regarded by most Israelis I know — as an event disqualifying the Palestinians from self-government, not entitling them to it. Nine out of ten Palestinians simply deny the October 7 atrocities took place.

A defining feature of with luxuries is that they are expensive. The same is true of luxury beliefs. The belief that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza, like the belief that a Palestinian state can be wished into existence by western leaders, is a Hermès handbag of an idea. It is on a par with the belief that peace can somehow be brokered between Ukraine and Russia without the application of meaningful economic and military pressure on Moscow, an idea that is more of a Patek Philippe watch.

Expend energy on such luxury beliefs and you will not notice the help you are giving the axis of authoritarians to bring about the defeat of the West. Nor will you notice the help they are giving you — through the social media channels they know so well how to manipulate — to be the useful idiot you are.