The Genocide Lie Is Back

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, September 02, 2025

 

Israel’s more pathological critics cannot resist the temptation to lie about matters large and small. Take, for example, Agnes Callamard — a French “human rights activist” and the secretary general of Amnesty International.

 

In a preemptive effort to attack the character of skeptics, Callamard dismissed the “toxic propaganda” that she predicted would cast into doubt an International Association of Genocide Scholars resolution accusing the Israeli government of genocide. “An overwhelming majority of members of the world’s leading genocide scholars’ association have backed a resolution stating that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of the crime,” she wrote. That is prima facie false.

 

According to one former two-term IAGS advisory board member, Sara Brown, only about 128 of the association’s 500 or so members participated in the vote. And there was plenty of chicanery around it, all of which seemed designed to stifle debate.

 

The association dispensed with the traditional town-hall-style virtual discussion that typically accompanies resolutions with a political valence. In addition, the association did not publish dissenting views on its listserv, which is also standard practice, and declined to release the names of the resolution’s draftees. “That favors those activists who are seeking to advance a false narrative about Israel,” Brown told the Times of Israel. “It wasn’t rushed; it was just forced through without the usual transparency.”

 

The resolution itself is about as marred as the process that produced it. To justify its claim of genocide, it cites organizations and institutions that have already altered their definition of what constitutes genocide — organizations like Amnesty International — merely to brand Israel a genocidaire.

 

As Amnesty itself admitted at the time, the previously agreed-upon definition of genocide represented an “overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence.” So the jurisprudence had to go — specifically, the 1948 Genocide Convention’s requirement that it must be a deliberate and intentional act.

 

The analysts at Just Security gave Amnesty’s imaginative reinterpretation of our shared reality more credit than it deserved when it picked it apart last December. They found that Amnesty could not prove that Israel deliberately targeted civilians (contrary to Israel’s efforts to warn Gaza civilians in advance of attacks and disseminate written legal warnings to IDF soldiers to comply with the laws of war) and made no attempt to do so. It alleges genocidal “intent” from what Just Security admits are ugly and even bigoted statements from Israeli officials about the Palestinian population, but Amnesty could not “prove the existence of a general plan or policy to commit genocide, which the military then acted upon.”

 

Indeed, Amnesty’s new criteria for establishing genocidal intent on Israel’s part “illustrate a de facto reversal of the burden of proof regarding intentional targeting of civilians.” In other words, Amnesty had held Israel to a standard that no other country on earth must observe — conduct that fits squarely within the IHRA’s working definition of antisemitism.

 

“As a theoretical matter, an intent to commit genocide could be harbored by an individual. However, as a practical matter, carrying out a genocide typically requires a collective plan or policy,” the report observed. “We submit that the methodology used in Amnesty International’s report is unlikely to support a finding of intentional attacks on civilians.” The shoddy work led Just Security’s analysts to conclude that the point of this exercise was to “maximize its public shaming effect.”

 

The IAGS resolution takes many of the same shortcuts Amnesty made the most of in its headlong rush to ensure the claim that Israel is engaged in genocide could be printed below some superficially authoritative letterhead. It therefore suffers from all the same problems. The purpose of this initiative was, as Brown said, to convey to the public that “genocide experts agree” Israel is engaged in a genocidal project in Gaza. “No, we don’t, and we were deliberately silenced,” she added.

 

If the point of the IAGS resolution was to generate a lot of negative headlines for Israel, mission accomplished.

 

After a brief drought of stories alleging Israel’s deliberate effort to starve the Palestinian population into submission — an extraordinary claim that was never supported by commensurately compelling evidence — the international press raced to uncritically republish the IAGS’s findings.

 

The resolution adds to “a growing chorus from human rights organizations and academics concluding that Israel is committing genocide,” the Washington Post reported. “We were very surprised at the level of consensus there was,” said association member Emily Sample, who knew quite well that what she was retailing was not true, even if the Post’s reporters did not. And, insofar as there is any dissent against the IAGS’s conclusions, WaPo readers could be forgiven for concluding that it is exclusive to Israeli nationals. Those are the only quoted objectors, after all.

 

The BBC put in a rote and uninspired performance, layering the IAGS’s report atop all the other calumnies it regularly deploys against Israel. It sang from a familiar hymnal, citing the veracity of the “Hamas-run Ministry of Health’s” statistics; commends the moral authority of upstanding members of the international community, like South Africa; and it engages in Holocaust inversion by accusing Israel of failing to properly grasp the horrors visited on the Jewish people under Nazi rule.

 

The Associated Press put so much color in its copy covering the IAGS report that it reads even more like fiction than intended. “Airstrikes and artillery shelling have echoed through Gaza City since Israel declared it a combat zone last week,” it read. “Another merciless night in Gaza City,” mourned one “medic” sheltering in the city that Israel warned people to evacuate weeks ago. The AP, too, went to bat for the Hamas health department, whose figures are considered “the most reliable estimate of war casualties” by U.N. agencies, some of which seem committed to Hamas’s survival.

 

Indeed, the IAGS report is the secondary focus of the AP’s dispatch on the IAGS report, but it served the purpose Brown said it would. In an appeal to her own authority, IAGS president Melanie O’Brien made her fallacy explicit: “People who are experts in the study of genocide can see this situation for what it is,” she said.

 

None of this is surprising, but it is alarming. The degree to which those in the community of international human rights enthusiasts are willing to sacrifice their credibility to this public relations campaign still retains the capacity to shock. Even if those who do not need evidence to conclude that Israel is involved in genocide in Gaza are talking mostly to themselves, their refusal to encounter, much less engage, with dissent will only contribute to their radicalization. On that score, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.