For the Left, the ‘Genocide’ Lie Does All the Heavy Lifting

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

 

Even the left’s own house organs acknowledge that accusing Israel of “genocide” has become a “litmus test” within the Democratic Party — a pass/fail quiz that, more than anything else these days, determines a candidate’s progressive bona fides. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani passed that test, even if he failed on the terms he’d set for himself.

 

In a sour-faced statement to the city, Mamdani called on the federal government to make good its commitments to an international treaty that America doesn’t observe and enforce an International Criminal Court warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that even Joe Biden’s administration rejected on both procedural and moral grounds. That’s some goofy stuff, but the left seems persuaded that Mamdani acquitted himself well. After all, he called Netanyahu a “war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people.”

 

Even if Mamdani effectively conceded his critics’ contention that he could not order the NYPD to arrest a foreign head of state, as he’d so often promised he could, at least he is “setting the standard for 2028 Democratic presidential candidates,” as the Nazi-curious left-wing podcaster Emma Vigeland exclaimed.

 

Vigeland may be a cheap date on this one, but at least she’s consistent. She has long argued that the “genocide” charge is both a means to an end and an end in itself. “It’s powerful to use the word and to democratize its power,” she once wrote. Many progressives now share her outlook. In fact, the demand that Democrats accuse Israel of executing the most incompetent genocide in history has only grown louder since major combat operations in Gaza ended in October of last year with a deal that left Hamas the de facto authority in roughly one-third of the Gaza Strip.

 

The progressives’ flippant approach to this issue calls their seriousness into question. “It is now routine for candidates to be asked to raise their hand if they think Israel committed genocide,” MS NOW contributor Jay Michaelson observed. That’s a box-checking exercise, not a weighty statement of commitment to righting a grave, historic wrong. Before she was shunted aside in favor of the genuine article, Michigan Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow did her best to neutralize the issue by professing her fealty to the “genocide” faith but only to urge her constituents to move on from it. She didn’t convince anyone, perhaps because she herself was unpersuaded by her own logic.

 

McMorrow’s fate is, however, illustrative of the consequences in store for those who don’t demonstrate a convincing level of devotion to this popular but baseless allegation. The knives are out for Democrats who refuse to toe the line.

 

For the American left, the incantation of “genocide” papers over the incompatible marriage of convenience between center-left liberals and revolutionary socialists. For the international left, the “genocide” claim is just as valuable. It allows anti-Israel fanatics to accuse Jerusalem of unspeakable perfidy without having to go into the details.

 

Today, 285 days after high-tempo combat operations in Gaza ceased, it is claimed that the Israeli “genocide” persists but in barely perceptible forms. The alleged extermination campaign against Palestinians now manifests in an “unprecedented” rise in miscarriages inside the strip, according to the ever-reliable Gaza Health Ministry. It’s a “reproductive genocide that Western feminists can’t be allowed to ignore,” the author Kylie Cheung declared.

 

The “genocide” is also said to be responsible for rising rates of Palestinian joblessness. Al Jazeera called the plight of young Palestinians who are locked out of the job market a “generational catastrophe,” describing the baleful experience of Gaza residents for whom the primary conduits through which they could sell their labor were Egypt and Israel. The unstated implication is that it’s Israel’s fault that the Gazans’ access to Israel has been circumscribed. If only we knew why those closures happened in the first place.

 

Perhaps the most insidious recent charge that attempts to establish Israel’s genocidal intent is the classically antisemitic claim that Israeli Jews are systematically murdering children. You’d think such a ghoulish campaign would result in more hardship than, as one doctor alleged, that Israel has “destroyed” the “essence of childhood.” Fortunately, the child-murder claim is yet another fabrication.

 

“These are among the most serious charges in international law,” wrote  Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator of a United Nations report alleging that Israel “deliberately targeted” Palestinian children. “So, you would expect, at minimum, one clearly documented case: a soldier who identified a child as a child and killed that child for no reason other than that they were a child. After 94 pages, the Commission cannot produce one.”

 

It’s not hard to prove genocide. If the evidence that supposedly supports the accusation spoke for itself, we’d be privy to a lot less table-pounding from those on the left who demand only fealty to the “genocide” shibboleth. And why wouldn’t they demand it? The lie is doing a lot of work for the anti-Israel left — cowing dissenters within Democratic ranks into submission and paving the way for the socialist takeover of the Democratic Party.