Israel, Take Heart: There Is Still a Market for the Truth

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

The New York Times letters page recently played host to a discussion that should give Jews some reason for optimism. But I hadn’t quite realized it until I read an exchange on social media this morning.

 

Both the letters and the social-media exchange went right to the heart of a question: Is it worth it to put one’s energy relentlessly and wherever possible toward debunking the lie that Israel committed genocide in Gaza?

 

The answer remains yes.

 

The New York Times letters were specifically addressed to an extravagantly poorly reasoned op-ed comparing Israel’s defensive war in Gaza to the Armenian Genocide and even the Holocaust. A scholar of the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide wrote to the Times to object to the facile false equivalency. As did others.

 

One tactic of the pro-Hamas propagandists in the West is to accuse Israel of genocide, and then when Israel’s defenders point out that this is a lie, the propagandists pretend that the term isn’t what’s important and that Jews are showing a guilty conscience by focusing so much on that one word. This is annoying and dishonest but in its own way heartening, because it is an admission by Team Genocide that they have lost the argument against Israel’s defenders.

 

But rarely do we see, in the general discourse, someone who thinks Israel guilty of monstrous behavior declare the importance of not calling it “genocide.” One letter writer to the New York Times did exactly that:

 

I hope it is uncontroversial to say that collective punishment, the killing and maiming of innocent civilians and the destruction of their homes and critical infrastructure are wrong. Can we leave it at that? Unless you’re a pedantic scholar or a legal expert, semantic labeling is an unnecessary distraction that adds controversy to the uncontroversial.

 

This is another important sign, because it tells us that contesting the genocide libel makes a difference. It exacts a cost to exaggerating Israel’s crimes, even if that “cost” is minimal. Once “genocide” is seen even by Israel’s staunch critics as a way to derail the debate, a reality-based conversation might finally be possible.

 

And a preview of that conversation can be seen in the aforementioned social media exchange today. Eliot Malin, an attorney focusing on international law, responded to a post claiming there exists a public consensus that the blood libel is true. Malin calmly explained two points.

 

The first is that the organizations that levied the accusation of genocide against Israel made clear that they were not applying the accepted definition of the term as it is used in international law. For example, Amnesty International stated that legal precedent would likely exonerate Israel of genocide, so they used a different formula. B’Tselem did the same. The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, having since been dismissed from that position, had said explicitly in an interview that he didn’t charge Israel’s leaders with genocide, only war crimes, because the evidence simply wasn’t there to accuse them of genocide.

 

So that’s the first thing to understand about the distorted debate around the genocide accusation: All basically agree that you would have to change international law to charge Israel with genocide.

 

Malin’s second point explains why. Another user on X asked him to answer for a specific part of the genocide accusation: deliberately seeking a group’s destruction “in whole or in part.”

 

This is actually a key phrase in the definition of genocide. It seems rather easy to say that any losing side in a war was destroyed “in part.” Which is why the term “in part” is explained further in the law. “In part” is actually a higher bar that it seems, and that’s a good thing. Otherwise nothing would distinguish genocide from war at all.

 

Here is Malin’s explanation from the precedential case law:

 

In Jelisić, the first case to confront the question, the Trial Chamber noted that, ‘[g]iven the goal of the [Genocide] Convention to deal with mass crimes, it is widely acknowledged that the intention to destroy must target at least a substantial part of the group.’ The same conclusion was reached by the Sikirica Trial Chamber: ‘This part of the definition calls for evidence of an intention to destroy a substantial number relative to the total population of the group.’ As these Trial Chambers explained, the substantiality requirement both captures genocide’s defining character as a crime of massive proportions and reflects the Convention’s concern with the impact the destruction of the targeted part will have on the overall survival of the group.

 

So there you have it. Malin’s willingness to present the relevant case law all in one place is commendable, especially since it was in response to a random questioner. And it paid off not only for his interlocutor but for anyone who saw or might see the conversation.

 

Truth exists. It is on Israel’s side of this fight. And there is still a market for it.