When the Lie of ‘Genocide’ Becomes an Alibi for Murder

Every era has its blood libel. Ours dresses it up in infographics.

After Jews were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach, a predictable response emerged from a familiar corner of the political and media ecosystem. Not grief. Not horror. Not moral clarity. Instead, a reflexive incantation: “Oh, but the genocide.”

It is not analysis. It is an alibi.

Across social media, posts circulated insisting that the massacre must be understood — if not excused — because of alleged Israeli “genocide” in Gaza.

One widely shared graphic claimed that Gaza had suffered the equivalent of “42,500 Bondi terrorist attacks” or “212 September 11ths.” It also declares, in block letters over a grayscale image of a crowded mass of people, that “680,000 DEAD,” asserting — without evidence — that 380,000 of them were children under five.

The sources cited were not demographic agencies, conflict-monitoring organizations, or peer-reviewed studies, but activist commentators engaging in speculative modeling stacked atop speculative modeling, amplified through repetition until assertion became “fact.”

This is not a mistake. It is how blood libels work.

The structure is ancient. Jews are accused of a uniquely monstrous crime — once ritual murder, later poisoning wells and causing the bubonic plague, now “genocide.” The accusation is presented as so morally overwhelming, so self-evident, that violence against Jews becomes not merely understandable, but provoked. The Jew is transformed from victim into cause.

That is precisely what we are witnessing now.

Another viral post following the Bondi murders lamented that “a small, powerful, and vocal group” was demanding silence about the “genocide we’ve watched for the last two-plus years,” implying that Jewish influence was suppressing truth and accountability.

The phrasing is not incidental. It echoes centuries of antisemitic mythology about Jewish power, repackaged in the language of progressive grievance.

Jews are again cast as manipulators of conscience and distorters of reality. A group that must be “resisted.”

Resisted how? Apparently, with bullets.

The now ubiquitous “680,000 dead” claim is the evidentiary backbone of this moral inversion. It is not a statistic; it is a fabrication — an extreme numerical inflation untethered from census data, excess-mortality analysis, or any recognized conflict-monitoring methodology. No reputable international body endorses it. No demographic baseline supports it. No transparent accounting explains it.

But truth is beside the point. Blood libels are not designed to inform. They are designed to license — to rationalize and justify antisemitic violence.

In the Middle Ages, the accusation that Jews murdered Christian children justified pogroms. In the 20th century, claims of Jewish malevolence justified exclusion, expulsion, and extermination.

In British Mandatory Palestine, the libel that Jews sought to “destroy Al-Aqsa” — first aggressively promoted in the 1920s by Nazi collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini — became a recurring justification for massacres of Jews. His ideological heirs revived it on October 7, 2023, invoking it as moral cover for invasion, rape, and slaughter.

In the twenty-first century, the charge that Jews — or the Jewish State — are committing “genocide” serves the same function.

That is why Bondi Beach was not an aberration. It was the foreseeable endpoint of a narrative ecosystem that has spent years insisting that Jews are the ultimate criminals of history, that Jewish self-defense is mass murder, and that Jewish suffering is, at best, inconvenient.

Notice what is absent from the “Oh, but the genocide” refrain: facts, intent, proportionality, or law.

Genocide is not defined by vibes, viral videos, or comparative body-count memes. It is a specific legal crime requiring demonstrable intent to destroy a people as such.

The facts in Gaza — however one judges individual Israeli policies — fail that test completely. Population growth in Gaza, evacuation warnings, humanitarian corridors, wartime medical coordination, vaccination campaigns, and battlefield practices demonstrate the opposite of genocidal behavior.

But precision would break the spell and destroy the genocide-libel, so precision must be rejected.

Once “genocide” is asserted as dogma, everything follows. Jewish fear becomes hysteria. Jewish self-defense becomes proof of guilt. Jewish deaths become footnotes — or worse, justified outcomes.

This is how slogans become bullets.

Bondi Beach was not caused by “two years of genocide.” That’s a blood-libel. But it was caused by years of moral corrosion: the normalization of a libel so vast that it renders Jewish life negotiable. The people sharing these graphics may not have pulled the trigger — but they helped write the permission slip.

History has seen this movie before. It never ends well.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.