The Verdict Came First: How the ‘Genocide’ Charge Against Israel Was Preloaded

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, which just ended in Israel, we are asked to do something very specific: remember, in detail, what actual genocide looks like.

Six million murdered. Their annihilation planned, industrialized, and executed.

In 2026, many Jews marking that day encountered something else at the same time: a flood of accusations on their phones and screens that Jews — through the State of Israel — are now committing or supporting “genocide.”

That term was coined because of the Holocaust.

Now it is deployed against its primary historical victims — even on the very day they commemorate it.

That is not coincidence. It is the endpoint of a narrative that was built in advance — and activated on cue.

On October 7, while Hamas terrorists were still inside Israeli communities massacring families — the word “genocide” was already being widely applied on Western college campuses and on the streets of Western capitals.

Not against Hamas. Against Israel.

Not after the facts. Not after a response. During the massacre itself.

Within hours of the October 7 massacre, social media platforms were saturated with claims that Israel’s response — which had not yet meaningfully begun — was “genocide.” This wasn’t fringe noise. Activists, influencers, and NGO-adjacent voices were deploying the charge in real time, before a battlefield even existed.

That should have ended the discussion. It didn’t — because this wasn’t an evidentiary claim. It was a preloaded one.

For years, a campaign — linguistic, political, and ideological — had been methodically reframing Israel from a state engaged in conflict with openly authoritarian enemies into a uniquely illegitimate actor. The progression was deliberate. Jewish self-determination became “settler colonialism.” Defensive wars became “Israeli aggression.” Territorial disputes became “war crimes.” And “war crimes,” predictably, became — “genocide.”

By October 7, the most damning label in international law was not waiting to be earned. It was waiting to be deployed.

And it was.

But, if “genocide” had been occurring in Gaza in the years leading up to this war, as anti-Israel activists and NGOs had been claiming for years, it would show up first in the most basic indicators: population decline, collapsing life expectancy, rising infant mortality.

The opposite occurred.

Gaza’s population grew from roughly 1.1 million in the early 2000s to around 2.2 million by 2023. Life expectancy rose from the high 60s in the 1990s to approximately 74–75 years by the early 2020s. Infant mortality declined significantly over that same period, falling from roughly 30–35 per 1,000 live births in the 1990s to the mid-teens by the 2020s.

Those are not marginal data points. They are baseline indicators used in any serious assessment of population-level destruction.

Yet throughout those same years — before Israel fired a single shot in response to October 7 — the charge of “genocide” was already embedded in anti-Israel activist and academic discourse.

In modern conflicts, whoever defines the terms early often shapes the perception of the war. Here, the “genocide” framing was set before Israel mobilized, before it attempted to rescue hostages, before any sustained military campaign began.

“Genocide,” however, is a legal term with a precise and demanding definition under international law: the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such.

When that standard has been met historically, the evidence has been overwhelming. As it was during the Holocaust, as well as the Armenian and Rwandan genocides.

But nothing in Israel’s conduct in the October 7 war meets that standard.

Israel has issued evacuation warnings, facilitated humanitarian corridors, and coordinated large-scale humanitarian efforts — including vaccination campaigns to prevent disease outbreaks — while targeting military objectives in a battlefield deliberately embedded within civilian infrastructure. The adversary it was fighting in Gaza — Hamas — operates without uniforms, places command centers beneath hospitals, stores weapons in residential buildings, and constructed an underground tunnel network exceeding 500 kilometers, with entrances embedded almost entirely within and beneath civilian areas.

This is not incidental. It is strategic.

As military analysts like John Spencer have repeatedly explained, warfare in such an environment inevitably produces civilian casualties — even when the attacking force operates within the bounds of the law of armed conflict. And even the casualty figures cited to support the “Gaza genocide” accusation collapse under scrutiny.

Hamas-controlled sources have reported roughly 70,000–75,000 deaths over the course of more than two years of war. These figures are opaque, unverifiable in real time, and do not reliably distinguish between civilians and combatants, as well as those who died from natural causes (which before October 7 averaged at around 7,000 per year). Israeli and independent analyses have consistently assessed that a substantial portion — often estimated in the tens of thousands — are Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.

Additional demographic analysis has shown a disproportionately high percentage of fatalities among males in the 15–40 age range — the cohort most likely to be combatants — relative to their approximately 20% share of the overall population. That is not what indiscriminate or exterminatory warfare looks like. It is what targeted engagement with a fighting force that wears civilian attire looks like in a dense urban environment.

Even taking the higher-end figures at face value, the numbers do not resemble “genocide.” They reflect a brutal, protracted urban war against an embedded militant force — not an effort to destroy a population. Gaza’s population has not collapsed. There has been no systemic attempt to eliminate it as such.

Both intent and outcome matter. Neither here support the charge.

Which brings us back to the beginning.

The verdict did not emerge from the evidence. It preceded it.

And the fact that it now saturates public discourse — even as Jews commemorate the historical event that gave the term its meaning — only underscores the point: this is not law being applied. It is language being weaponized.

Once introduced, the accusation became self-reinforcing. NGOs cited one another. Media outlets cited NGOs. International bodies cited both. Assertions hardened into assumptions, and assumptions into accepted “truths,” all without meeting the evidentiary burden such a charge requires.

This is how modern blood libels function.

For centuries, Jews have been accused of uniquely monstrous crimes — poisoning wells, intentionally spreading disease, engaging in ritual murder. The language evolves. The pattern does not. The accusation is absolute. The credible evidence is non-existent. The conclusion is predetermined.

Today, the claim is “genocide.”

The scale of that accusation demands rigor, discipline, and proof.

Instead, the verdict came first. And everything since has been an attempt to justify it. And to try and shame — as “deniers” — those who stand up to it.

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.