The generational price of the false Gaza ‘genocide’ narrative
Those who validate blood libels about Israel’s deliberately starving Palestinians are complicit in the antisemitic attacks on Jews that will happen long after the war ends.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Aug 11, 2025
Israel’s enemies and those mainstreaming antisemitism have good reason to celebrate. It’s been only 22 months since the horrific Hamas-led Palestinian-Arab terror attacks on Israel that took place on Oct. 7, 2023.
But, as far as much of the corporate liberal media is concerned, it is, at best, a distant memory. For the most part, however, it’s been erased along with the latest evidence of Hamas barbarism toward the Israeli hostages still in their hands, as they embrace the narrative that Israel is committing “genocide” and deliberately starving the children of Gaza.
These claims are false and they can and should be refuted. The distorted news coverage and the lies that are being mainstreamed about Israel’s conduct of the post-Oct. 7 war are integral to the debate about Gaza. The mendacious atrocity stories alleging Israeli misconduct and sending the truth about the intentions of the Palestinians and the brutal crimes they have committed down the Orwellian memory hole are shaping international opinion about the conflict.
But there is something even more sinister about the debate over Gaza that isn’t being fully understood either by Israelis or those in the Diaspora who are speaking up about what is happening. The willingness of so many to swallow pro-Hamas propaganda about Gaza as truth transcends contemporary arguments about the war or discussions on how best to combat the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism. The acceptance of assertions put forth by jihadists are laying the foundation for a future in which antisemitism will not just spread, but will be treated as something in which decent and high-minded people believe.
The half-life of lies
What should be understood is that the consequences of this campaign to demonize the Jewish state and its supporters will be with us long after the war in Gaza ends. Like radioactive material that lingers in the atmosphere, its half-life will not decay into insignificance for a very long time.
Those who promote the claim of genocide, as well as those who accept it passively, are laying the foundation for how much of the world will think about Jews for the foreseeable future. Their efforts are helping to convince a broad audience that the Jews and their state are uniquely awful and guilty of crimes against humanity. In this way, smearing the Jewish people, whose state is now considered evil, is rationalized. And such smears will be thrown in the faces of Jews for decades, perhaps even centuries, to come.
Put in this context, the effort to refute the lies must be seen not just as an important aspect of the information war to defend Israel today, but for generations of Jews yet born.
Mainstreaming anti-Zionism
As even a cursory examination of the objective evidence about what is happening in Gaza reveals, the food shortages there are clearly the fault of the Hamas terrorists. The Islamist group that ruled Gaza as an independent Palestinian terror state in all but name from 2007 until the aftermath of Oct. 7 started the war that caused all the suffering, and used tactics designed to put civilians in danger.
It also obstructs aid sent into the Strip to alleviate the suffering by sources they can’t control; steals most of the food that does come in; hoards it for itself; and then sells some of it to the population at exorbitant prices.
But with much of the media influenced by Hamas propaganda and woke leftist ideology that wrongly sees Israel as a “white” oppressor state that’s always in the wrong and the Palestinians as “people of color” who are always right, all evidence to the contrary is ignored.
As a result, the discussion about both the post-Oct. 7 war and the surge of antisemitism it set off is being shoehorned into a frame of reference in which Jew-hatred has been normalized. That was best illustrated by a trio of articles published last week by The New York Times, in which the demonization of Israel and Jews was portrayed as a principled response to events.
In one, the Times’s Ezra Klein conducted a fawning interview with Mahmoud Khalil, the Syrian-born activist threatened with deportation by the Trump administration. Khalil helped organize the pro-Hamas rallies and attacks on Jews at Columbia University. Klein’s obsequiousness not only enabled Khalil to falsify the history of the war against Israel, but to justify his conduct and the antisemitic campaign he has helped lead.
That the Times platformed someone spreading lies about Israeli behavior today is bad enough. But he also made the outrageous and equally false claim that the terrorist war of attrition known as the Second Intifada, which took the lives of more than 1,000 Israelis from 2000 to 2005, was “non-violent” and that Oct. 7 was a justified response to Israeli actions. In doing so, it treated his support for Hamas’s goal of eradicating Israel—something that can only be accomplished via genocide—as an objective that is, at worst, something about which people ought to be able to agree to disagree about.
It goes without saying that no responsible outlet would publish such a piece treating the proposed genocide of any other people in this manner. But that demonstrates how effective contemporary Jew-haters have been in mainstreaming both their goals and the defamation of Israel as an “apartheid” and genocidal state.
Just as telling was the Times interview with Anti-Defamation League national director and CEO Jonathan Greenblatt a few days later. I’m a stern critic of Greenblatt, whose leadership of the venerable group steered it away from its mission of Jewish defense toward one devoted to partisan liberal causes that both undermined its core purpose and legitimized woke leftist forces that were spreading antisemitism. But, since Oct. 7, he has been compelled by events to change course to some extent, as the wave of Jew-hatred spread over the globe.
Unlike the softball questions tossed to Khalil, Times journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro was adversarial with Greenblatt, challenging him on virtually every point, denying his attempt to explain how anti-Zionism and support for the Hamas agenda was not “criticism” of Israel. Desperate to appeal to the newspaper’s overwhelming liberal readership, Greenblatt boasted of his frequent bashing of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and how he shares the concerns of the Jewish state’s detractors about events in Gaza.
He deserves credit for trying to point out that the unprecedented increase in antisemitism since Oct. 7 is directly tied to the legitimization of anti-Zionism. But the overall impression of the piece was that of a besieged leader thrown on the defensive and losing the battle for the hearts and minds of his group’s erstwhile allies who have bought into the arguments of antisemites.
A subsequent piece by Times opinion columnist Lydia Polgreen, an avowed anti-Zionist, celebrated the way supposedly moderate Democrats like Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) are buying into the claims about Israel committing genocide and deliberately starving Palestinians. Polgreen extolled the fact that a large majority of Senate Democrats voted to halt military aid to the Jewish state during wartime.
But in doing so, the words “Oct. 7,” “Hamas” and “terrorism” never appeared, thus justifying the notion that taking sides against Israel and enabling those seeking its destruction to survive was the position of “conscience.”
A tipping point
It is therefore clear that the discussion about alleged starvation in Gaza must be understood not as simply a talking point in an endless debate about who did what to whom in a forever war in the Middle East. It is the potential tipping point for the delegitimization of Israel in the minds of most Democrats and liberals—and for the old bipartisan consensus to be replaced by a sense of the justice of the Jewish state that only Republicans can be counted on to espouse.
That’s not how a great many Americans—Jewish and non-Jewish—who think of themselves as friends of Israel, but are falling prey to the narrative about starvation, understand the discussion. The same applies to some Israelis who have allowed their bitter disagreement with Netanyahu to persuade them to validate the media misinformation about Gaza, and even to falsely label what is happening there as a form of genocide.
It is possible to argue that Israel’s war against Hamas has had its share of blunders and misguided strategies. The prime minister deserves credit for not letting himself be pressured to allow Hamas to survive—as the Biden administration and most of the world wished—as well as for achieving the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon and of Iran. But his decisions are fair game for criticism.
The new ‘Protocols’
But by succumbing to the claims about starvation that are rooted in Hamas disinformation and media bias, Netanyahu’s detractors, both at home and among Israel’s friends abroad, are doing more than distancing themselves from a leader they dislike. The legitimacy accorded the lies about a Gaza famine or vastly exaggerated Palestinian civilian statistics by those who claim they love Israel but oppose Netanyahu isn’t doing him much harm. Yet it is helping to justify the demonization of the Jewish state and giving aid and comfort to an emboldened movement of antisemites on the left and the far-right.
At stake here isn’t the reputation of the prime minister. It is, rather, a blood libel about Israel that may well be the moral equivalent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the rest of the 21st century, and a game plan for an endless round of antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish misdeeds.
Once you treat the canards about genocide as not merely debatable but reasonable, you have handed anti-Zionist Jew-haters of all ideological stripes a weapon that they will use against the Jewish people in ways that have nothing to do with Israeli political spats or second-guessing about the best way to finish the war in Gaza.
Those who sign letters denouncing Israel—or use mainstream platforms to virtue-signal about the plight of the Palestinians who cheered the Oct. 7 attacks but now are suffering for their support of Hamas—may mistakenly think they are speaking for Jewish values. But they are playing right into the hands of Hamas propagandists as well as those cheering for Israel’s destruction and attacking Jews wherever they live.
The lies they bolster rather than refute will be thrown in the face of the Jewish people for many years to come. They will be the slogans chanted not just by the current generation of Jew-haters, but those who will plague us in the future.
1 comment:
There are a lot of stupid motherfuckers in positions of power and authority in this country.
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