Mick Hartley

In full:

The accusation predates every action it claims to be responding to. 2007. 2014. 2021. Before this war, before this government, before October 7. Historian Georges Bensoussan has documented that it goes back to 1948 itself ; the French collaborationist writer Maurice Bardèche was already accusing Israel of “genocide against the Arabs” before the first war of independence had ended. From 1950, Soviet propaganda flooded the world in dozens of languages equating Zionism with Nazism. By 1982, during the Lebanon war, a respected French jurist was writing in Le Monde calling on the West to stop “this genocide.”
The word was never waiting for evidence. It was waiting for an opportunity to get amplified.
On October 7, while Hamas terrorists were massacring families in the kibbutzim and at a music festival, the organization was simultaneously declaring that “the Palestinian people endure a daily genocide.” Ismail Haniyeh, from his hotel in Doha, called the attack a “heroic epic” , then added: “We face a genocide before the eyes of the world.” In Arabic, Hamas promised the annihilation of Jews.
By October 10, the Palestinian envoy to the UN was formally accusing Israel of seeking to commit genocide. On December 29, South Africa filed at the International Court of Justice. The ICJ never found that Israel was committing genocide, but who cares?
Everyone already “knows”. Francesca Albanese, Amnesty, scholars…
Just like in 2001, at the Durban conference against “racism”, “apartheid” and “genocide” had been formally imposed as the official vocabulary of the conflict- through organizational pressure and the silence of institutions that should have known better.
So today when two Jewish men get stabbed in Golderd Green or a Jewish girl gets raped because she is a “Zionist”, it is no longer processed as antisemitism. Within the logic of the genocide accusation, it reads as a response to a crime. That’s the point.
The genocide charge has nothing to do with what Israel does. It never did. It has everything to do with what Israel and Jews are supposed to be. It is the accusation of deicide, updated for a secular age. Once you were Christ-killers. Now you are genocide-perpetrators. The crime changes. The function is the same.