27 October, 2025

On 7 October 2023, the terrorist organization Hamas and allied groups attacked multiple Israeli communities, including a music festival held near the kibbutz Re’im in the north-western Negev desert. The terrorists murdered almost 1,200 people and kidnapped another 250 people to serve as hostages. There have been credible reports of torture, rape, and other forms of cruelty inflicted during these events, which I’ll refer to as the October 7 massacres.

These attacks on Israel attracted widespread international condemnation. More surprisingly, however, many people excused them or even glorified the perpetrators. The excuses and glorification came not only from Islamists in the Middle East but from secular opponents of Israel living in Western democracies. It became clear that many politically focused individuals in the West are not merely critical of the Jewish state and certain of its actions and policies; they regard Israel as a white colonial enclave that lacks any legitimacy, should not have been established in the 1940s, and ought to be destroyed.

Over the last two years, such criticisms have been amplified many times over, as we’ve followed events in a desperate urban war carried out on terms dictated by Hamas. Like many such organizations, Hamas benefits by maximizing the number of deaths and injuries within its own civilian population. These can be leveraged for a global information war, and indeed Hamas has achieved remarkable successes at that level of its struggle against Israel. This is a well-known approach to asymmetrical warfare. It has often been used in the past to gain international support and to triumph politically against militarily stronger enemies.

Similar strategies have a long history, and aspects of them were formalized by nineteenth-century theorists of insurrection, including the Russian nihilist Sergei Nechaev (1847–1882) and the French anarchist Émile Henry (1872–1894). The idea came into its own, however, with the practices of twentieth-century insurrectionist groups. These would hide among civilian populations while avoiding conventional battles that they were unlikely to win. They challenged militarily superior adversaries by committing atrocities that predictably led to harsh responses. This was especially successful against colonial or occupying powers constrained by domestic and international scrutiny. Classic case studies include the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921), the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya (1952–1960), and the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962).

To focus briefly on just one example, the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (better known as the Mau Mau) conducted attacks on isolated settler farms and assassinated pro-British Kikuyu people, including the 1953 Lari massacre, in which 74 victims were murdered with extreme brutality. These acts sowed fear, polarized communities, and provoked a British overreaction: the colonial authorities resorted to torture, mass detentions, aerial bombardments, and executions on a large scale. By 1956, the Mau Mau were militarily defeated, but the savage response to their rebellion caused revulsion at home in the United Kingdom and attracted international criticism. This accelerated Kenya’s path to independence in 1963.

In such cases, provocative atrocities are used to exploit the moral and legal limits recognized in modern democracies, if not always by their governments. While they might not welcome it, political leaders and military personnel in democratic states face intense domestic and international scrutiny over their responses to wars, insurrections, or armed revolutions.

The scale of the October 7 massacres exceeded precursors such as the Lari massacre or the 1955 Philippeville massacre in Algeria, but we can see the same pattern. They were meant to provoke an Israeli response that could then be used in global information warfare.

When they embarked on full-scale war, Israel’s political and military leaders must have been aware of past successes by the Mau Mau, the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria, and other insurrectionist groups that committed provocative atrocities as part of their strategy, and they should have been aware of the information war that was coming. All of this is textbook material for mainstream military strategists and terrorist masterminds alike.

The Israelis must also have known how important it was to comply as closely as possible to international humanitarian law – both to reduce the carnage of urban warfare for its own sake and to position themselves to withstand scrutiny. What the Israeli leaders might not have understood was just how fertile the soil had become in the Western democracies for even the most extreme and appalling accusations against their country to take root.

In his chapter of a new book on threats to open inquiry and free speech, the Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry examines the credulity of left-wing scholars and activists – extending to prominent NGOs and to many individuals and bodies connected with the United Nations – when Israel is portrayed as committing genocide. Boudry explains this credulity by its connection to an anti-Western ideology through which Israel is easily perceived as a white, Western colonial outpost.

Boudry is clearly onto something. It’s notable that Hamas does not merely seek the withdrawal of Israel from territories that it currently occupies, or partly controls, as a result of past wars that were never fully settled. Hamas is pledged to violent eradication of Israel as a political entity. Here, it differs from past insurrectionist organizations such as the Mau Mau in Kenya or the FLN in Algeria. The Mau Mau and FLN fought to establish independent nations, but they never plotted the destruction of the United Kingdom or France. Naturally enough, Hamas has learned from their experiences. In many circles, however, it also gets away with presenting itself as a similar insurrectionist organization merely seeking liberation for its people. That message now finds a ready audience in the West.

To be clear, the war in Gaza has involved tens of thousands of deaths, though reports of the actual numbers and demographic distribution have probably been manipulated for propaganda purposes by the Gaza Ministry of Health (which is essentially an arm of Hamas). Thus, we don’t have trustworthy figures showing the proportion of non-combatants to Hamas fighters among those killed, or the percentages of fatalities disaggregated by age group and sex. Heavy civilian casualties are in any case to be expected under conditions of urban warfare, especially when enemy fighters embed themselves in population centres and within, around, and underneath civilian infrastructure such as hospitals and schools. Nonetheless, the overall death toll in Gaza is tragic.

Israel has, moreover, undoubtedly committed some breaches of international humanitarian law. After all, such breaches happen on every side of any serious war, though this does not excuse them. Some may even rise to the level of war crimes – again an occurrence in most prolonged conflicts. 

It’s not my intention, then, to exonerate Israel of all forms of wrongdoing. But whatever else it must answer for, Israel is obviously not committing genocide in Gaza. In particular, it is not committing genocide as defined by Article II of the Genocide Convention (and reflected in Article 6 of the Rome Statute) as interpreted by international courts and tribunals. Genocide involves an attempt “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” – which has been interpreted to mean not merely dispersing a group or destroying its culture, but destroying it biologically. Put bluntly, genocide involves efforts at a group’s extermination. This is not the nature of Israel’s war against Hamas.

The legal definition of genocide is narrower than definitions used by some scholars, activists, NGOs, and others, which have employed ideas of “cultural genocide”, “structural genocide”, “slow genocide”, and the like, none of which necessarily involves the physical and biological destruction of a group or the typical methods of génocidaires such as massacres, death camps, and rapes on a mass scale.

Philosophers are familiar with the argumentative sleight of hand involved here: a new definition is stipulated that differs from whatever attracted powerful emotional responses in the first place, but at the same time, an attempt is made to hang on to exactly those emotional responses.

The legal definition of genocide is confined to the destruction of specific kinds of groups – national, ethnic, racial, or religious. It does not include, for example, large-scale purges of real or imagined political opponents. This definition might be narrower than the popular conception of genocide, which is closely tied to mass killings, but not necessarily to specific sorts of groups. For example, the notorious killing fields in Pol Pot’s Kampuchea fall within the popular conception of genocide, and indeed the mass killings in the 1970s in what is now Cambodia did have genocidal elements under the legal definition. However, the victims were largely the regime’s imagined political enemies, irrespective of nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion, and those aspects are properly classified as crimes against humanity rather than genocide.

In another sense, however, the legal definition of genocide may be broader than the popular conception, in that it can capture some actions on a smaller scale than prototypical examples such as the Holocaust, in which (among other atrocities) six million Jews were murdered, or the 1990s slaughter in Rwanda, where half a million or more Tutsis were murdered (and among other atrocities, hundreds of thousands of Tutsi women were raped).

It has been accepted since the 1940s that large numbers of civilian deaths in the course of warfare do not fall into the legal definition of genocide, and nor are they part of its popular conception. Situations where civilians are directly and deliberately targeted in the conduct of war will be war crimes, but even these won’t amount to genocide unless they are part of a campaign to exterminate a group, rather than, say, to coerce an enemy to surrender.

Even assuming that some civilian deaths in Gaza resulted from identifiable war crimes, that does not amount to genocide. It’s clear that Israel has sought to achieve strategic and military aims, such as freeing hostages and getting rid of Hamas, rather than trying to exterminate a group within the meaning of the Genocide Convention (e.g. the Palestinians) or a part of the group (e.g. those Palestinians living in Gaza). It has also sought to reduce civilian casualties and to comply with international humanitarian law. This has often entailed losing the advantage of surprise by giving prior warnings of attacks on targets thought to be of military significance. In other cases, missions have been called off to avoid their potential for high civilian casualties.

Israel’s actions, viewed as a whole, have not remotely been those of a genocidal state. As Maarten Boudry expressed the point in a recent article in Quillette, “The more informed critics of Israel – those who understand the definition of genocide – should recognise that an army issuing evacuation warnings and facilitating humanitarian aid is pursuing a different project altogether.”

When the word genocide is falsely attached to Israel – rather than, say, calling for investigations of possible war crimes – it has an impact. The effect – and no doubt the intent – of spreading a genocide narrative is precisely to associate Israel with “the crime of crimes” and more specifically with the horrors perpetrated by Nazi Germany. By linguistic sleight of hand, Israel is frequently accused of committing its own Holocaust. This association then clings to all Israelis and can extend more broadly to the Jewish people themselves.

Like any nation involved in war, Israel should expect scrutiny and fair criticism. But over the past two years, public discussion of the war in Gaza has frequently had an air of unreality, with participants showing little grasp of the strategies and dilemmas that Israel faced. We have seen an effort – largely successful – at outright demonization of Israel through the misuse and equivocal use of the term genocide. This ignores the realities of urban warfare and obscures the dynamics where groups like Hamas exploit civilian suffering to gain political leverage.

The false Gazan genocide narrative sidelines the challenges of fighting a terrorist organization embedded within a civilian population. It inflames global tensions, fosters antisemitism, and distracts from efforts to understand the genuine rights and wrongs of the war.

Russell Blackford is Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle, NSW, and a contributing editor to The Philosophers’ Magazine. His latest book is How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration (Bloomsbury, 2024).