(JNS) “Everything that needs to be said already has been said. But since no one was listening, it must be said again.” — Andre Gide, 1947 Nobel Prize laureate for literature

The original blood libel—the accusation that Jews kidnapped and murdered non-Jews to use their blood in religious rituals—began among Greeks in antiquity. It led to massacres of Jews throughout the Middle Ages, pogroms in the 19th century, and was revived in the 20th century by the Nazis.

Yet it was not only false, but an inverted reality. The Torah commanded the Israelites to shun the practice of some of their neighbors by not consuming animal blood. This requirement was elaborated in the laws of kashrut, including draining and salting kosher meat.

But the libel endured. Why not, since it proved useful against those Jews, a stiff-necked little minority that infuriatingly insisted God chose it to bring ethical monotheism to humankind. Like a periodically active volcano, it erupted during times of social stress. Once, such a time and place was late czarist Russia. Hence, during murderous antisemitic hysteria in the 1890s, Asher Ginzburg (his Hebrew pen name was Ahad Ha’am, “one of the people”) wrote that “every Jew who has been brought up among Jews knows as an indisputable fact that throughout the length and breadth of Jewry there is not a single individual who drinks human blood for religious purposes.” Therefore, “let the world say what it will about our moral inferiority: we know that its ideas rest on popular logic, and have no real scientific basis.”

Ginzburg asserted that the blood libel stood as “the solitary case in which the general acceptance of an idea about ourselves does not make us doubt whether all the world can be wrong, and we [the Jews] are right, because it is based on an absolute lie, and is not even supported by any false inference from particular to universal.”

He was mistaken. The 20th and 21st centuries have demonstrated numerous cases in which the Jews, or the Jewish state, have been right, and “all the world,” or at least large chunks of it, wrong. These include, but are hardly exhausted by, claims that Jews control international finance, run the world’s communications media, helped start two World Wars to profit from them, concocted the HIV-AIDS virus to attack their enemies, that Israel murders Palestinian Arabs to transplant their organs into Jewish recipients and that Zionism—the multi-ethnic Jewish people’s national liberation movement—is racism.

Today, the charge of “genocide” against Israel and its supporters for the war against Hamas and its allies refreshes the blood libel. It provides renewed justification for Jew-hatred, the resumption of massacres, and ultimately, the annihilation of Jews and their state. In doing so, the libel associated with the Israeli genocide of Palestinian Arabs caps the contemporary antisemitic catechism. This dogma merges the old Bolshevik charge of Zionist imperialism, Soviet-Arab League allegation of racism, and contemporary leftist and Islamist slander of the renewal of an indigenous people living in part of their ancient homeland as its opposite: settler-colonialism.

Last fall, Ireland elected Catherine Connolly president. She believes that Israel and the West should not have “any say about Hamas,” which she endorses as a “fabric of Palestinian life,” in a post-war Gaza government. As for the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led Palestinian massacres in Israel, Connolly instructs that “history did not start on 7 October” but with “many, many atrocities committed by the Israeli government through their army.”

They cry of ‘genocide’

Dissecting Connolly’s rise, Brendan O’Neill wrote in Spiked-Online that “she has become the patron saint of Ireland’s cult of Palestinianism. … It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which Ireland has been consumed by the religious fervor of Israelophobia.” In the Irish parliament, “they are hell-bent on seeing that dastardly Jewish nation be arraigned for ‘genocide’—so much so that the Irish government proposed that the International Court of Justice ‘broaden its interpretation of what constitutes the commission of a genocide’ in order that Israel might finally be found guilty of that crime.”

In the United Kingdom, Jew-hatred mainstreamed by a leftist-Islamist alliance in reaction to Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip has resulted in Jewish emigration. Tunku Varadarajan, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and New York University Law School’s Classical Learning Institute, focused on the genocide charge in a Wall Street Journal commentary: “That one word, more than any other, is killing the Jewish way of life in Britain.”

On Oct. 2, during Yom Kippur, a British Muslim drove his car into worshippers outside a synagogue in Manchester, England, then attacked them with a knife, killing one. Police gunfire killed a second Jew before fatally hitting the attacker. Times of London columnist Melanie Phillips told Varadarajan that the assault “took place against the backdrop of two years of demonization, incitement and intimidation directed at the Jewish community. …[T]his has been orchestrated by a Muslim-far-left alliance with now almost daily street demonstrations that feature chants to destroy Israel, kill Jews and ‘globalize the intifada.’ … [T]hese mobs are allowed to rule the streets with the police doing virtually nothing.”

A day later, the Associated Press reported that as many as 2 million Italians took to the streets in a 24-hour general strike “in solidarity with Gaza” and to support a self-described international aid flotilla of 40-plus ships attempting to break Israel’s blockade of the Strip. Called by major Italian trade unions, the strike turned out marchers in more than 100 cities.

After intercepting the flotilla, Israel asserted that it carried no amount of humanitarian aid. “It was never about bringing aid to Gaza. It was about the headlines and social-media followings,” said a police spokesman. Exactly, so more such flotillas reportedly were planned, additional acts in the theatrical, even ritualistic campaign to save Palestinian Arabs from “genocide.”

In the United States, also early in October, the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, sent its nearly 3 million members a Middle East map that erased Israel. Part of NEA’s “Indigenous Peoples Day” (Columbus Day) instructional material, the graphic labeled the Jewish state, Judea and Samaria, and the Gaza Strip as “Palestine” in English and Arabic. The materials in the mass emailing are also linked to anti-Israel websites.

NEA deleted the links after objections, first from the StopAntisemitism organization. A statement from the teachers’ union said it dropped the third-party material from its own website and condemned the “deeply offensive” content. Yet last June, NEA released its handbook of priorities for the coming school year that expunged Jews from the Holocaust. Instead, the handbook called for promoting International Holocaust Remembrance Day by “recognizing more than 12 million victims of the Holocaust from different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities and other targeted characteristics.” The handbook also falsely alleged Israel was founded by “forced, violent displacement and dispossession.”

The Big Apple votes Marxist-Islamist

Late in October, thousands attended a New York City rally for Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party nominee who would be elected mayor days later. Mamdani co-founded a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter while at Bowdoin College in Maine. He has said that support for the anti-Israel boycott, divest and sanction (BDS) movement by the Democratic Socialists of America attracted him to the party. After the 2023 massacres, Mamdani repeatedly labeled Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip a “genocide.”

The Big Apple’s mayor-elect personifies the “red-green” alliance of convenience. During the campaign, he would not repudiate the “globalize the intifada” slogan—that is, kill Jews wherever they are—of Hamas’s supporters. In Commentary online in late October, Seth Mandel noted that at an anti-Israel, antisemitic demonstration in New York in 2023, Mamdani claimed “in New York City, you have so many opportunities to make clear the ways in which that struggle over there [against Israel] is tied to capitalist interests over here.”

One of the speakers at Mamdani’s late October rally was Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Last summer, Sanders falsely declared that Israel “literally starved the people of Gaza” (in fact, at the time, more than 100,000 trucks with humanitarian aid had entered the Strip after Oct. 7, 2023), and won support of 26 Democratic colleagues for his proposal to ban certain US weapons sales to Israel.

While New York elected Mamdani mayor, Seattle voters chose Katie Wilson to lead their city. A self-described socialist, she, too, has accused Israel of genocide.

An fresco of a blood libel painted by the monk Adam Swach (1668-1747) at the cathedral basilica in Sandomierz, Poland. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

How are the charges of genocide and related claims, like starvation, fundamentally false, like the original blood libel?

Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, whose family perished in the Nazi-led Holocaust of European Jewry, coined the term in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Europe. Growing out of the post-World War II Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, the Genocide Convention was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. The convention does not include a legal definition but characteristically covers inherent intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, ethnic or religious group as such.

Just as Jewish law forbids the consumption of animal blood, Israel’s policy never intended the genocide of Palestinian Arabs. In practice, the opposite. Israel seized the Gaza Strip and West Bank (Judea and Samaria) from illegal Egyptian and Jordanian occupation, respectively, during the Six-Day War in June 1967. The estimated combined Arab population of the territories then totaled roughly 1 million. In 2021, the US State Department put the figure at nearly 5 million. That figure may be “greatly inflated,” according to at least one critic. Regardless, post-’67 Israeli policy in the territories, including electrification, water and sewage connections and medical clinics likely contributed to significant Palestinian population growth.

In fact, the genocide charge sticks to Israel’s enemies. The war in the Gaza Strip has been against would-be genocidaires. Hamas’s 1988 charter called for the destruction of Israel, an Islamic theocracy over it, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the annihilation of the Jews. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Popular Resistance Committees and civilians from Gaza killed nearly 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and kidnapped 251 others. It was the biggest one-day mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas politburo member Ghazi Hamad vowed many more by the US-designated terrorist group.

Deconstructing the war in Gaza

According to John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies in the Modern War Institute at the US Military Academy at West Point, Hamas spent 20 years preparing Gaza for war. It stored weapons in mosques, schools and residences; installed combat positions throughout civilian areas; and placed command posts under hospitals. It spent more than $1 billion building 350 miles of tunnels to shield itself, but not non-combatants. Each such act violated international rules of war. So did every launch of the tens of thousands of rockets from the Strip at Israeli civilian targets.

Spencer noted Hamas’s use of Gaza’s non-combatant population in a “human shield/human sacrifice” strategy. The Israel Defense Forces, on the other hand, “implemented more measures to prevent civilian harm than any military in the history of urban war.”

Among other actions, it sacrificed the element of surprise by warning civilians with phone calls, text messages and leaflets in Arabic to vacate target areas.

No matter. Images of widespread destruction in Gaza necessitated by Hamas’s militarization of the Strip, and general news media parroting of unverifiable casualty figures from the Hamas-dominated Gaza Health Ministry, helped turn Western public opinion and governments against Israel. This furthered the Islamists’ goal of a stalemated war that would leave them in power and “genocidal” Israelis isolated.

By Oct. 9, 2025, when the ceasefire and Israeli hostage-Palestinian prisoner release mediated by the Trump administration took effect, Hamas and its Western echo chamber claimed 67,000 fatalities in the two-year war. Proof of genocide?

The Gaza Health Ministry’s number likely counted all Gazans who died during those 24 months. This would have included thousands who perished from natural causes, from the perhaps 20% of terrorist rockets that fell short, and all those murdered by Hamas and its allies while attempting to flee terrorist-controlled areas, reach humanitarian aid confiscated by Hamas or perceived by the jihadis as opponents.

Regardless, accept the Hamas health ministry’s number. Accept then, too, the IDF estimate that it killed at least 22,000 terrorists. Subtract the latter figure from the former. That leaves 45,000 non-combatant deaths, or a ratio of roughly one combatant killed for every two non-combatant fatalities. Col. Richard Kemp, who commanded British forces in Afghanistan in 2003, has pointed to estimates issued by the United Nations of one combatant killed for every nine non-combatants in all post-World War II conflicts.

Kemp noted that estimates for US forces in Iraq were 1:3 and in Afghanistan between 1:3 and 1:5. In the Gaza Strip, the IDF ratio varied between 1:0.6 and 1:2, he said. But Hamas fights “from within the civilian population” and “deliberately tries to force the IDF to kill as many of their civilians as possible.” As a result, a credulous when not Jew-hating world “turns on Israel and falsely condemns it.”

The genocide malediction against Israel and its backers, like the blood libel before it, inverts reality to enable the repetition of that crime. As British novelist Howard Jacobson observed, “when, for the sheer irreligious hell of it, we begin withdrawing fellow-feeling from Jews, upturning the moral universe and declaring them guilty of what was done to them, this impiety shows itself first as thinking the unthinkable, then as saying the unsayable. It is impossible not to ask, how long before we do the undoable?”

The genocide libel against Israel and its supporters will not be defeated by Holocaust education. Leftists, the far right and Islamists often confiscate Jewish history to make Palestinian Arabs “new Jews” and Jews “new Nazis.” “Anti-hate” education may not avail either, in some cases, reinforcing bigotry.

A decade ago, Robert Wistrich, director of Hebrew University’s Vidal Sasson International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, wrote “Antisemitism and Jewish Destiny” for The Jerusalem Post.

He argued that Israelis and Diaspora Jews needed “to rediscover, redefine and reassess their Jewish identity, core Jewish values and the depth of their own connection to the Land of Israel as well as their historic heritage.” In what he called their “essential and relentless fight against antisemitism,” Jews had to be “worthy of the scriptural promise that ‘the Torah will come forth from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.’ ”

At bottom, this is what our enemies fear—and it’s what can defeat them.