Hirsh is a professor of sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also the Academic Director and CEO of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.
The driving aim of the grotesque ‘genocide’ libel is to attempt to portray Israel – and by extension, Jews – as modern-day Nazis, and to treat them accordingly
As he attacked the synagogue in Manchester to murder Jews, he shouted: ‘This is what they get for killing our children’. For a thousand years, Jews have been attacked by people who accuse them of murdering children. Today, there is an apparently respectable and legitimate way of repeating this antisemitic blood libel. It is to say that Israel is committing genocide.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have said Israel is committing genocide. The Governments of South Africa and Ireland have made the accusation. Genocide Studies scholars and other academics, including my own European Sociological Association, have given the claim all the weight their professorial credentials can muster. A United Nations independent commission of enquiry has said Israel is committing genocide. The UK Government says that it would not stand in the way of the UK courts sending Israeli Ministers for trial at the International Criminal Court.
But Israel is not committing genocide, it is fighting a war against a genocidal movement. On 7 October 2023, Israel was invaded by Hamas, which proudly states genocidal antisemitism as one of its founding principles. A thousand Jews were deliberately murdered that day, in cold blood and more were killed defending their country. Hamas also led a campaign of deliberate sexual violence and it kidnapped about 250 people.
Creating the concept of genocide was part of the work of describing and understanding what the Nazis had done to the Jews of Europe. It was codified into international law in 1948. What was it about the Holocaust that needed this re-conceptualisation? Mass killing, mass cruelty, deliberate starvation, sexual violence and the removal of children from their families have not been unusual in human history. But the term ‘genocide’ captured a campaign to commit these crimes for the purpose of destroying a collectivity of human beings, as such.
Often, the defence of Israel against the charge of genocide sounds cringingly legalistic. But the difference between Israel fighting a defensive war, and Israel conducting a deliberate campaign of murdering children and other civilians with intent to destroy the Palestinians, is far from a legal technicality.
Millions of civilians died in the Second World War, but nobody compares the deaths of French people who died in the battle of Normandy or innocent Germans who died in the Allied advance to Berlin, with the genocide of Jews in the shooting pits or the gas chambers. One was predictable casualties of war, the other was genocide.
Some say that Israel should not fight Hamas. They say that the price in human suffering of engaging an enemy that treats civilian casualties on its own side as a strategic gain, is too high. They say that it would have been better for Israel to do what it has done before, which is to withdraw, allow Hamas to re-consolidate and re-arm, and buy back the hostages, and the bodies of the hostages, and to endure the humiliation of the Hamas victory celebrations. Even if opponents of the war described their favoured option honestly, there is no similarity between this war, even if one opposes it, and genocide.
It is true that people under the age of 18 die in this war, some of them as combatants (the Hamas use of child soldiers is a war crime) and some of them as civilians, who are deliberately caught up in the fighting by Hamas strategy. Who knows how accurate the Hamas figures might be, but what military experts like John Spencer demonstrate is that given the nature of the war, Israel still manages to keep civilian casualty rates low compared to other examples of urban warfare. Palestinian suffering in Gaza is huge and terrible, but it is the responsibility of Hamas, which started the war, which hides amongst its own people, which refuses to surrender even when all is lost; and which came into existence to sabotage the peace process that ought to have led to Palestinian independence.
Antisemitic violence does not come out of nothing, it comes out of antisemitic thinking. It comes out of the portrayal of Jews as murderers. It comes out of the portrayal of Jews as Nazis. It comes out of the portrayal of the Jews as globally powerful and oppressive.
We live in a time when so many of our heroes, role models, teachers and leaders say that Israel is committing genocide, like Nazis. And this blood libel spreads from the state of Israel to Jews, for whom some kind of positive attachment to Israel is an aspect of their Jewish identity.
The blood libel is treated as legitimate by the international organisations that were set up in the wake of the Holocaust to prevent it from happening again.
This portrayal of Israel and the overwhelming majority of ordinary Jews as Nazis has the effect of removing from Jews the protection that they thought they had from antisemitism, since the Holocaust. It is a license to relate to Jews as one would relate to Nazis.