From K. The Magazine
Since the attack on October 7 and Israel’s war in Gaza, the word “genocide” has become a touchstone in public debate. A symbol of uncompromising commitment for some, it is no longer a matter of law, but an absolute moral imperative. In this article, Matthew Bolton analyzes the shift in meaning of this term—from legal accusation to ontological condemnation—and shows how its use, fueled by the theory of “settler colonialism,” leads to cutting off any possibility of political action against the war of destruction being waged by the Netanyahu government in Gaza. For by positing that Israel is acting on a logic of annihilation intrinsic to its very existence, the equation “Israel = genocide” becomes the axiom of an ideology that rejects any political solution to the conflict on principle.
In February 2024, the British social media personality Ash Sarkar interviewed the veteran leftist US senator Bernie Sanders. She posted a four-minute segment of the interview on her X account. It quickly went viral, racking up more than 8 million views. ‘I asked Bernie Sanders three times whether he thinks Israel’s assault on Gaza constitutes a genocide,’ she wrote. ‘This is what he said.’ To the first question, Sanders replied that ‘what Israel is doing is absolutely disgraceful, horrible’ and that he was doing ‘everything I can to end it.’ He said he ‘led the opposition’ in Congress to a bill which would have sent $14bn in American aid to Israel, because he didn’t ‘want to see the United States complicit in what Netanyahu and his right wing friends are doing right now to the Palestinian people.’ He called for a ‘humanitarian ceasefire’ and negotiations to ‘work out…some kind of long term solution.’ Sarkar was not satisfied. She asked again – was it a genocide? ‘We can argue about definitions,’ said Sanders, but what mattered was preventing further deaths and getting aid into Gaza. Sarkar tried once more: genocide or not? ‘We can talk about that,’ Sanders replied. ‘But what does that mean in real terms?’ What he was trying to do, he repeated, was to stop American aid to Israel so that ‘Mr Netanyahu and his right wing friends may decide it is not a good idea to continue’ with their war of destruction.
The response to the clip was savage. Sanders was ‘craven and cowardly,’ ‘spineless’ and a ‘grifter.’ The way he ‘was dancing around the question was so telling.’ Some went further. Sanders – who is Jewish and in his youth had spent time on a kibbutz similar to the ones attacked on 7 October – was a ‘Zionist and [that] explains everything he’s been doing and saying since Oct 7th.’ A week later, another video clip was posted on X, showing Sanders speaking at the University of Dublin. Here his views on term ‘genocide’ became a little clearer. ‘When you get to the word [genocide],’ he said, ‘I get a little bit queasy…and I, you know, I don’t know what, what ‘genocide’? You’ve got to be careful when you use that word.’ At this, those filming the video exploded with rage. They began yelling at Sanders: ‘it is a genocide…Bernie you have funded Zionism yourself, you have funded the Israeli settler state… liar, liar, genocide denier…you are a child killer, you are a genocide denier…the Native Americans are still being genocided [by the USA], I have never heard you once speak about genocide.’ Sanders has faced similar protests at his public appearances ever since.
The treatment of Sanders – a man who almost singlehandedly put the idea of democratic socialism back on the political agenda in the USA – encapsulates the totemic role the concept of ‘genocide’ has come to play in the opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. Here we have a leading politician who is forthright in his rejection of the war and who is acting concretely against it at the highest levels of American government. Yet because he refuses to use a particular word to describe the violence he seeks to prevent, he is mocked, vilified and excommunicated. And Sanders is not alone in this regard. The opposition to a war whose initial justice has been progressively undermined by its indefensible conduct is thus split and weakened, perhaps fatally. This raises the question: If the priority of the anti-war movement is preventing further death and destruction in Gaza – and the urgency of this demand, certainly since the resumption of Israeli bombing and blocking of aid in March 2025, cannot be doubted – why does it matter what it is called? Why is it worth sacrificing the unity of the movement on the altar of ‘genocide’?
On one level, the immediate take-up of the ‘genocide’ label – with the first charges issued while the dead were still being gathered from the Nova field and the kibbutzim – is simply further evidence of a general semantic inflation of the term over recent decades. From accusations that governments slow to impose Covid-19 lockdowns were committing genocide, to specious notions of ‘trans’ or ‘white genocide,’ the emotional power carried by the concept has made it a wearyingly ubiquitous rhetorical weapon in a social media-driven attention economy.
Yet when it comes to the application of the concept to Israel, there is, as ever, more at stake than internet posturing. For some observers, the appeal of the concept of ‘genocide’ in this context can be explained by the opportunity it affords to engage in a victim-perpetrator reversal, or Holocaust inversion. By accusing Israel – a state that rose from the ashes of an annihilated European Jewry – of genocide, of doing to others what was once done to them, Israel is placed on the same level as the Nazi regime. As Philip Spencer puts it, ‘[t]here was always a nagging sense of guilt about what was done to the Jews. The charge of genocide wipes this guilt away once and for all. Now anyone can say that the Jews do not deserve any more sympathy, because they are as bad as or even worse than the Nazis.’ At the same time, for Spencer, by spuriously accusing Israel of genocide for its response to Hamas atrocities which were themselves laced with genocidal intent, ‘the concept and charge of genocide is turned on its head.’
The eagerness with which so many grabbed the chance to accuse Israel of genocide in the aftermath of 7 October surely does have something to do with the taboo-breaking thrill of inverting, and thereby finally cancelling out, the Shoah. That for Pankaj Mishra – in a lecture delivered, bizarrely, as a sermon from the lectern of St James’ Church, Clerkenwell – it is Israel’s war that is ‘dynamiting the edifice of global norms’ built after ‘the Shoah’– rather, say, than Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Bashar al-Assad’s flagrant use of chemical weapons, or the US invasion of Iraq – is no coincidence. Nor is it just chance that the terminology of ‘concentration camp,’ ‘Auschwitz,’ ‘Warsaw Ghetto,’ ‘genocide’ and ‘Holocaust’ itself has long been ostentatiously used to condemn Israel’s treatment of Gaza and the Palestinian people. Sanders’s ‘queasiness’ at the use of the term by the anti-war movement no doubt stems from his recognition of this dynamic. That Sarkar too is aware of the weight of the word for Sanders is what lends the interview the uncomfortable air of a forced confession.
Matthew Bolton is a postdoctoral researcher at Queen Mary University of London’s Faculty of Law. He previously worked at the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung at the Technische Universität Berlin. He has written extensively on contemporary antisemitism.