Clearly, the death toll in Gaza has exceeded 100,000. The vast majority of the victims are civilians of all ages. The 2.3 million inhabitants have had their homes destroyed and are suffering from starvation, stress and disease. Since October 2023, some Israeli ministers have been openly advocating genocide, and the small territory of Gaza has been subjected to military and police divisions aimed at cramming the population into the worst conditions of unsanitary living, in what can only be called a concentration camp, the plan being to drive some out – but where? – and kill the others.
Consequently, the word ‘genocide’ corresponds to the facts, even if it is impossible to say at what point quantity becomes quality and therefore when exactly the moment of genocide has arrived. The terms crimes against humanity, urbicide and mass murder are also justified, but it is the term ‘genocide’ that has been the subject of debate, and there is a reason for this.
The reason is that several political movements and a host of individuals, particularly in the so-called pro-Palestinian movement, have been talking about ‘genocide’ since 7 October 2023 – that is, since the pogromist provocation by Hamas that allowed the gradual unfolding of the current horror. The first lasting ceasefire was followed, since its violation by Netanyahu on 18 March 2025, by an intensification of massacres and violence aimed at driving the Palestinian people out of the West Bank, so that we can speak here of ethnic cleansing in the sense known since the former Yugoslavia in 1992-1995. In fact, the movements and individuals in question have not been talking about ‘genocide’ since 7 October 2023, but since well before that. Essentially, for them, ‘Israel’ and ‘the Zionists’ are genocidal. Sometimes we see writings explaining that ‘the genocide’ began in 1947. This would mean that it has been going on continuously for 78 years!
The same people do not see genocide elsewhere. They have turned a blind eye to the urbicide of Mariupol, which in terms of the number of victims is probably close to Gaza, and deny that Ukrainians are threatened with genocide by Russian-Putinist neo-fascism. They are indifferent to the Tutsis, the Uyghurs and the Rohingyas. Despite the fact that the latter two groups are, like the majority of Palestinians, Muslims, they are conscientiously ignored by the fetishists of the Eternal Zionist Genocide. It is clear that we are dealing here with a major contemporary form of unconscious antisemitism – expressed by people who are often sincerely convinced they could never be antisemitic – but which reproduces all its fantastical and conspiratorial traits, attributing them to the ‘Zionists’.
It is therefore necessary to distinguish between the fantastical ‘Zionist genocide’ and the real genocide being carried out by Netanyahu, which is not the result of a fantasised, ahistorical ‘Zionist’ essence, but of the global offensive by the Trump/Putin axis, and which has as its corollary the risk of genocide of the Ukrainian people, the hunt for migrants and the destruction of the rule of law in Europe and the United States. One must not obscure the other and vice versa.
Clarification and discussion are not facilitated by the UN’s legal definition of genocide, whose level of generality allows for very long lists of ‘genocides’ of various kinds, although this confusion stems initially from the fact that Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term and developed the concept, while clearly identifying the genocide committed by the Nazis against the Jews, discerned the broader genocidal dynamic of Nazism on a European scale. Many participants in these ‘debates’ knowingly or spontaneously resort to sophistry, relying on the legal definition to claim that ‘the Zionists’ are committing the equivalent of the Holocaust. This is not the case: each genocide must be recognised in its own specificity, in order to be better condemned.
Thus, the fact that Israeli soldiers use starving Gazans trying to access food distribution centres for target practice fully justifies comparing this inhumane attitude to that of the SS entering the Warsaw ghetto. Such a statement is not in itself an ‘anti-Zionist’-anti-Semitic fantasy and such acts warrant the total moral condemnation of what the Israeli army is doing. But one of the specificities is that such facts are known practically on the day they occur because there are other Israeli soldiers who report them with shame, newspapers such as Haaretz that report on them, and movements such as Standing Together that express outrage about them: Needless to say, there was obviously nothing of the sort in Nazi Germany. The use of reason in reporting and interpreting the facts is all the more necessary when indignation is called for.
There is a fairly simple, albeit sad, way to identify, at the present moment, those for whom the word ‘genocide’ is a fetish covering up conscious or unconscious antisemitism, rather than the designation of a reality and a people to be defended and saved, the Palestinians. The threshold of genocide is increasingly recognised as having been crossed, including by European heads of state and people who, in the name of ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’, have until now condoned the massacres. It is also recognised by Jews, Zionist or otherwise, who are hostile to the policies and actions of the Israeli government, but who protested when they felt the term was being used as a charge against all Jews, and who now use it themselves, albeit somewhat euphemistically (‘genocidal risk’, ‘genocidal danger’, ‘genocidal dynamic’). Those for whom ‘Zionist genocide’ is a fetish are now furious that others are using the term. They stamp their feet, get angry, saying ‘you’re saying it too late’, etc., instead of trying to use these growing numbers of people taking a stand to defend and save the Palestinians. In doing so, they show that defending the Palestinians is not their real concern, despite the display of keffiyehs and flags…
There is genocide, or at least the beginning of genocide, and the Israeli authorities are displaying it more and more openly. The practical and democratic conclusion is that it must be prevented. We must therefore demand that forces be sent. Not a boat with Rima and Greta, but armed forces, to break the blockade and save the Palestinian people of Gaza. Just as Ukraine must be armed. That is what fighting genocide means. It must be said that the ‘pro-Palestinian movement’ … has not thought of this!
It is true that no capitalist government has ever intervened to stop a genocide in its early stages or while it was unfolding. This was true of the Holocaust and the Samudaripen (the genocide of the Roma) during the Second World War: stopping these genocides was not the goal of the war, neither for Roosevelt, nor for Churchill or Stalin. It was also true in Rwanda in 1994: the only reason France sent troops was to help the perpetrators of the genocide, not the victims.
Nevertheless, the current moment demands this fight and is conducive to it. So what do we do?
The French original of this article was first published on the website of APLutSoc. This English translation by Daniel Mang first appeared on the Left Renewal Blog.
More content from this blog
- Beauty and Cosmopolitan Whiteness, by L. Ayu Saraswati – 3 May 2021
- Hobbled by Obstruction and Uncertainty: Gaza’s Post-Ceasefire Aid Response, by Ghada Abdulfattah and Riley Sparks – 20 November 2025
- The enemy’s enemy: feminism at the crossroads of neoliberal co-optation and anti-gender conservatism, by Jenny Gunnarsson Peyne and Sofie Tornhill – 6 May, 2021
- ‘Our Genocide’: Israeli Rights Groups Abandon Their Restraint on Gaza, by Shatha Yaish – 31 July 2025
- Trump’s Imperialism – 5 April 2025