Recent polling by Richard Baris (of Big Data Poll) shows that a large share of Americans—particularly younger voters, including many on the political right—believe that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. When asked, a plurality of registered voters (38.4%) believe “what Israel has done in Gaza amounts to genocide.” Less than 3 in 10 (29.0%) say it does not, and roughly one-third (32.6%) are unsure. Republican voters ages 18-29 agree 43.5 to 36.2 percent. That margin widens significantly among the same age group that self-identifies as America First Republicans, with nearly 60 percent agreeing with the statement. Moreover, except among Republicans overall, Israel drew less support than did Gazans. Even here, sympathy for Israel is less than 50 percent. More striking is that the group with the greatest sympathy for Gaza is young devotees of the American First movement. Note also the ambivalence of many respondents. The sample size of the poll exceeded 2,000. (For Baris’s report, see Poll: Sympathy for Israel Falls to Historic Low Among U.S. Voters.)
As someone well-informed about the conflict and having an in-depth understanding of the laws of genocide and war, these numbers are troubling. They indicate that a large proportion of the American population does not understand the situation. However, as I will come back to at the end of this essay, it suggests something more disturbing: that many Americans hold Israel to a different standard than they do other nations. Assuming, charitably, that these numbers mainly reflect widespread ignorance of genocide law and a nation’s permissible response when attacked, it is important to state that the belief that Israel perpetrated genocide in Gaza misinterprets both the legal meaning of genocide and Israel’s response to the events of October 7, 2023.
On the matter of genocide, a genocide is defined by its motive: the intent to destroy an ethnic population in whole or in part. Israel did not carry out its operations in Gaza with this motive. Israel’s action in Gaza was defensive. Israel was responding to an attack by a belligerent entity on Israeli soil. Indeed, it was responding to a genocidal act, not perpetrating one. To explain this, I will draw a parallel between the Israeli-Gazan situation and Allied operations conducted against Nazi Germany during WWII. Allied actions in Nazi Germany will serve as the moral measuring rod for judging the appropriateness of Israel’s actions.
Under Nazi rule, Germany pursued a genocidal agenda, seeking to eliminate the Jews from German society and from Europe altogether, with plans to do the same in the Middle East (see Jew-Hatred in the Arab-Muslim World: An Ancient and Persistent Hatred). Following this genocidal aggression and Germany’s broader assault on Europe, the Allies unleashed a campaign of overwhelming force on German cities—Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Frankfurt, and other urban centers—reducing them to rubble. The devastation, when viewed in photographs today (easily obtained by searching Google images, some of which appear in my essay The Danger of Missing the Point: Historical Analogies and the Israel-Gaza Conflict), bears a striking visual resemblance to Gaza. Roughly 600,000 German civilians were killed in Allied bombing alone, tens of thousands of them children, and millions of German civilians died through other causes during the war. Yet the Allied campaign is not understood as genocidal because its motive was defensive and reactive. The scale of devastation, horrific as it was, did not define the moral category. Intent did.
The Hamas attack of October 7 carried a clearly stated genocidal intention. Hamas’s foundational commitment is the removal of Jews from Palestine, which its slogan “from the river to the sea” and its charter openly articulate. The 1988 Hamas Covenant contains genocidal language, including explicit calls for violence against Jews as a group, promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories, and framing of the conflict as a religious obligation to eliminate the “Zionist enemy.” The charter contains two particularly inflammatory provisions that are widely regarded as genocidal in intent. Article 7 quotes a well-known hadith declaring that the Day of Judgment will not arrive until Muslims fight and kill the Jews. Article 13 categorically rejects any peaceful solution or negotiation, stating that “there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad” and dismissing all diplomatic initiatives and international conferences as contrary to Hamas’s principles. Regardless of later revisions to the charter, which do not alter the intent identified above, the ideological core remains: a Jew-free Palestine. October 7 was carried out in furtherance of this genocidal goal.
Israel responded to the horrific attacks of October 7 defensively, striking Hamas targets embedded across Gaza’s densely populated urban environment. Again, crucially, the moral comparison between Germany and Hamas rests not on the scale of devastation (in lives lost, approximately 6-7 percent of the German civilian population, and 3-4 percent of the Gazan population), but on motive: in both cases, one side initiated aggression grounded in genocidal ideology; the other responded with overwhelming force designed to defeat that aggression.
Critics argue that the comparison to World War II is flawed because the Allies fought a sovereign nation-state, whereas Israel faces a non-state militant organization embedded among civilians. However, the structural form of the enemy does not alter the essential moral fact: in each case, a genocidal actor initiated the violence. Israel’s response, like that of the Allies, aimed to neutralize an entity driven by the elimination of a people, as the Hamas Convenant makes clear. Once more, intent, not political form, is the hinge of the moral argument.
Another criticism focuses on foreseeability. Critics claim that even if Israel did not intend civilian casualties, the extent of the destruction was foreseeable and therefore morally condemnable. Yet international law has long distinguished between intent and foreseeable collateral damage. Civilian casualties, even on a large scale, do not constitute genocide unless they arise from a desire to destroy a population. The Allies bombed German cities knowing that civilians would die in enormous numbers, yet their motive—to defeat a belligerent and genocidal regime—remains morally distinct from genocide itself. The same holds for Israel confronting Hamas fighters who systematically embed themselves in civilian structures precisely to produce inflated civilian death tolls.
A further argument asserts that Israel’s overwhelming military superiority imposes a heightened obligation for restraint. But superiority does not alter intent, nor does it erase the right of a nation to defend itself after suffering a genocidal massacre. Indeed, a nation acquires overwhelming military superiority to deter threats to its people and to effectively repel those threats if deterrence fails. The Allies eventually enjoyed overwhelming industrial and military superiority over Germany, yet this never transformed their defensive campaign into genocide. Nor did Israel’s campaign in Gaza become genocidal. Moral categories do not shift based on the balance of forces.
Some critics insist that Israel never truly left Gaza, pointing to border controls and airspace restrictions. This is the “Gaza under siege” narrative, which typically elevates controls and restrictions with language suggesting an Israeli blockade. But Israel’s withdrawal in 2005 was complete: every soldier and every Jewish civilian was removed from Gaza. What followed was Hamas’s ascendancy and its decision to militarize Gaza, diverting international aid away from civilian needs and into tunnels and weaponry (Gaza-specific aid for the 2005-2023 period is estimated at $12–15 billion, with $3.5-4 billion coming from USAID). The dire conditions in Gaza reflect this militarization, not an Israeli desire to eliminate the population. Holding Israel responsible for the consequences of Hamas’s governance confuses cause with effect.
Critics also claim that Hamas does not represent the civilian population in the way that the Nazi regime represented Germany, making the analogy inappropriate. Yet Hamas is the de facto governing authority of Gaza, exercising control for nearly two decades. (Can it really be said that the Nazi government was representative of German interests?) Gaza has deliberately placed its military infrastructure in hospitals, schools, and residential buildings to maximize civilian exposure and to weaponize civilian casualties for political effect. When a governing authority uses civilians as shields, civilian deaths become part of its strategic calculus, not evidence of genocidal intent by the opposing force.
Some argue that the scale of destruction in Gaza must itself be taken as proof of genocide. But devastation alone does not define genocide. World War II’s destruction of Germany far exceeded what has occurred in Gaza (possibilty twice as many civilians deaths in Germany compared to Gaza), yet the Allies are not remembered as perpetrators of genocide against Germans. The decisive factor in moral reasoning is always intent, not the magnitude of devastation, and Israel’s intent has been the defeat of a genocidal organization, not the extermination of a people.
This brings the analogy to one more important dimension. The Allied demand for Germany’s total surrender was followed by the project of denazification, which aimed to ensure that Germany would not repeat its genocidal aggression. Ending hostilities without uprooting the ideology at its core would have guaranteed future conflict. By contrast, the cease-fire negotiated between Israel and Gaza—despite Israel’s ongoing operations—prevented Israel from securing a total surrender from Hamas or enforcing any ideological disarmament comparable to denazification. Calls for Hamas to be disarmed have not been accepted by Hamas itself (and the Arabic parties involved seem disinteresting in pressing the issue), and nothing resembling ideological de-radicalization has occurred in Gaza. The Islamist, clerical-fascist ideology that undergirds Hamas bears a conceptual similarity to the fascism that animated Nazi Germany, but unlike postwar Germany, Gaza has undergone no ideological transformation. This is why I opposed a cease-fire. I believe Israel should have been permitted to completely remove Hamas from the territory.
Thus, Israel is not only wrongly accused of genocide; it is held to a standard that the Allies themselves were never held to. Imagine how unacceptable a resolution to WWII would have been if it had ended through a cease-fire that left the Nazi regime intact, unreformed, unbeaten, and un-disarmed. Such an outcome would have been rightly rejected as dangerous and incomplete. A cease-fire may halt violence temporarily, but it can also freeze a conflict in a form that prevents the defensive side from accomplishing the very goal that made its campaign morally justified. Yet Israel faces precisely this situation. It is judged harshly for doing far less than what the Allies were required to do to end a genocidal threat, and at the same time, is denied the opportunity to achieve the decisive conditions that ended the fascist threat in Europe.
The charge of genocide against Israel not only fails historically, legally, and morally—it inverts the roles of aggressor and defender in a way that obscures the real dynamics of the conflict. So I close by asking readers to consider the source of the double standard. How did the sides get flipped in the minds of so many people? How does Israel become, in the eyes of millions of reasonably intelligent observers, a bad actor when the Allied victory over Germany is celebrated, and the deradicalization of a belligerent entity is seen as necessary? What is the difference between the cases? The only one I can see is that, in the case of Israel’s actions, the ethnic group defending its people from genocide is Jewish. Given the extent and intensity of anti-Jewish sentiment in the West today, perhaps this was a predictable development.
freedom and reason 