Since October 7, 2023, the concocted narrative of a ‘genocide’ in Gaza has catalyzed the activist left.
In Israel on October 7, 2023, 1,200 people — including 364 young men and women attending a music festival — were murdered in cold blood in a mass sneak attack launched by Hamas from the Gaza Strip. Terrorists went house to house, killing and burning with barbaric fury. (I have seen the agonizing videos and grisly photographs of the aftermath, and if you doubt for a moment the mad cruelty on display that day, you owe it to yourself to see them as well.) Hamas abducted 251 people from Israel and carried them away into brutal captivity. (Only 166 of them came back alive.)
And needless to say, before the week was even out, while the nation was reeling from the largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, and before it had even responded militarily, Israel was already being accused of committing genocide. The situation in Gaza — from which Israel withdrew in 2005 — was “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” wrote Raz Segal on October 13 in Jewish Currents. U.N. official Craig Mokhiber mirrored that language on October 28, 2023, in a resignation letter where he called events in Gaza a “text-book case of genocide.”
The insanely tendentious rhetoric — Gaza was suddenly characterized as “an open-air concentration camp,” the Israelis their repulsively hypocritical “jailers” — took the familiar path, using Jewish history as a club against Israel: You complain about the Holocaust, and here you are, committing “genocide”! Of course it was a farcical claim — people die in war, especially when terrorists hide among civilians. And while it is no doubt terrible to live in a war zone, the blame lies with those who started that war. But the reason you keep hearing the argument made is because Israel’s enemies seek desperately to strip it of the armor of its moral reason for existing. (If you need World War II explained to you — apparently Tucker Carlson still does! — then you’re probably beyond help.) The rhetoric on college campuses and online was vastly cruder, and eventually all of it was given political expression by Democratic Socialists like Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Three years on, the situation has only grown worse. Israel has become a key fracture point within the Democratic Party coalition. Republicans have their Carlsons and Fuenteses to wrangle with, to be sure, but there is no serious political debate on this subject within the elected party. Meanwhile the one thing that seemingly unites every wing of the young socialist left isn’t socialism at all — it’s hatred of Israel on existential moral grounds. The Israelis are butchers and settler-colonialists, we are told, an invasive (white, really) race falsely grafting themselves onto a foreign land. To support them is to violate what has now become the central, sacred progressive taboo. That has obvious political consequences for the left, but for the nation as well: for example, many openly debate whether a Zionist Jew like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro could ever hope to win a national Democratic primary campaign in 2028.
Although the example comes from the U.K., look to the recent Green Party convention there, in Brighton, for a too-perfect expression of this phenomenon (and a preview of things to come in America, with the rise of monsters like Hasan Piker and Abdul El-Sayed). The Greens are in the process of exchanging their political identity: Once an environmentally focused party, they’re adopting a new shade of green as they are swiftly being taken over by pro-Palestinian extremists. Last weekend at their convention, they voted 1,022–813 to formally adopt the policy that Israel is an illegitimate state and Zionism would hereafter be “treated as any other form of racism.” (Note: the Green Party’s leader, Zack Polanski, is Jewish, and a shambling disgrace.)
While Israel’s intertwinement with the United States’ various foreign policy blunders in the region has done it no reputational favors, it is the concocted narrative of the so-called Gaza genocide that has catalyzed the activist left and steers its passions. At least it’s the one thing all of them seem to agree about: They will never forgive Israel for refusing to die.