Sunday Telegraph – Genocide is humanity’s gravest crime. It should not be used as a political insult
To invoke the term as an accusation against Israel is to strip it of its true meaning.
“Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.” These were the reflections of Professor Victor Klemperer, the German philologist who chronicled life under the Third Reich. His warning has rarely felt more urgent.
Today it takes almost no thought to repeat the accusation that Israel has committed “genocide”. Some repeat it from a place of singular hostility toward the world’s only Jewish state; others from an earnest desire to hasten an end to an unquestionably horrific conflict in which many innocent people have suffered. But whatever the motivation, the result is the same: this gravest of crimes is invoked casually, without due regard for the weight of the word itself.
In an age when hyperbole dominates our discourse and outrage is rewarded with clicks, campaigners reach instinctively for the most extreme language available. Faced with images on social media of immense, tragic suffering in Gaza, journalists, academics and celebrities understandably feel compelled to speak out. Yet the race to linguistic escalation has consequences.
The worst of these was seen in north Manchester on Yom Kippur and in Bondi Beach on Chanukah – eventually, extreme rhetoric almost always leads to extreme violence. But there is also a more subtle consequence which often goes unseen. The ubiquity of a term is often wrongly understood as evidence of its veracity. And some terms have a meaning that must remain protected at all costs. “Genocide” is one of them.
Genocide is defined as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. The word “intent” is crucial. It differentiates the tragic, often devastating consequences of war from one of humanity’s most monstrous crimes. It is why Britain and her allies are not accused of genocide for our strategic bombing of Nazi Germany, despite the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians who were killed. Intent is the moral and legal hinge.
The clearest evidence that Israel did not intend to destroy the people of Gaza is that it did not in fact do so.
This was a war that Israel did not seek, nor start. Israel’s just intentions were to neutralise Hamas’s capacity to repeat the October 7 massacre “again and again”, as they had promised to do, and to attain the release of more than 250 hostages, cruelly snatched from their homes, many of whom were subjected to horrific daily torture.
Israel’s Defence Forces are among the most capable on earth. They neutralised the offensive capabilities of Hezbollah within months, and of Iran in less than two weeks. A military with such capability, if truly seeking to destroy a population, would not simultaneously have facilitated the entry of more than two million tonnes of humanitarian aid into Gaza. It would not have helped establish 15 field hospitals to serve Palestinian civilians. It would not have enabled the mass immunisation of over a million Gazan children against polio. And it would certainly not endanger the lives of its own soldiers on the ground in Gaza every day, so that they would be better able to distinguish between civilians and terrorists.
Both sides have been clear about their intent in word and in deed: Israel has only ever sought the return of its hostages and the disarmament of Hamas. Hamas has sought the total destruction of the state of Israel and the murder of as many of her civilians as possible. If Hamas lays down its arms there will be no fighting and no suffering. If Israel were to lay down its arms there would be no Israel.
Yet many so called “human rights” organisations appear to revel in misappropriating the term genocide, because it has proved such an effective rallying call for them. They do so by expanding its definition to include actions in which it is known that military activity could cause some harm, even if not necessarily undertaken with the intent to cause that harm. This is a truly troubling moral deceit. It should be obvious that there can be no such thing as a genocide in which the victims could end the violence at any moment, by releasing the hostages they have taken and laying down their arms.
In the most scrutinised conflict on earth, footage of the tragic suffering of Palestinians abounds. No decent person could fail to be moved by it or wish to see its end. What you will not find is evidence of systematic massacres, mass executions or the targeted killing of civilians as a matter of policy. Every war contains tragic mistakes and incidents which demand serious investigation. But genocide leaves unmistakable signatures: mass graves, footage of sanctioned point-blank executions, documented orders to target the innocent. Gaza shows none of these.
For years, Hamas diverted vast international aid to construct a subterranean battlefield, unique in modern warfare: some 400 miles of fortified tunnels built beneath homes, schools, hospitals and mosques. Civilians were left above ground, exposed, while terrorists hid below. That is the tragic architecture of this conflict. Yet, as Professor John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point, has noted, the available evidence suggests that the civilian casualty rate in Gaza – awful though it is – is historically low for urban warfare of this scale.
Insisting that this nevertheless amounts to “genocide” carries profound consequences.
When academics, activists, faith leaders and public figures declare, with unshakeable certainty, that genocide has occurred, they do something far more destructive than merely repeat a falsehood. They trivialise the very concept they claim to defend. What language is left for the Rohingya, expelled en masse, systematically raped and slaughtered? For the Uyghurs, subjected to mass internment, forced sterilisation and cultural erasure? For the ethnically targeted killing and mass rape in West Darfur? To invoke the term “genocide” as an accusation against Israel is to strip it of its true meaning, reducing humanity’s gravest crime to a political insult.
This kind of rhetorical inflation is not new. Terms like “fascist” and “communist” have long been mere epithets. Offensive speech is now labelled “violence”. Sharp criticism is branded “treason”. Political frustration becomes a “coup”. Eventually the words themselves collapse under the weight of their misuse.
The human rights movement depends on moral precision. Its credibility rests on our collective ability to distinguish tragedy from atrocity, miscalculation from malice, and the awful cost of war from the deliberate destruction of a people. When that precision erodes, so does the ability of human rights advocates to protect those who need them most.
The great Jewish sages noted that in the Biblical description of the creation of the world, God speaks the world into existence with 10 utterances. They ask why it would be necessary to create the world in this way. Could God not have simply willed the world into being? They answer that He did so to teach us that the power to create and to destroy lies in the words that we speak. As King Solomon put it: “Life and death are in the hands of the tongue!”
The suffering of innocent people demands empathy, accountability and a genuine commitment to preventing future conflict. But to level the charge of genocide against Israel is to commit a moral inversion whose casualties include not only Israelis and Palestinians, but the very idea of human rights itself.
This article was posted by the Sunday Telegraph, 11 January 2026
