Students accusing Israel of genocide at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Nov. 16, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder

For the past few weeks, I’ve been regularly receiving hate messages calling me “Eichmann with a kippah.” The phrase appears in angry screeds from anonymous accounts — often by people apparently pretending to be Jewish women “ashamed” of me for defending Israel. The script never changes: Israel is Nazi Germany, Zionists are fascists, and the IDF is committing “genocide.”

The vocabulary may sound new. The hatred is not. This moral inversion — turning descendants of refugees and survivors of pogroms and genocides into the heirs of their murderers — is one of antisemitism’s oldest tricks, refitted for modern politics.

The “Genocide” Libel Long Predates Oct. 7

The claim that Israel is committing “genocide” didn’t arise after Oct. 7, 2023. Nor did it begin during the Gaza wars of 2008 or 2014. It’s decades old — part of a propaganda campaign that long preceded the current war.

Within hours of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, and before Israel fired a single retaliatory shot, protesters from London to Los Angeles were already chanting “genocide.” The accusation was preloaded, not provoked — waiting to be forced into whatever followed.

Its roots trace back to the 1970s, when Soviet and Arab League propaganda began branding Israel “the new Nazis.” State-controlled media in Moscow, Cairo, and Damascus weaponized Holocaust imagery against the Jewish State, reframing Jewish survival as Jewish supremacy.

By the 1980s, “Zionist genocide” was a standard slogan — even as the Palestinian population in Gaza and Judea and Samaria grew faster than almost any on Earth.

The population growth numbers alone should have ended the claim. But this was never about demography or evidence. It was about demonology — portraying Jewish sovereignty itself as a moral offense.

Why “Israel = Nazis” Is Antisemitic

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism explicitly lists “drawing comparisons between contemporary Israeli policy and that of the Nazis” as antisemitic. That’s not censorship — it’s moral lucidity.

Equating Israel with Nazi Germany desecrates Jewish memory while denying Jewish self-defense. It turns the Holocaust into a political weapon, stripping Jews of moral legitimacy and redefining their sovereignty and survival as crimes.

That’s why these comparisons surge whenever Israel fights back. They aren’t moral critiques but psychological projections — attempts to turn collective Jewish self-defense into the personification of evil.

The “Appeal to Authority” Fallacy

When challenged, those spreading the “genocide” libel typically resort to what Aristotle first called the appeal to authority fallacy. They list various academics and NGOs — the International Association of Genocide Scholars, UN commissions, and other self-declared arbiters — as if citation equals truth.

None of these are credible judicial bodies. Many are activist-driven and politically biased. The UN Human Rights Council has condemned Israel more than all other nations combined, including Iran, China, and North Korea. Even the highly politicized International Court of Justice has made no finding of genocide — only procedural rulings allowing South Africa’s case to proceed.

And even those arguments collapse under scrutiny. Before Oct. 7, the “genocide” claim was absurd: Israel had withdrawn from Gaza in 2005, leaving it under Palestinian rule, even as Gaza’s population doubled.

After Oct. 7, the same activists rebranded Hamas’ war — launched with barbaric mass murder and hostage-taking — as “Israeli genocide.” They ignored the central element of genocide: intent.

Israel’s actions show the opposite intent — an intent to avoid civilian casualties. It issues evacuation warnings, opens humanitarian corridors, coordinates aid deliveries, and risks soldiers’ lives in ground operations to spare noncombatants. No nation in history accused of genocide has ever done those things.

The Ethical Reality

If genocide requires intent to destroy a people, Hamas and its patron, Iran, fit that definition far better than Israel ever could.

Hamas’ charter calls for the extermination of Jews everywhere. Its leaders boasted that Oct. 7 was “only the beginning” and vowed to “repeat it again and again.”

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has long declared that Israel must be “wiped off the map” while arming Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — all sworn to Israel’s annihilation.

In Gaza, Hamas hides in hospitals and schools, fires rockets from residential areas, and turns its own civilians into human shields. It even has uniforms for parades but not for combat — deliberately fighting in civilian clothes to endanger its own population. Hamas has built more than 700 kilometers of tunnels, not to protect civilians, but to shelter its commanders and stockpile weapons. When Gazans try to flee to Israeli-designated safe zones, Hamas often blocks or attacks them to increase civilian death tolls.

This is not a liberation movement. It is a fascist death cult that thrives on civilian suffering. Every Palestinian death becomes Hamas propaganda.

Israel, by contrast, spends billions on defense — bomb shelters, Iron Dome, and precision weaponry — yet is condemned as genocidal for refusing to surrender to the openly genocidal forces Iran has armed and financed around it.

If the genocide label were applied honestly, it would have been used for Syria, where over half a million non-Alawites were slaughtered, or in Yemen, Sudan, and Ethiopia, where famine and ethnic killings reach truly genocidal levels. But the same NGOs and academics most vocal about “Israel’s genocide” are largely silent in the face of those atrocities. Their outrage isn’t proportional to suffering — it’s proportional to Jewish sovereignty.

The Psychological Comfort of the Lie

The “genocide” accusation persists because it serves two needs.

First, it comforts those who crave moral simplicity. Admitting that Hamas and Iran are fascist aggressors would mean acknowledging that evil exists outside the West — and that Jews are its target once again.

Second, it soothes those who resent Israel’s existence — who hate that Jews took “Never Again” seriously and built a thriving democratic state to ensure it. The libel restores the moral hierarchy they prefer: Jews as either evil or as victims, but never as defenders.

Calling Israel “Nazi-like” lets these moral poseurs feel righteous without learning anything. It turns ignorance into empathy and hashtags into heroism.

The Continuity of Antisemitic Tropes

From “Christ-killers” to “baby-killers,” from “poisoners of wells” to “genocide perpetrators,” the accusation never truly changes — only the vocabulary does.

Now a new smear circulates alongside “genocide”: “denier.” Anyone who defends Israel or questions Hamas’ death tolls is labeled a “genocide denier,” as if doubting Hamas propaganda were equivalent to denying the Holocaust. This isn’t moral reasoning. It’s moral sadism.

What we’re witnessing isn’t a policy debate but a war over moral reality. One side believes Jewish sovereignty and self-defense are rights; the other believes they’re crimes.

The Hatred That Never Dies

Those accusing Israel of “genocide” aren’t defending human rights. They’re heirs to a long tradition of antisemitic inversion — from medieval blood libels to Soviet propaganda — now repackaged as “justice.”

It should go without saying: Israel is not Nazi Germany. It is the living refutation of Nazi Germany — a pluralistic democracy where Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Druze, men and women alike, share full civil rights, and whose army does more to prevent civilian casualties than any military in history.

The “genocide” libel says less about Israel than about those who need to believe it. Because to accept the truth — that Jewish self-defense and sovereignty are not crimes — would mean confronting an ancient hatred they can’t let go of.

And that hatred, history shows, never dies. It just changes its vocabulary. 

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.