The Genocide Slur Is Not Just for Jews.
Judging Israel’s wartime behavior through epithets, TikTok clips, and faulty balance sheets poses a direct danger to American lives.
By John Spencer.
January 22, 2026.
The casual use of the word genocide to target Israel is not only a slur—it is also dangerous to Americans. That’s because, if this ahistorical, amoral, and largely evidence-free way of judging war is allowed to take hold in public discourse and, worse, harden into international legal practice, it will not remain confined to one conflict or one ally. It will be turned on the United States and every other military that may have to fight and win in cities.
Israel is not the endpoint of the debate over the rules of war in the age of TikTok. It is the test case. If the rules are rewritten here, American soldiers will inherit them in the next urban war.
I hope we never see another Gaza war again, a war in which an enemy builds a strategy around civilian suffering not as the tragic cost of fighting that’s to be avoided whenever possible, but as the path to victory itself—a strategy of human sacrifice for political gain. These slogans of genocide and the normalization of lawfare risk stripping any law-abiding military of the ability to defend itself or protect innocent civilians from harm.
This matters because the legal and moral test is not whether the death toll in a given battle or conflict is high or low: That number can often be a measure of how determined an adversary is to keep fighting. The test is how a force fights. Proportionality is not a civilian death quota. It is an assessment of whether expected incidental harm would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated—a judgment made under uncertainty, with imperfect information, against an adaptive enemy. Precautions are not a public relations checklist. They are measures that are feasible under the circumstances, balancing mission accomplishment and force protection.
The problem is the framework that is increasingly being normalized, in which lawfare replaces law, moral arithmetic replaces judgment, statistics replace intent, and civilian deaths become proof of illegality by default.
Genocide under international law requires intent to destroy a protected group in whole or in part. That intent is the defining legal element. Without it, the charge collapses. When genocide becomes a label applied whenever civilian casualties are high, the term loses meaning, and law becomes a weapon rather than a restraint.
There has been no genocide in Gaza. Israel has not intentionally targeted civilians. Its intent has been to return hostages, dismantle Hamas as a military and governing organization following the Oct. 7 mass casualty attack, and do so while sustaining civilian life under extraordinarily difficult combat conditions. Intent matters. Context matters. Law matters.
Israel has taken more measures to reduce civilian harm than any military in history operating in dense urban terrain against an enemy deliberately embedded among civilians. These measures include mass warnings before strikes, evacuation corridors coordinated at scale, daily humanitarian pauses, precision targeting based on layered intelligence, and operational restraints that deliberately increase risk to its own soldiers to reduce harm to civilians. No other military facing an enemy that systematically hides among the population has attempted civilian harm mitigation at this scale, over this duration, while under constant attack.
Hamas, by contrast, has openly declared and operationalized a strategy of using civilians as shields. It has tortured, sexually abused, starved, and murdered hostages. It has threatened civilians who attempt to leave combat zones or accept unauthorized aid. All of this constitutes war crimes. When international discourse erases this distinction and instead accuses the defender of genocide, it does not protect civilians. It rewards the most cynical and unlawful tactics in modern warfare.
The genocide accusation collapses further when measured against observable reality rather than slogans. Israel has conducted this war while facilitating a scale of humanitarian assistance, medical access, vaccination campaigns, and civilian protection measures unprecedented in a conflict where the defending force does not control the territory and the enemy does. Aid, food, water, fuel, medical supplies, and vaccines have entered Gaza throughout the war, even as Hamas retained territorial control and continued fighting. Israel coordinated humanitarian corridors, medical evacuations, and pauses in combat while under attack. No historical case of genocide includes a state feeding, vaccinating, providing medical care to, and sustaining the civilian population of the territory in which it is supposedly committing extermination.
Wanting to destroy your enemy is not genocide. It is war. War is not illegal, and in some cases, it is necessary. The aim of many of those accusing Israel of genocide is in fact to make it impossible for any law-abiding nation to defend itself against those who openly proclaim their desire to destroy us, and imagine that our adherence to law and to norms of conflict will assist them in achieving their aims.
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You Can’t Have It Both Ways on ‘Genocide’
By Seth Mandel. January 22, 2026.
A number of Democrats were clearly hoping that once the war in Gaza was over, they could stop talking about it. But that’s not how litmus tests work.
“I am somebody who looks at the videos, the photos, the amount of pain that has been caused in the Middle East, and you can’t not be heartbroken,” Michigan Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow, who in October joined the jackals in falsely accusing Israel of genocide, told a local radio station. “But I also feel like we are getting lost in this conversation, and it feels like a political purity test on a word — a word that, by the way, to people who lost family members in the Holocaust, does mean something very different and very visceral — and we’re losing sight of what I believe is a broadly shared goal among most Michiganders, that this violence needs to stop, that a temporary cease-fire needs to become a permanent cease-fire, that Palestinians deserve long term peace and security, that Israelis deserve long term peace and security, and that should be the role of the next U.S. senator.”
It’s awfully rare to have a “genocide” take place, acknowledge it, and then plead with people to stop talking about it. One reason McMorrow wants to stop talking about it is that she doesn’t actually think Israel committed genocide, just as she doesn’t think the earth is flat. But she caved to pressure to say so because she wants the votes of people who think the Jewish state should be destroyed.
In other words, McMorrow, like many of her fellow Democrats, falsely accused Israel of genocide to please actual promoters of genocide.
In that sense, of course McMorrow doesn’t want to talk about her disgraceful kowtowing to anti-Semites for political gain.
Yet she’s not wrong about the problem of some in her party wanting to use a blood libel as a purity test. It’s just that if she really thinks the war in Gaza was a genocide, she wouldn’t be so troubled by its status as a litmus test.
Put another way: Should “genocide” be a litmus test? I’d bet McMorrow thinks so. If she were running against a Holocaust denier, for example, would she say that she is troubled by the amount of criticism the denier were facing? To ask the question is to answer it.
McMorrow almost gets there herself, when she says that the genocide accusation “does mean something very different and very visceral” to those “who lost family members in the Holocaust.” But it’s not that the word genocide means something very different to them. Genocide was coined to categorize the Holocaust. That’s what genocide means. People who lost family in the Holocaust are bothered by the term being applied inaccurately.
What McMorrow wants is to earn points with her party’s base by passing the litmus test without having to revisit what she had to do to pass that test. She never considers her other option: to answer the question honestly.
Similarly, today Jewish Insider reports that Scott Wiener is stepping away from his post as co-chair of the California legislature’s Jewish Caucus. As I wrote last week, Wiener declined to say Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza constituted genocide at a candidates debate against two of his congressional primary opponents. He, like Mallory McMorrow, thought they had moved on. He was wrong, and he got slammed by progressives for equivocating, and so he filmed a soul-crushingly pathetic video changing his answer to “yes.”
It certainly would be inappropriate for him to continue on as Jewish Caucus co-chair, and he recognized as much. But I was struck by his plea for open-mindedness: “As we move through this moment, it is even more important for Jews here and globally to foster open dialogue and acceptance of disagreement, even on the hardest of issues.”
Does he feel that way about other genocides? Again, how much “acceptance of disagreement” does he feel there should be in the Jewish community toward Holocaust denial?
Wiener and McMorrow—and who knows how many others, but the number is high—don’t think Israel committed genocide. They don’t actually believe that there are much more important things to talk about and that genocide is a distraction. They lowered themselves to gain the approval of terrible people, and they feel dirty about it, and they would like to not have to do it again. Their problem is simple: It’s degrading to accuse Israel of genocide and then have to look at yourself in the mirror.
A number of Democrats were clearly hoping that once the war in Gaza was over, they could stop talking about it. But that’s not how litmus tests work. “I am
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'Genocide Lie Enthusiasts Mourn the Collapse of the Genocide Lie'. 
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