Let me begin without dressing this up in diplomatic language: I believe Israel has committed and continues to commit a genocide in Gaza. That is not a statement against Jewish people. It is not approval of Hamas. It does not excuse, minimize or justify the atrocities committed in Israel on October 7, 2023.
It is a conclusion about the conduct of a government and its military—the killing of civilians, the destruction of homes and hospitals, mass displacement, deprivation of food and essential supplies, and the conditions imposed upon an entire civilian population.
Those distinctions should not be difficult. Yet throughout this conflict, criticism of the Israeli government has repeatedly been answered with accusations of antisemitism, as though condemning the actions of a state means hating everyone who shares the majority religion or heritage of that state.
It does not.
Jewish, Israeli and Zionist Are Not Interchangeable Words
This is where some basic definitions help.
Jewish describes an ethnoreligious identity. Judaism is a religion, but Jewish identity can also involve ancestry, ethnicity, culture and shared history. Some Jewish people are deeply religious. Others are secular or atheist.
Israeli is a nationality. Israel’s citizens include Jewish people, Muslims, Christians, Druze and others. Not every Israeli is Jewish, and most Jewish people in the world are not Israeli.
Zionism is a political and national movement supporting Jewish self-determination in the historic Land of Israel. People interpret Zionism in very different ways. Some understand it as supporting Israel’s continued existence. Others associate it with territorial expansion, displacement or permanent control over Palestinians. Jewish people themselves hold widely differing views about Zionism and the conduct of the Israeli government.
Criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli government, the Israel Defense Forces or Israeli policy in Gaza is not inherently antisemitic. Even the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition says that criticism of Israel comparable to criticism directed at another country cannot, by itself, be regarded as antisemitic.
Antisemitism means hostility, discrimination or hatred directed at Jewish people because they are Jewish. Blaming Jewish people collectively for Israel’s actions is antisemitic. Threatening a synagogue because of something Netanyahu did is antisemitic. Repeating conspiracies about Jewish control or collective guilt is antisemitic.
Saying that the Israeli government has committed war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide is a political and legal judgment about a state’s conduct.
Governments are not religions. Political leaders are not ethnic groups. A military is not an entire people.
We understand this distinction perfectly well elsewhere. Condemning Vladimir Putin does not mean hating Russians. Criticizing the Iranian government does not mean hating Muslims or Persians. Opposing Saudi policy does not amount to hostility toward Arabs.
Israel cannot be the only country whose government becomes indistinguishable from an entire religious and ethnic population whenever its conduct is challenged.
October 7 Was an Atrocity
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups attacked Israel, killing approximately 1,200 people and taking roughly 250 hostages. Civilians were murdered. Families were devastated. Hostages were dragged into Gaza. Reports of sexual violence and other atrocities demanded investigation and accountability.
Nothing about Palestinian suffering makes those crimes acceptable.
Hamas is not the Palestinian people, just as Netanyahu’s government is not every Jewish person and not every Israeli.
Hamas leaders and individual fighters responsible for murdering civilians, abusing captives or committing other war crimes should be held legally accountable. Supporting Palestinian human rights does not require anyone to defend Hamas.
But condemning October 7 does not require us to accept everything Israel chose to do afterward.
Two things can be true at once: Hamas committed horrific crimes, and Israel’s response became a sustained assault on a civilian population.
“Israel Had a Right to Defend Itself” Is Not the End of the Conversation
Israel had the right to protect its population and pursue those responsible for the October 7 attacks. That right was never a blank cheque.
Self-defence does not erase international humanitarian law. It does not permit a state to treat an entire territory as a legitimate target because armed fighters operate somewhere within it. It does not make every hospital, school, refugee camp, journalist, aid worker or hungry child an acceptable casualty.
People often argue over whether Israel’s response was “proportionate.” In ordinary language, the answer appears painfully obvious: the scale of destruction and civilian suffering bears no reasonable relationship to a targeted effort to stop those responsible for October 7.
Legally, proportionality has a more specific meaning. It is not simply a mathematical comparison between the number of people killed on each side. For an individual attack, the law asks whether the expected civilian harm would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.
But that technical definition does not rescue every attack merely because Israel says Hamas was nearby. The existence of a military target does not cancel the obligation to distinguish civilians from combatants, take precautions and refrain from attacks expected to cause excessive civilian harm.
Nor does it answer the larger question of what happens when civilian destruction is not an isolated mistake but a repeated and foreseeable pattern.
Gaza Did Not Begin on October 7
A short history cannot explain every competing claim, but the conflict did not materialize from nowhere in 2023.
In 1948, the State of Israel was established following the end of the British Mandate and a UN partition proposal. War followed. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes during what Palestinians call the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe.”
In 1967, Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Although Israel removed its settlers and permanent ground forces from inside Gaza in 2005, it continued exercising substantial control over Gaza’s borders, airspace and maritime access.
After Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, Israel intensified a land, sea and air blockade, while Egypt also restricted its border. The United Nations described Gaza as being virtually isolated from the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory and the wider world. Movement of people and goods—including materials, medical equipment and exports—was severely restricted long before October 7, 2023.
None of that justifies deliberately attacking Israeli civilians.
It does explain why portraying October 7 as the first event in the story produces a distorted history. There were decades of occupation, dispossession, blockade, settlement expansion, failed negotiations, armed attacks, military campaigns and cycles of retaliation before that day.
Historical context is not the same as moral permission. Explaining how a conflict developed is not condoning every act committed within it.
Why I Call It Genocide
Genocide is not simply a synonym for terrible warfare or a very large civilian death toll.
Under the Genocide Convention, genocide involves specified acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Those acts can include killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately imposing conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction.
Intent is the element most often disputed.
Israel says it is fighting Hamas, not attempting to destroy Palestinians, and maintains that civilian deaths result from urban warfare and Hamas operating among civilians. Israel firmly rejects the genocide allegation.
But governments do not usually issue a neatly labelled genocide policy.
Intent can be inferred from patterns of conduct, the foreseeable consequences of repeated actions, official statements, the systematic destruction of conditions needed for survival and the continuation of those actions after warnings from courts and humanitarian organizations.
By July 2026, UN reporting cited more than 73,000 Palestinians reported killed in Gaza and more than 173,000 injured. Much of the population had been repeatedly displaced, while homes, hospitals, schools, water systems and other civilian infrastructure had been devastated.
In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. In June 2026, it reported that Israeli authorities continued committing genocide and other atrocity crimes, including through conduct directed at Palestinian children.
Those findings do not represent every government’s position, nor do they constitute the final judgment of an international court. But they make it impossible to dismiss the word genocide as merely inflammatory language invented on social media.
I use the word because I believe the evidence supports it.
What the International Court of Justice Has—and Has Not—Decided
The International Court of Justice, or ICJ, decides disputes between states.
South Africa brought a case accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention. The ICJ has issued provisional measures directing Israel to prevent genocidal acts, enable humanitarian assistance and preserve evidence while the case continues.
Those orders are significant, but they are not a final judgment that genocide has legally been proven. The case remains pending.
That distinction matters because the public discussion often swings between two inaccurate extremes.
One side says, “The ICJ already convicted Israel of genocide.” It did not.
The other says, “No court has issued a final genocide judgment, so calling it genocide is false.” That does not follow either.
Legal proceedings of this scale take years. The absence of a final judgment while destruction is occurring does not require ordinary people, scholars, human-rights investigators or UN experts to suspend every moral and factual conclusion until the last judge signs the last page.
Israel is already the respondent in an international genocide case. In that sense, it is already before the world’s highest court for disputes between states. Whether the ICJ ultimately finds Israel legally responsible remains to be decided.
My own conclusion does not require pretending the final ruling has already been issued.
Netanyahu and the International Criminal Court
The International Criminal Court, or ICC, is different from the ICJ.
The ICJ deals primarily with the legal responsibility of states. The ICC prosecutes individuals for crimes such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
On November 21, 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant. The allegations against Netanyahu include the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity including murder, persecution and other inhumane acts. The warrant is not a genocide conviction, and Netanyahu has not been tried.
An arrest warrant means judges found reasonable grounds to believe he bears criminal responsibility for the alleged crimes. It is not a final finding of guilt. A trial would require his arrest or voluntary appearance before the court and an opportunity for the prosecution and defence to present evidence.
Netanyahu disputes the ICC’s jurisdiction and rejects the allegations. Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute, but the ICC bases its jurisdiction on the alleged crimes occurring in Palestinian territory, over which the court recognizes jurisdiction.
I believe the warrant should be enforced. That is what international law is supposed to mean: allegations against powerful leaders are tested in a courtroom rather than dismissed because the accused heads a government supported by influential allies.
If international criminal law applies only to leaders of weaker or politically isolated countries, it is not a system of justice. It is a system of selective punishment.
Accountability Is Not Collective Blame
Demanding accountability for Netanyahu does not make every Israeli responsible for his decisions.
Calling Israel’s conduct genocidal does not make every Jewish person responsible for Israel.
Supporting Palestinian freedom does not require supporting Hamas.
Condemning Hamas does not require supporting the destruction of Gaza.
These distinctions are neither complicated nor contradictory. They become blurred when people find the confusion politically useful.
Antisemitism is real, dangerous and historically catastrophic. Jewish people around the world have faced increased threats and harassment during this conflict. That must be condemned without qualification.
So must anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Arab hatred and Islamophobia. Palestinian civilians should not be treated as morally expendable because Hamas committed atrocities. Muslims should not be expected to answer for Hamas any more than Jewish people should be expected to answer for Netanyahu.
Collective guilt is wrong in every direction.
The Word “Genocide” Should Disturb Us
Some people object that calling Gaza a genocide is too provocative.
It should be provocative.
The word describes one of the gravest crimes recognized under international law. It should make people uncomfortable enough to look closely at what is happening rather than retreat behind political slogans.
The more dangerous response is not using the word too early. It is deciding that we may use it only after the destruction is complete, the dead have been counted and an international court has spent years producing a final judgment.
“Never again” cannot sensibly mean “never again, once every appeal has been exhausted.”
It must include the willingness to recognize warning signs and demand intervention while people are still alive to be protected.
My Position Is Not Complicated
I condemn the October 7 attacks.
I want every person responsible for deliberately murdering civilians or abusing hostages to face justice.
I also believe Israel’s response went far beyond pursuing Hamas and became the destruction of a civilian population’s ability to live safely in Gaza.
I believe Israel must answer before the International Court of Justice.
I believe Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested under the existing ICC warrant and brought before the court, where the allegations can be tested according to law.
I believe Palestinian lives have been treated as though they matter less.
And I believe calling that out is not antisemitism.
Criticism of a government is not hatred of a people. Demanding accountability is not religious persecution. Refusing to excuse mass civilian suffering is not support for terrorism.
If we cannot maintain those distinctions, then words such as justice, human rights and international law become little more than decorations—displayed when convenient and quietly packed away when the accused is an ally.
Stay curious. Look closer. Keep the conversation going.
— Laurie