Logic points to the perpetrator. But from Hitler to accusers of Israel of genocide, it is the Jew, by his very existence, who starts it all.
When Raphael Lemkin devised the word “genocide” to account for what Hitler did to the Jews, no one asked: What comes first? The perpetrator of a genocide, or the victim? Obviously, the perpetrator came first. Without a killer, there is no victim.
Actually, there was one person who reversed the obvious, who did think that the victim came first. That was Hitler. For him, the victim came first — because in his mind the Jew was not a victim. The Jew was the poisoner of humanity. The Jew was the perpetrator. Hitler, in killing the Jews, was aiding humanity.
This is absolutely perverted.
This perversion is exactly what generates the accusation of “genocide” against Israel. The Jew is the poisoner of the Middle East. The Jew is the invader — not indigenous to the Middle East. Not the offspring of Biblical civilization. Not the reflection of countless pieces of Biblical archaeology in the Land of Israel. The Jew in the Middle East is inherently the criminal — precisely the perspective of Hitler. The Jew’s mere existence in the modern State of Israel makes him the perpetrator of genocide, against which people can only “resist.”
This is what the accusation of genocide against Israel since Oct. 7 means. This is why the accusation of genocide against Israel could be launched even before Israel responded militarily to Hamas’ invasion and massacre on Oct. 7, 2023. The inherent crime of being Israeli rendered the Hamas atrocities “resistance.”
Genocide, in the case of post-Oct. 7 Gaza, had nothing to do with the destruction in Gaza. It had to do with the rendering of the Jewish return to its historic homeland nothing other than, and nothing more than, a European invasion.
Forget that the language that the early Zionists spoke was the same language of the Bible recorded 3,000 years earlier — Hebrew.
Forget that the prayers of the Jewish people since their exile from ancient Israel continued for some 1,850 years to refer to the same place that the early Zionist pioneers called their spiritual center: Jerusalem. Same word, used by the pioneers of the First Aliyah in 1905; same word used by the Jewish residents in ancient Israel and during all the centuries in between.
Jerusalem: Not only the same word, but the same place.
No matter. Such inconvenient facts are denied, dismissed or overlooked by the contemporary, anti-Semitic theorists of genocide, because if these facts were true, Israel could not be accused of genocide the day after, or the day of, Oct. 7, when it was actually Hamas that attempted genocide by massacering and kidnapping innocent Israelis — and filming it and boasting of it to prove their intent.
The accusations of genocide against Israel are rooted in a frighteningly similar stance toward Jews as that of Hitler. For him, all Jews were inherently poisonous. For the accusers of Israel, Israeli Jews are inherently poisonous because they don’t belong in the Middle East.
The irony here is the racism. It is deemed legitimate to “resist” — i.e., to slaughter Jews in Israel, a la Hamas on Oct. 7, and a la all Palestinian terrorism against Jews in Israel. This is, in fact, racist. For even if one were incorrectly to grant that the Jews of today are not indigenous to the Land of Israel, even if one were incorrectly to grant that the early Zionist pioneers from the 1880s to 1905 had no ancestral roots in the land, the opponents of Israel would reply that the Jews had no right to be in the Middle East. Why? Because they were purely “European.” For the sake of argument, say that this were true. It means: White people do not belong in the Middle East. Europeans do not belong in the Middle East. Only Arabs do (even though Arabs themselves are not indigenous to the Levant Valley).
This is sheer racism. If white people may not live, or farm, in the Middle East, it is no different from saying that whites may not live in a black neighborhood or vice versa. Underlying the genocide charge against Israel is the racist idea that it was right to “resist” Jewish migration to the Land of Israel because most of the early Zionist immigrants were white. Were European. And such people have no right in the Middle East.
Behind the settler-colonialist genocide charge is the further irony that not all Jews are white; and even when modern Zionism began in the 1880s, not all Jews already living in Jerusalem were white. The pre-Zionist Jewish population of Jerusalem was both Ashkenazi and Sephardi. Not to mention, Middle East Jews also emigrated to Palestine, and they too were deemed invaders, worthy of “resistance.”
And now, Jews around the world today are deemed legitimate targets of violence because . . . well, because Israel consists mostly of Jews. That’s the reason given for why a Jewish middle school student in the Boulder Valley School District is severely harassed. That’s why 15 people are gunned down on Bondi Beach in Australia. Alas, the examples of anti-Jewish racism today, rooted in the existence of Israel, multiply.
The original question — what comes first, perpetrator or victim of genocide — is not absurd in this sense: Israel is wrong: that is the starting point. That is a given. The original question is precisely what drives the charge of genocide against Israel. The unfortunate destruction in Gaza, which was the only way Israel could defend itself against human shields, simply bolstered the conclusion reached about Israel before Israel even existed as a state. The early Zionist farmers represented an attempt at anti-racism, an attempt to forge a diverse civilization within the context of a Jewish return to Zion. A civilization of Jews and Arabs thriving in the same place.
All this is summed up in one salient fact. Under the British Mandate, the British wanted to hand the governance of Palestine to Jews and local Arabs jointly. The Zionists accepted it. The Arabs rejected it. No recognition by the Arabs of any Jewish right to any part of what they called Palestine! No tolerance for a diversity of populations in Palestine.
Parse it out. It is that intolerance and that racism that are expressed in the charge of genocide against Israel. In the mentality of those who accuse Israel of genocide, who comes first? The victim. The victim is seen as the Arab in Palestine. The perpetrator is seen as the Israeli. It’s that senseless. It’s that ahistorical. It’s that racist.
© IJN 2026
