Opinion - When everything is genocide, nothing is: A call to preserve the term’s weight
Eighty years ago today, a liberation took place at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp in southern Poland. Soviet troops arrived to free the survivors, but by then, over 1 million people — the vast majority of them Jews — had already been murdered in the camp.
In the aftermath of World War II, Western leaders vowed to prevent genocide from ever occurring again. Yet today, we see the term weaponized and diluted, casually applied in ways that defy its legal and historical gravity. This misuse dishonors the memory of Holocaust victims, undermines international law and diverts attention from contemporary genocides — the very crimes the world swore to confront.
This week, as I stand at Auschwitz to mark 80 years since its liberation, I am reminded of our collective duty to honor the memory of the victims by resisting the degradation of the term “genocide.” Bodies like the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, and organizations such as Amnesty International must stop politicizing and redefining this critical term, specifically in ways that distort its meaning to denigrate the state of Israel.
Since Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel and the terror group have been at war. In Gaza, Hamas has exploited humanitarian zones and U.N. infrastructure to maximize civilian casualties and stoke global outrage. This strategy has succeeded — and accusations of genocide against Israel have grown deafening.
In a bitter twist of irony, some of the most vocal anti-Israel protesters who invoke the Holocaust to condemn Israel often indulge in genocidal rhetoric themselves, chanting slogans like “From the river to the sea,” which calls for the elimination of the Jewish state.
The word genocide was coined by a Polish lawyer, Raphäel Lemkin, in 1944 and enshrined in international law in 1948. It refers to “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” This definition, the U.N.’s no less, emphasizes deliberate, systematic targeting — not unintended harm amid conflict.
When I first visited the Majdanek concentration camp as a teenager, I stood before a giant mound of ashes preserved as a testament to the industrialized murder of the Holocaust. I was struck by the meticulous intentionality of it all — the systematic effort to annihilate an entire people. That is genocide. Misapplying the term to describe the conflict in Gaza trivializes the 6 million Jews who were murdered and undermines the legal framework designed to prevent such atrocities.
Meanwhile, real genocides go largely ignored. In early January, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken determined that the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces were committing genocide in their struggle with the Sudanese Armed Forces. This conflict has killed 150,000 — more than three times the number of deaths in the Israel-Hamas war — and displaced 11 million. Yet there is scant media coverage, no International Criminal Court arrest warrants, no campus protests and no celebrity speeches at award shows.
The same neglect applies to the Burmese military’s atrocities against the Rohingya and the Chinese government’s brutal repression of Uyghur Muslims, both of which the State Department recognized as genocides in recent years. Where is the outrage?
Instead, the global focus is on Israel, where the accusations of genocide require a distortion of international law. Amnesty International, for instance, dismisses what it calls “an overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence.” This amounts to moving the goalposts, turning genocide into a catch-all accusation, and making a mockery of international law.
Sadly, international legal bodies are complicit in this confusion. Last year, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against political leaders from both Israel and Hamas, charging both sides with “extermination…as a crime against humanity.” This false equivalency — drawing parallels between a democracy defending itself and a terrorist organization deliberately targeting civilians — is a moral and legal outrage.
As legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich has noted, “If Israel’s defense against Hamas constitutes genocide, then American wars from World War II to Obama’s campaign against ISIS do as well.” And this is precisely the problem: If anything is genocide, nothing is genocide.
In 1945, Allied general and future American President Dwight D. Eisenhower liberated a concentration camp at Ohrdruf in Germany. He later documented what he saw and heard, “in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” Today I see a new battle unfolding — not just against Holocaust denial but against Holocaust dilution.
If we are silent as genocide is recklessly redefined, we dishonor its victims and weaken our collective ability to prevent future atrocities. In memory of those who perished and in defense of those still at risk, we must stop the politicization of genocide. Instead, we must preserve the term’s integrity, uphold its legal weight, and direct our outrage where it truly belongs — toward those who commit the most heinous crimes.
Aviva Klompas is the former director of speechwriting at the Israeli Mission to the United Nations and co-founder of Boundless Israel, a nonprofit organization that partners with community leaders in the U.S. to support Israel education and combat hatred of Jews. She is co-host of the Boundless Insights podcast.
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