26 No. 76 JUSTICE They also used well-worn antisemitic tropes regarding everything from blood to government manipulation. Today’s genocide charges against Israel use earlier inversions of reality and antisemitic tropes, but they also lean on settler colonial theory, which expanded in the academic world in the 2000s. The theory holds that settler colonialism is different from mercantile colonialism, which seeks raw materials or markets. It is characterized by mass settlement over the long term that invariably exterminates indigenous peoples. Scholars of settler colonialism believe that only westerners are settler colonialists, and so they study Canada, the U.S., and Australia. But they have particular ire for Israel. They hold that the Jewish connection to the land is a Zionist fabrication. They also hold that Israel weaponizes the Holocaust, which for settler colonial theorists deliberately obscures colonial genocides, in order to attack its enemies. Finally, they imagine that settler colonialism in Israel can be reversed, because millions of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, and elsewhere are ready to return and have an inalienable right to do so. These ideological claims ignore all historical developments that conflict with the theory, such as various Zionist attempts to reach accommodation. But settler colonial theorists also reject a two-state solution because a surviving Jewish state would still normalize settler colonialism. In the meantime, the study of settler colonialism has redefined genocide to sidestep the UN Genocide Convention. Genocide here is not a defined crime with special criminal intent and certain criminal acts, so much as it is a societal structure that unfolds over the long term. The Gaza war is thus the final stage of a decadeslong genocidal process. Arguments concerning Israeli self-defense, the atrocities of October 7, the aim of destroying Hamas, the problems of fighting in an urban landscape against an underground enemy – are all waved aside. Thus, genocide accusations against Israel since October 2023 have been muddled. It is considered a given that Israel is committing genocide; this is what settler-colonial societies do. But the facts must be shoehorned into the theory because the UN Genocide Convention, approved unanimously by the General Assembly in 1948, has been unchanged since that date. To ignore the Convention is to ignore international law. This, of course, is what antiZionists have long accused Israel of doing, and many hope to see Israeli leaders in the dock of the International Criminal Court one day. Thus, ever since the Hamas attacks, we have been told the following by pro-Palestine news outlets like Aljazeera and The Electronic Intifada and human rights NGOs like Amnesty International and al-Haq: Hamas was engaged in resistance on October 7. Tales of Hamas rapes, beheadings, and other depravities are Zionist fabrications. Israeli leaders engaged in genocidal speech after October 7. Civilian fatalities could number in the hundreds of thousands, none are combatants, and most are women and children. The Israelis, we are told, even attacked a major fertility clinic to kill thousands more unborn children. We have also been told that the Israelis send Palestinian civilians to humanitarian zones, removing them from combat in order to kill them. We have been told that the Israelis have deliberately starved the Gazan population. We have been told that the Israelis have destroyed hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings not because they are used by Hamas, but to create a landscape that cannot support life. We are told that Hamas does not use civilians as human shields. And finally, we are told that Israel and its allies are all part of a global deception that weaponizes charges of antisemitism to blunt the reality of these horrors. Indeed, the war in Gaza has been a horror. Wars fought in urban spaces against adversaries who deploy guerrilla tactics and refuse to surrender are always horrible. There are many historical guides from Stalingrad (1943), Manila (1945), Mosul (2016-17), and Khartoum (2023-25). States committing genocide do not warn civilians to get out of harm’s way; they do not allow the import of hundreds of thousands of tons of humanitarian aid; and they do not primarily target weapons systems like rocket launchers and underground smuggling routes. False Expertise This brings us to the issue of false expertise. Before winning New York’s mayoral election in November 2025, Zohran Mamdani noted that his accusation of genocide against Israel was not “my own individual assessment,” but rather a “reflection of leading genocide scholars from across the world.”13 Many others make tactical use of experts. In May 2025 social media provocateur Mehdi Hasan announced to his 1.7 million X followers that “Genocide experts are almost all in agreement that what’s 13. 1010wins (@1010Wins) and Susan Richard (@ thesusanrichard), INSTAGRAM (Oct. 9, 2025), available at https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPmQpPkD5PQ/
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