Calling It ‘Genocide’ Is a Moral Sin: When the World Forgets the Righteous

In the lexicon of human atrocity, few words carry the weight and historical resonance of “genocide.” Coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to describe the systematic extermination of a people, it is a term born of the Holocaust. It speaks of a specific, malevolent intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. To invoke this word is to evoke the gas chambers, the mass graves, and the chilling finality of a planned annihilation.

When this solemn word is deployed as a political weapon against Israel, it is not just a rhetorical exaggeration — it is a moral sin. It is a fundamental betrayal of history and a grave injustice to a righteous nation’s fight for survival.

Calling Israel’s campaign of self-defense “genocide” is a grave moral error that ignores the core facts of the conflict and the very nature of the enemy it faces. The central pillar of the legal and moral definition of genocide, as codified in the 1948 UN Convention, is the “intent to destroy.” This is a high bar, a standard that requires proving not just that people were killed, but that the purpose was the systematic destruction of a specific group.

Planned Extermination

The war in Gaza is a direct response to a terrorist organization, Hamas, whose stated goal is the annihilation of the Jewish state and its people. This is not a war against the Palestinian people, but a war against the genocidal ideology of Hamas. To understand the profound distinction, one must look no further than Hamas’s own founding documents.

The 1988 Hamas Covenant explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel. It quotes a hadith (a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) that speaks of a time when Muslims will fight and kill Jews, who will hide behind rocks and trees. It declares that “Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” While the group issued a new document in 2017 that appeared to soften its stance, its leaders continue to reject peace, negotiations, and the very existence of a Jewish state. Their actions on October 7, 2023, were a brutal manifestation of this ideology.

The October 7 attacks were not a military operation; they were a pogrom. Hamas fighters infiltrated Israel’s borders, brutally murdering over 1,200 people, including entire families, children, infants, and the elderly, and taking more than 250 hostages. The barbarism of the attack — the rapes, the torture, the deliberate slaughter of civilians — is an irrefutable expression of a genocidal mindset. In the aftermath of such an assault, no sovereign nation would stand idly by. Israel’s response is, and must be, a military operation aimed at dismantling Hamas’s capability to repeat such an attack. It is an operation of self-defense, a fundamental right enshrined in international law.

To confuse this with genocide is to turn moral reasoning on its head. It is to equate the actions of a terrorist group that deliberately targets civilians with a nation’s military that, despite the tragic casualties of war, goes to extraordinary lengths to protect them. While every civilian death in Gaza is a tragedy, they are a byproduct of a conflict instigated and sustained by a terrorist group that intentionally embeds its military infrastructure within civilian areas. Hamas operates its command centers in hospitals, its rocket launchers in schools, and its tunnels beneath homes and mosques.

In stark contrast, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have implemented unprecedented measures to minimize civilian harm, often at the expense of their own military advantage. The IDF has dropped millions of leaflets and sent hundreds of thousands of phone calls and text messages to warn residents of impending strikes, urging them to evacuate designated combat zones. They have used “roof-knocking,” a non-lethal munition that gives residents of a targeted building a final warning to evacuate before a strike. These are not the actions of a military engaged in a genocidal campaign; they are the protocols of an army operating under the immense moral and legal constraints of urban warfare.

Ultimately, the charge of genocide against Israel is a moral sin because it inverts the roles of the righteous and the unrighteous. It portrays the victim as the perpetrator and absolves the actual aggressor of its crimes. The world must not forget that a nation’s right to defend itself from annihilation is not only a matter of law, but of profound moral necessity.

Amine Ayoub is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco.