Since its formation on May 14, 1948, Israel has been vilified in various degrees by hostile states and by leftist groups and individuals within friendly ones. Generally speaking, not all those in the latter two categories had originally been seeking Israel’s demise.

However, since October 7, 2023, when Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Israelis, including women and children, as well as taking 252 Israelis as hostages, large numbers of leftist Westerners critical of Israel, crossed the Rubicon to throw in their lot with Hamas.

As a result, Israel has been subjected to a slanderous universal campaign, the likes of which have never been encountered by countries such as Iran, China, North Korea, Russia, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other such human rights violators. In the process, Israel has been depicted as being a cruel apartheid state bent on committing genocide against the Palestinians. Alternatively, it is accused of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, thus rendering the Palestinians stateless.

The genocide vilification of Israel has been flaunted over many periods of time, but instead of attempting to review them all, thus unnecessarily burdening the reader, we commence in September 2014 when the chairman of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, issued a statement to the United Nations proclaiming that in the 2014 War between Israel and Hamas, Israel had acted with genocidal intent.

The 2014 war broke out on July 8, as a result of Hamas launching thousands of rockets and mortar attacks directed exclusively against Israel’s civilian population. By July 15, Egypt proposed a ceasefire which Israel readily accepted, while Hamas refused to do so. As a result, fighting continued until August 27, by which time Hamas encountered numerous casualties. Israel’s adversaries regularly cite such losses as poof of Israel’s nefarious aspirations. But the 2014 war was indisputably initiated by Hamas. Furthermore, General Martin Dempsey, the then chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, in undertaking a thorough study of the course of that war, concluded, ‘Israel had gone to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and prevent civilian casualties.’

Nearly nine years later, on October 7, 2023, Hamas, in another surprise attack, slaughtered the largest number of Jews since the Holocaust. Even before Israel’s army had completed its mobilisation, anti-Israel demonstrators in Helsinki marched behind a large banner that read: ‘Stop Genocide. Free Palestine.’

Shortly thereafter, similar banners appeared throughout most Western countries.

Then on December 29, 2023, South Africa, acting in concert with Israel’s major enemies, filed a case at the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of committing genocide. Adding a rider to its application, South Africa requested of the Court to order Israel to halt is military campaign in Gaza. Should such a request have been accepted by the Court with Israel’s compliance, Hamas would have been able to undertake its carnage without incurring any punishment.

That would by no means have troubled South Africa, for on May 15, 2018, the African National Congress, South Africa’s leading political party, declared, ‘We regard the Israeli government and its armed forces as an outcast and blight on humanity.’ This comes from a regime that renames its streets after Palestinian terrorists such as a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

As it happened, the Court did not conclusively accept that Israel had committed genocide, rather that it theoretically could have done so. That being the case, it entreated Israel to adopt measures to forestall such a contingency. Finally, in March 2024, Francesca Albanese, as the established UN rapporteur on Palestine, opined, as she was wont to do so, that Israel had in fact committed a genocide.

The next attempt at accusing Israel of engaging in genocide, occurred on August 31, 2025, when the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) passed a resolution stating that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza met the legal definition of genocide, as accepted by the United Nations. That being the case, they considered that it was incumbent upon Israel to cease forthwith all its supposed crimes against humanity. The release of the IAGS’ resolution was eagerly endorsed and publicised by the entire range of leftwing journals and television stations. In the process, special emphasis was placed on the unwarranted assertion of the IAGS resolution, that the Israeli Army had deliberately targeted men women and children, when in reality it went to inordinate lengths to minimise civilian casualties. Nonetheless, it soon came to light that the IAGS’ resolution was flawed. It was reported that only 28 per cent of its 500 members took part in the vote, which was by no means unanimous and contrary to its usual practice.

In arriving at their conclusion, investigators involved in various UN reports claimed that the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) indiscriminately killed an excessively large number of Palestinian civilians by means of shooting, bombing, and starving them. Hence, Israel committed a genocide.

Given that Israel had no choice but to engage Hamas in battle, it nonetheless made serious efforts to minimise civilian Palestinian casualties. Prior to each major planned encounter, Israel airdropped literally thousands of leaflets printed in Arabic, forewarning Palestinians in a specific area, of the imminence of an Israeli attack. Such a procedure, which deprived the IDF of surprising its enemy, is out of keeping with Israel being intent on undertaking a genocide. With regard to the ubiquitous claim that the death rate in Gaza has been extraordinary high, the statistical source generally available has been the Hamas Ministry of Health, which makes no distinction between civilian and military casualties. Considering that Hamas uniquely derives international goodwill emanating from high Palestinian death rates, its Ministry of Health has a clear interest in exaggerating them and there good reason to believe it does so. However, John Spencer, director of urban warfare at the West Point Military Academy, on determining the ratio of civilian to military casualties, in Gaza, concluded, ‘Israel has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other military in history.’

Finally, the piece de resistance of the indictment against Israel is an anti-Semitic libel that the Jewish State deliberately starves the Palestinians in Gaza. As proof of that accusation, photographs of three very young emaciated Palestinian children were exhibited to the world at large. However, it soon became clear that all three children were inflicted with a pre-existing medical condition that hampered their ability to absorb nourishment. One child had a genetic disease that damaged their digestive system. Prior to having had their photograph taken, the child had been under treatment in a third country. Within a short period of time, the international media realised that Hamas had hoodwinked them, with the result that most withdrew the deceptive photographs and grudgingly issued an apology.

The upshot of it all is that Israel had neither intended nor actually committed a genocide. By contrast, the real villains have been the Palestinians who have consistently sought the elimination of Israel and its entire Jewish population, even before the State of Israel had formally come into existence.

In 1941, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the head of the Palestinian Muslim community, took refuge in Nazi Germany. There in an official visit to Hitler, Husseini sought from the Nazi dictator his blessing and support in enabling the Palestinians to wipe out the entire Jewish population then living in what was British Mandated Palestine. A few years later, in May 1948, a day after the State of Israel had been declared, it was invaded by five Arab armies. Heading the Arab League at that time, Abdul Rahaman Azzam Pasha predicted that the Arab onslaught would amount to ‘a war of extermination and a momentous massacre’. Then in June 1967, a few days prior to the outbreak of the Six Day War, Ahmed Shukeiri, the founding head of the PLO, was asked by journalists what would become of the Israeli Jews. In response he moved his index finger across his throat and replied that none would survive. To this very day, although the Palestinian Authority recently promised not to, it still awards ongoing sums of money to families losing a member while engaged in killing Israelis. Finally, Hamas in its charter, makes it crystal clear that the killing of Jews is its top priority.

Apart from claiming that Israel is liable to undertake a Palestinian genocide, Israel’s enemies are also prone to suggest that it during its war of independence, Israel had had expelled almost all of the Palestinians living within its frontiers.

Such a fantasy relies heavily on an Israeli defence force document named Plan Dalet. The opening section of Plan Dalet proclaimed that ‘in the event of an Arab village offering resistance, its armed forces ought to be crushed and its population expelled beyond Israel’s frontiers’. However, in the succeeding paragraph, the text read as follows, ‘But if no resistance is offered, bodies will be appointed consisting of the people from the village to administer the internal affairs of the village.’

The same could be said about other aspects of ‘evidence’ that features in the media narrative. One is a quote from Ben Gurion, Israel’s then-Prime Minister. According to some, Ben Gurion had written that the Haganah (Israel’s then defence force) ‘captured many Arab positions and liberated Tiberius, Haifa, Jaffa and Safad … so that part of Israel is almost clear of Arabs’. The words frequently omitted are:

‘…the first town to fall to the Haganah was Tiberius. That was on April 18. We told the Arabs there they might stay if they gave up their arms and fought no more. They chose to go encouraged by the British who took them away in trucks to Syria. The same thing happened elsewhere.’

In short, the claim that Israel ethnically cleansed itself of Arabs is not based on reliable evidence.

Turning to the third calumny listed the above, namely that Israel is an apartheid state. Those that glibly liken Israel to an apartheid state are probably either dismally unaware of what constitutes one, or are so consumed with anti-Israel hatred that they seek to equate Israel with South Africa’s previous apartheid regime.

In the days of apartheid in South Africa, Africans were denied the franchise to vote in both national and regional elections. They could not take up permanent residence in areas designated as white ones. Nor could they attend white universities and schools, participate in national sport activities, ride in so-called white buses, and in white sections of trains. They were also barred from entering white cinemas, theatres, and hospitals. Needless to say, the few amenities open to them were vastly inferior to those enjoyed by the whites. Africans lived in shanty towns lacking an adequate supply of electricity and water. It goes without saying that almost all Africans were denied reasonably well-paid employment and as a result, they were mostly impoverished. Finally, as if to emulate Nazi German legislation, in apartheid South Africa, the partaking of interracial sexual intercourse was prohibited by law.

As for Israel, it bears not the slightest resemblance to South Africa’s previous apartheid regime. Israel’s declaration of independence includes a promise to ‘uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed, or sex’. It is a promise that has been faithfully kept. The Arabs in Israel are accorded the same rights and opportunities as the rest of the population. Amongst other things, they enjoy the right to vote and to sit in the Knesset (Israel’s house of parliament), where they periodically have held the office of deputy speaker. Not only that but they also serve in Israel’s High Court, where the Arab Justice Salem Joubran had sat on a High Court panel. A comparable situation occurring in apartheid South Africa, would have been absolutely unattainable.

In terms of Israeli Arabs making their mark in other areas, in the field of medicine, they have been highly successful, both as practitioners and as medical administrators. They also have established international reputations as distinguished commentators, writing for the Jerusalem Post along with attaining the highest positions in many other industries. Some Arabs, even Muslim ones, have volunteered to serve in the Israeli Armed Forces.

What all this amounts to is that if Israel really was an Apartheid state, none of the above would have materialised.

Whenever outrageous charges brought against Israel are subject to a careful examination, they almost inevitably turn out to be baseless. This raises the question as to what motivates those that not only accuse Israel of some dastardly affront but also do so with much emotional venom.

In Western countries, apart from the significant presence of Jihadists stationed there, the conveyors of anti-Israel slander overwhelmingly originate from the hard left, with the mild left somewhat meekly in tow. Such a state of affairs began to arise from the mid-1960s onwards. Prior to that period, the left in general were well disposed to both Israel and Jewry. Their subsequent change of heart intrinsically reflects the fact that the left itself has undergone a radical transformation.

Traditionally, the left saw themselves as supporters of the working class, who in their view, were ruthlessly exploited by selfish capitalists. But from the mid-1960s onwards, living conditions of workers in the West were steadily improving, enabling them to enjoy amenities previously thought to be unimaginable. As a result, the ability of the radical left to recruit workers to their cause, markedly declined. That placed them in a dilemma, for without a constituency to champion, their continued existence would be rendered meaningless.

To save the day, they began to align themselves with Middle Eastern states in conflict with the West. That eventually brought them into close contact with local Jihadists with whom they formed alliances in protesting against their countries’ so-called imperial misdeeds. Soon enough, British Labour politicians began referring to Hamas activists as their friends. Their tendency to do so was in part inspired by literature falsely depicting Israel as having been established by foreign intruders acting under the auspices of colonial powers. More to the to the point, they accepted the Palestinians’ narrative which describes the Palestinians as being a powerless peace-loving people, uprooted by aggressive Jews with no prior historical claims to their land.

As the new radical left progressed, its adherents acquired crucial positions in academia and the media. Entrenched in such posts, they indiscriminately imposed their ideology on students, listeners and readers. The net result being that the Western public increasingly looks upon Israel as unwarrantedly meeting out harsh treatment to the Palestinians. With such an acquired conviction, they readily believe whatever Israel is accused of.

Unfortunately, the issue is not simply what induces people to think the worst of Israel but also of leftists increasingly adopting the mindset of Hamas.