On 7 October 2023, the world experienced in a real-time livestream what the absence of a secure Jewish state meant for the people of Israel, for the West and for the world.

The brutal savagery of the invasion was broadcast to the world: first the trained terrorists, then the civilians who surged across the border. The horror of that day summoned up the atrocities of the Holocaust.

What began as Hamas’s war rapidly metastasised into a regional war Israel had to fight on seven fronts – Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, the West Bank and Iran itself – against Iran and the network of proxies it had built across the region.

It is worth noting that Iran calls this alliance the ‘Axis of Resistance’. International humanitarian law does not confer immunity on atrocities committed in the name of resistance. Gazans who tortured, raped and murdered civilians, who took hostages and starved and murdered them, are war criminals.

The war that Hamas started on 7 October entered a ceasefire just over two years later, on 10 October 2025. Three days later, the last 20 living Israeli hostages were finally released. Yet the war is not over. Hamas still controls roughly a third of Gaza. In Lebanon, notwithstanding the decapitation of its leadership through the extraordinary pager bombs, Hezbollah remains armed. The Houthis are still attacking Saudi oil exports in the Red Sea. Hamas and Islamic Jihad remain active in the West Bank. Yes, Assad is gone, depriving Iran and Hezbollah of their crucial Syrian ally and supply corridor, but Syria is now ruled by Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda-adjacent jihadists. Hardly a triumph for the West. And in Iran, the regime survives despite the devastating aerial campaigns of Israel and the US. Its seven-front war against Israel has suffered a setback, but the forces that produced it are far from vanquished.

Against these losses, Hamas’s triumph is not just that it is still standing, but that it has persuaded leftist intellectuals to erase its conduct from consideration of Israel’s conduct: a case of ‘Don’t mention the war’. Shorn of Hamas’s determination to wipe Israel off the map, Israel’s attempt to eliminate Hamas has been branded genocide.

The inversion has been relentless. In the lead-up to the third anniversary of 7 October, the revolutionary socialist website Green Left advertised rallies around Australia to mark ‘three years of genocide and resistance’.

Think about those words. Not two years of ‘genocide’ that emerged from Israel’s conduct of the war. The clock started ticking on 7 October, 2023, when Hamas was launching rockets into Israel on a religious holiday and murdering Israeli civilians in their beds.

This is an important clue to understanding one of the most successful intellectual transformations of our time.

For these intellectuals, ‘genocide’ was not a conclusion reached after examining Israel’s conduct of the war. It was the premise through which they interpreted that conduct. Hamas’s slaughter of civilians was not a war crime but ‘resistance’. Israel’s response was not to free the hostages and destroy Hamas but ‘genocide’.

Once those categories had been assigned, everything was made to fit them: a civilian killed in an Israeli air strike; a Hamas fighter killed in civilian clothes; the bombing of a hospital used by Hamas as its military headquarters – all supposedly evidence of genocidal intent. Aid delayed inside Gaza by Hamas was evidence of Israeli starvation even when hundreds of truckloads were sitting on the Gaza side of the crossing waiting to be collected. Israeli warnings to civilians, evacuation corridors, telephone calls, text messages, proportionality assessments and aborted strikes simply disappeared from the narrative.

Even Israel’s mistakes were dragooned to provide evidence of ‘genocidal’ intent despite the fact that the Israel Defence Forces made catastrophic mistakes involving its own people. Israeli soldiers mistakenly shot three escaped hostages in Gaza. Israelis died from friendly fire. Was this evidence that the IDF was perpetrating genocide against Israelis? Of course not. War conducted day after day for more than two years in a densely populated urban battlefield produced precisely what wars always produce: hell, and imperfect intelligence, misidentification, terrible judgment calls and even unlawful conduct. None of that establishes genocide.

Genocide requires the specific intention to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part, as such. And if conduct is offered as evidence of that intention, the inconvenient conduct has to be considered too.

Israel warned the population it supposedly intended to exterminate. It evacuated civilians from areas in which it intended to fight. It admitted vast quantities of food and humanitarian aid. It assessed anticipated civilian casualties before strikes and sometimes cancelled them. It investigated its own soldiers and officers when things went catastrophically wrong.

Meanwhile, Hamas provided rather less ambiguous evidence of its intentions. Its fighters deliberately entered civilian communities, murdered their inhabitants and took hostages. Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad subsequently promised that 7 October would be repeated again and again until Israel was eliminated. The Houthis helpfully put ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘Curse upon the Jews’ in their slogan.

Yet it is Israel’s ‘genocidal intent’ that apparently requires no further inquiry.

In Intellectuals and Society, Thomas Sowell showed how intellectuals make catastrophically bad ideas – eugenics, Nazism, communism – respectable. Transforming Israel into a racist, genocidal state is the latest example.

The transmission belt is visible here. An ideological interpretation developed in the activist and academic left acquires the language of international law — genocide, apartheid, occupation, settler colonialism — is amplified by NGOs, the UN and other international institutions and eventually arrives in the newsroom not as one interpretation of contested events but as the intellectual framework through which those events are understood.

There is a terrible irony in all this. Zionism arose from the recognition that Jews could no longer entrust their survival to the goodwill of others. On 7 October, Hamas demonstrated with merciless clarity why a secure Jewish state is necessary. Yet within hours the intellectual machinery of the West began turning the massacre into ‘resistance’ and the defence of its victims into ‘genocide’.

Three years later, the argument has travelled still further: Zionism itself is once again being branded racism, resurrecting a calumny the UN abandoned in 1991. Hamas has not destroyed Israel. But persuading the West that Jewish determination not to be destroyed is itself a crime goes a long way towards achieving its goal.