I.

During a public address in October 2023, as Israel was preparing to launch its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu quoted a verse from the Bible that would echo through countless NGO reports and news stories: “Remember what Amalek has done to you.” To those uninitiated in Biblical mythology, the phrase may not sound particularly ominous, but Israel’s critics knew better. In the Book of Samuel, they pointed out, Yahweh commands King Saul to “smite” the Amalekites, leaving no one alive—not even women and children.

The snag is that Netanyahu was quoting from the Book of Deuteronomy, which recounts a tale from centuries earlier. As the Israelites fled Egypt, they were ambushed from the rear by the Amalekites. Following this treacherous attack, Yahweh tells the Israelites: “Remember what the Amalekites did to you along the way when you came out of Egypt. When you were weary and worn out, they met you on your journey and attacked all who were lagging behind.” The relevance of this passage would surely have been obvious to his audience, who were still reeling from Hamas’s surprise attack on 7 October.

But Israel’s critics were not satisfied by this explanation. “Amalek” could not possibly refer to Hamas, they reasoned, because Hamas is an organisation, not a people like the Amalekites. Therefore, when Netanyahu spoke about “Amalek,” he clearly meant the Palestinians as a whole. And since the Amalekites are being smitten elsewhere in the Bible, the obvious inference is that Netanyahu was demanding the annihilation of the Palestinians. For this reason, “remember Amalek” was alleged to be a dog whistle for genocide, and Netanyahu’s quotation would feature prominently in South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.

As it happens, just a few hundred metres from the ICJ, there is a memorial commemorating the Holocaust. It bears a bronze plaque, inscribed in Dutch and Hebrew with the same verse Netanyahu quoted: “Remember what Amalek has done to you. Don’t forget.” This time it cites the correct source: Deuteronomy 15:17–19. If Israel’s critics had bothered to check, they would have found the same verse at the entrance of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. It is a well-established motif in Jewish culture, symbolising the duty to record and remember the persecutions that Jews suffered at the hands of mobs and regimes throughout history. (Has the German ambassador to the Netherlands expressed his dismay at this genocidal incitement against all German people?)

These facts about the history and meaning of the Amalek verse are easily verifiable, and they were pointed out early on in the Gaza War when accusations about Netanyahu’s use of allegedly genocidal language first surfaced. And yet, newspapers and NGOs have kept repeating this inflammatory canard without ever issuing a correction.

There are countless examples of similar distortions. In an impromptu speech delivered days after 7 October, former defence minister Yoav Gallant told his soldiers that “Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.” A widely circulated clip of this speech—which appeared on the BBC, and in the New York Times, the Guardian, and South Africa’s ICJ case—dishonestly omitted the middle sentence, making it look as if Gallant had pledged to eliminate “all of Gaza.” Gallant was also accused of calling Palestinians “human animals.” He didn’t—he was referring to Hamas, the “ISIS of Gaza.” And Netanyahu never said that “Gazans would pay a huge price,” as even once-reputable scholars have claimed; he said Israel would “exact a huge price from the enemy,” meaning Hamas. Nor did he threaten to turn Gaza into a “desert island”—a mistranslation by Al Jazeera, which is funded by the same regime that bankrolls Hamas.

Holocaust Historians, the Genocide Charge, and Gaza

The accusation is wrong on the facts and objectively serves to support the intent of Hamas to murder Jews with impunity.

QuilletteNorman J.W. Goda

And then there is Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s assertion that “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely untrue. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime.” Herzog’s phrasing was unfortunate and liable to be misunderstood, although it should be noted that some historians have made identical claims of collective responsibility about the German people under Nazi Germany. In any event, during the same speech Herzog went on to clarify that “there are many, many innocent Palestinians” who will not be targeted by the IDF. He subsequently stated:

For the State of Israel, and of course for me personally, innocent civilians are not considered targets in any way whatsoever. There are also innocent Palestinians in Gaza. I am deeply sorry for the tragedy they are going through. From the first day of the war right until today, I have called and worked for humanitarian aid for them—and only for them. This is part of our values as a country.

Needless to say, these remarks by Israel’s president did not make it into South Africa’s ICJ case, or into any of the NGO reports. Nor did the endless stream of official statements in press conferences, IDF briefings, and social media posts from 8 October onwards reaffirming that Israel’s “military operations in Gaza are solely directed at Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other armed groups,” that the IDF “does not intentionally target civilians or seek to harm the civilian population,” and that Israel “does everything possible to limit civilian casualties.”

I can’t recall another instance of such arrant dishonesty making its way into serious reports and court filings. Every single report regurgitates the same litany of misquoted, misinterpreted, or fabricated statements by Israeli officials, sometimes just a few words strung together, as if they somehow constitute the equivalent of the Wannsee conference. To be sure, some Israeli figures did make abhorrent statements in the overheated wake of Hamas’s massacre, but these were people without military decision-making power, such as extremist rabbis, Knesset members, retired military officers, and media personalities (and Israel is arguably not doing enough to prosecute these people).

And though horrific, such statements are typical of the belligerent rhetoric in every war, a far cry from the explicit instructions and chain of command needed to establish actual genocidal intent. Even the hateful remarks by the far-right ministers of finance and national security, though reprehensible, do not come close to establishing genocidal intent, as these people did not have a seat in the war cabinet and do not dictate military strategy. They are mostly extremist rabble-rousers riling up their political base.

II.

If the Gaza War was a genocide, it was the most incompetent genocide in recorded history. Had Israel wished to use the 7 October massacre as a pretext for genocide, it could have carpet-bombed the entire Strip without without endangering the life of a single IDF soldier. Instead, Israel lost more than 900 soldiers during the Gaza campaign (and thousands more were wounded) precisely because it entered the enclave on foot and refrained from indiscriminate killing. Even according to Hamas’s own statistics, which do not distinguish between combatants and civilians, the overwhelming majority of casualties are male and of fighting age, which is inconsistent with a policy of indiscriminate killing (Hamas initially tried to fool global opinion that the casualties of the Gaza war were “70 percent women and children,” but that claim collapsed under scrutiny and was then quietly retracted).