Is there any difference between medieval blood libels inspired by the Church and fabricated claims of Israeli genocide disseminated by today’s useful idiots in the west? Not really.
Protocol of the Elders. By Humus sapiens at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., Public Domain, Wikipedia
As an adjunct professor of law and criminal justice for undergraduates, I eschew institutional politics and have no use for academic unions that seem compelled to support partisan agendas. If the raison d’être for such unions is to maximize salaries and benefits for professors, then fine. But when they act like political action committees pushing radical ideologies, they should be exposed for misrepresentation of purpose, recognized as lobbying organizations, and required to refund dues used to promote causes that may be irrelevant or offensive to their members.
And when they use their platforms to spew hysterical anti-Israel propaganda that echoes the talking points of antisemitic terrorist groups, they should be exposed for sanctimonious hypocrisy.
Recently, one of the unions in our region passed an embargo and divestment resolution against Israel over the war in Gaza (as have unions at other schools), which contained inflammatory language and erroneous, misleading casualty statistics. The resolution was long on baseless accusations of Israeli apartheid and genocide, short on truth, and brimming with provocative rhetoric, as illustrated by the following excerpted recitals:
“WHEREAS, from October 2023 to September 4, 2025, Israel has killed at least 64,000 Palestinians in Gaza, half of them women and children. It has likely killed over 100,000 more people through its blockades on food aid and its systematic destruction of Gazan medical facilities and water and sanitation infrastructure. Israel simultaneously continues to illegally annex land in the occupied West Bank and displace Palestinians there; and….
“WHEREAS…Top genocide scholars agree that Israel is committing genocide [and]…the ICJ affirmed that Israel’s prolonged occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is illegal, as is its system of racial segregation and apartheid; and…
“WHEREAS, in February 2025, United States President Donald Trump called openly for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza, followed by Israeli government’s plan for forced displacement in May 2025; and…
“WHEREAS, Israel is currently using blocking of humanitarian aid and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza…”
Aside from the glaring mistruths stated in these recitals (e.g., that Israel has caused starvation by blocking humanitarian aid, illegally annexed parts of Judea and Samaria, conspired with the US to engage in “ethnic cleansing,” and systematically destroyed medical facilities – all false), the resolution also contained unverified casualty statistics mirroring those circulated by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry’s figures are unreliable because, among other things, they (a) overstate the total death toll, (b) fail to distinguish civilians from combatants and children from adults, and (c) fail to identify deaths caused by Hamas’s use of human shields and its appropriation of schools, hospitals, residential areas, and mosques to launch missiles, store weapons, and hide hostages.
Though it may be difficult to calculate casualty statistics precisely during wartime (and despite the reliance of haters on specious data concocted by Hamas and disseminated by propaganda merchants posing as news and human rights organizations), objective analyses indicate lower civilian-to-combatant death rates in Gaza than in other instances of urban warfare (e.g., the battle for control of Mosul). Agenda-driven media outlets and NGOs, however, use erroneous statistics to falsely portray civilian casualties in Gaza as unprecedented and the result of coordinated Israeli attacks against noncombatants – all in order to promote the lie that Israel is committing genocide.
The resolution’s recitals included foul slanders against Israel without mentioning the depraved acts of murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping perpetrated by Hamas that started the war in the first place. Moreover, the language and imagery used sounded similar in tone to the anti-Israel (and antisemitic) tropes that have become commonplace on university campuses and throughout academia.
The resolution attempted to buttress genocide claims by citing “top genocide scholars” – unnamed, of course – and regurgitating misleading mortality statistics. But such claims are groundless as the reality does not even comport with the expanded definition of genocide contained in the UN’s “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
As discussed in Article II, “genocide” includes “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical (sic), racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Such definitions apply not to Israel, but to Hamas – whose charter calls for Israel’s destruction and the annihilation of all Jews, and which has launched five wars of attempted extermination against the Jewish state since 2007. Despite propaganda to the contrary, Israel does not target civilians and never has. In contrast, Hamas specifically attacks Jewish men, women, and children – while simultaneously endangering Arab civilians by using them as human shields in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, preventing them from leaving battle zones, and often slaughtering them as “collaborators.”
Furthermore, the documented increase in Gaza’s population since 2023 clearly undercuts any claim of “genocide.” Israel-haters, accordingly, have had to redefine the term to strip it of substance and meaning. Collateral civilian deaths – though regrettable – are by definition not genocide, particularly when they are largely the consequence of Hamas’s strategic entrenchment in civilian areas and institutions in order to maximize casualties.
If anti-Israel critics are genuinely concerned about genocide, why do they not condemn the extermination of Uyghurs in China? Or of non-Muslims by Arabs in Darfur (Sudan), the Rohingya in Myanmar, Tigrayans and Oromos in Ethiopia, Christians in Nigeria, or Hema tribesmen in the Congo? Apparently, real genocide elicits no outrage from those who condemn Israel for essentially defending herself.
Accusations of Israeli “segregation” and “apartheid” are likewise baseless, as the ICC’s Rome Statute of 2002 defines apartheid as “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” This definition does not fit Israel, where ethnic and religious minorities have equal rights by law and Arabs serve in the Knesset, judiciary, and all professions.
But it does describe dictatorships like China, Islamist regimes like Iran, and genocidal terror organizations like Hamas, whose agitprop seems to have found its way onto university campuses and into classrooms, student senates, and the misinformed resolutions of academic unions.
Those who wrongfully accuse Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and forced starvation often claim they are not antisemitic and that one can be critical of Israel without harboring hatred against Jews. However, when they make objectively false accusations against Israel while ignoring real atrocities occurring in China, Sudan, Nigeria and elsewhere, prejudice is the only rational explanation for their exclusive (and rabidly obsessive) focus on the Jewish state. Indeed, their anti-Israel calumnies are but the latest iteration of ancient blood libels used to justify the persecution and murder of Jews throughout Christian and Islamic history.
The classical blood libel accused Jews of using gentile blood to bake matzah and for other ritual purposes and was invoked to whip mobs into murderous frenzies to facilitate pogroms and massacres, particularly around Easter time. And the putative victims – usually children – were almost always venerated as martyrs, including William of Norwich, Simon of Trent, and Gabriel of Bialystok, who was elevated to sainthood in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
This theme was updated to cater to modern sensibilities, as when a Scandinavian tabloid accused the Israeli military of killing Arabs and harvesting their organs, and other outlets ran sinister stories of Jews controlling the illicit organ trade.
Intertwined with the blood libel myth were stories of the Jews’ supposed predilection for killing children – a malignant theme modernized by the Mohammed al-Dura hoax in 2002, when a French television station used edited film to report on Israelis killing an Arab child being shielded by his father during a supposed standoff with the IDF. As shown in court, unedited footage indicated that (a) the scene was staged, (b) Israelis were not shooting in the boy’s direction, and (c) he was neither killed nor injured.
And then there are the myriad stories of supposed civilian massacres by the IDF, which are embraced by unethical journalists only to be quickly refuted – usually without apology. Such was the case with the apocryphal Jenin massacre during the second intifada in 2002, a fraud initially validated by a fawning western media and the UN.
Is there any difference between medieval blood libels inspired by the Church and fabricated claims of Israeli genocide disseminated by today’s useful idiots in the west? Not really. Though times and societies certainly change, antisemitic myths and stereotypes remain constant themes connecting the generations.
And make no mistake, false accusations of genocide do indeed constitute a modern-day blood libel.
Matthew Hausman is a seasoned trial attorney and adjunct professor of law and criminal justice with nearly forty years’ experience as a journalist and editor. A former correspondent specializing in science, health and medicine and legal affairs columnist, Mr. Hausman now writes and speaks about constitutional and international law, foreign policy, Israel and Jewish affairs, and his work has been published throughout the US, Canada, Israel, and Australia.
Israel is not in the business of genocide. If it were, it seems that they could improve vastly by actually bombing those civilians rather than warning them.
On the other hand, each missile indiscriminately fired by Hamas (and Hezbollah and the Houthis and the Iranians) into Israeli civilian targets are nothing less than attempted murder of said civilians – no excuses. If, then, some depressed Israeli reservist who has just lost his family were to retaliate in kind, that might be related to genocide, but the IDF is not just a moral army, it is also guided by rules of engagement and nobody fires at a target without the order to do so unless fired upon directly first.
So, at the end of the day, these stories are libel, plain and simple, and intended to attack Israel’s public image at the cheapest possible cost. It may be time for Israel to pick up the baton and loudly tell their side of the story, and if a few embellishments creep in, it is still not enough to balance the scales.