Opinion: The antisemitic lie at the heart of too many campus protests

Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a senior columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

During a recent visit to the student encampment at Columbia University, Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota made what she may have thought was an enlightened statement. “We should not have to tolerate antisemitism or bigotry for all Jewish students,” she declared, “whether they are pro-genocide or anti-genocide.” Omar, whose daughter was arrested in the protests, appeared to be implying that students who back Israel’s actions in Gaza are supporters of genocide.

The claim, the chants, the smearing of President Joe Biden as “Genocide Joe” (to former President Donald Trump’s delight) for his support for Israel are part of an astonishingly successful campaign to paint Israel’s defensive war against Hamas as an act of genocide.

The charge is not just absurd, it’s outrageous. Yet incredibly, it’s a smear that has gained traction.

Yes, Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians following the Hamas attacks of October 7. The suffering of the population in Gaza is heartbreaking, horrific. And Israel may not have done everything it could to minimize the civilian death toll. But the leap to brand its military campaign as a genocide — the depth of humanity’s depravity — is unconscionable.

Many people see, as I do, a direct connection in the genocide accusations to a centuries’ old calumny that has bedeviled the Jewish people, used since the Middle Ages to taunt them and even to justify massacring and exiling them. It’s called the blood libel, and it has long helped fuel the apparently undying fires of antisemitism.

The original blood libel claimed that Jews murdered Christians, particularly children, so they could use their blood in rituals. It may sound laughable, ridiculous, but across hundreds of years many have believed it. Some still do. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer confronted a Hamas official on air in 2014 about his assertion that Jews use Christian blood in the matzo they eat at Passover.

Over the centuries, this defamation gave rise to other well-worn antisemitic tropes — that Jews are vampires, blood-suckers and organ-harvesters. Images of Jews and Stars of David dripping blood have cropped up repeatedly since October 7.

Indeed, too many today are willing to assume the worst possible motives for the actions of Jews — or in this case, the Jewish state — making the historical blood libel the heir to an ever-evolving series of modern slanders culminating in genocide.

Genocide is a term that became enshrined in international law after Nazi Germany sought to annihilate every Jew in Europe, killing 6 million, including about 1.5 million children. It is something completely different from what is happening in Gaza.

The UN’s Genocide Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” The term was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish jurist who in the 1930s began to push for an international law barring such atrocities as Jews in Eastern Europe endured brutal pogroms. He escaped to the US and later helped prepare the Nuremberg trials against the Nazis who, among the millions they had killed, had murdered his family who remained behind in Europe.

Claims that Israel has been committing a genocide of Palestinians date to long before October 7. Yet the population of Gaza was estimated to be less than 400,000 when Israel captured the territory from Egypt in a war against multiple Arab countries in 1967. It’s now estimated at just over 2 million. Population growth of almost 600% would make it the most inept genocide in the history of the world.

What about now?

Those repeating the word genocide over and over, turning it into a mantra that penetrates the public consciousness, smearing Israel and anyone who supports it, ignore the facts of this war.

This is not an unprovoked war, like Russia’s against Ukraine. It’s not a civil war between rival militias, like the one raging in Sudan — which, by the way, is being ignored by almost everyone, even though the UN describes it as one of the “worst humanitarian crises in recent memory,” where a famine could kill 500,000 people.

No, Israel was attacked. On October 7, Hamas launched a gruesome assault on Israeli civilians, killing some 1,200 — including many women and children — and dragging hundreds of them as hostages into Gaza. Today dozens — including many women and children — remain in captivity.

Those who keep saying that Israel’s response is an act of revenge rather than the strategic, defensive war that most Israelis view as a fight for national survival against a determined enemy backed by a powerful country are deliberately distorting reality. In doing so, they are perversely evoking the same false blood lust and grotesqueness embedded in the blood libel archetype.

Hamas’ massacre, its wide-ranging sexual violence, its burning of entire families in their homes, its vow to do it again — these and other serious threats that the group poses to Israelis get ignored in the characterizations of the Israel Defense Forces as pursuing only vengeance by killing Gazan civilians.

Indeed, Hamas’ actions, which precipitated this war, don’t seem to exist in the minds of ostensibly humanitarian-minded protesters. Nor even the fate of the hostages, still captive in Hamas tunnels.

Although the campus protests vary in their message and actions from school to school, we never hear protesters chant that Hamas should release the hostages or accept a ceasefire. Quite the contrary. Accusations against Israel at times include praise for Hamas, one of whose aims — the end of the Jewish state — is shared by some key organizers of the student protests. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently said, “It remains astounding to me that the world is almost deafeningly silent when it comes to Hamas.”

Accusing Israel of genocide and putting the entire onus for stopping the war, putting all the blame for the deaths, on the Jewish state is even more astounding because Hamas — designated a terrorist organization by the US, the European Union and many other countries — is a group whose explicit goal, according to its founding charter, is not just to destroy Israel, but to kill Jews. That is the definition of genocide.

Yet the casualty figures from Gaza are produced by people who report to Hamas, which has ruled Gaza as a dictatorship for nearly two decades. They are repeated regularly, without noticeable skepticism, often without specific attribution to Hamas as the source. I don’t know how many people have died. But it’s reasonable to believe that Hamas has an incentive to inflate the numbers.

Still, the death toll, even by the Hamas count, does not in any way suggest a genocidal campaign. The terror organization puts the total at about 35,000. The figure, disputed by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy among other think tanks and researchers, includes Hamas fighters. That means the number of civilians killed, whatever the total, is actually lower.

Compare that to the death toll in Mosul, Iraq, where coalition forces uprooted ISIS from a city that had some 600,000 people at the time. Estimates of the exact number of deaths vary, ranging from 9,000 to 40,000 (the latter is the estimate of Kurdish intelligence). The lowest figure is on par with the rate of total deaths reported by Hamas authorities in Gaza that does not distinguish civilians from Hamas fighters, while the highest is four times greater.

I don’t recall hearing the term genocide used there, or in any of the battles that led to more than half a million people being killed in Afghanistan and Iraq during America’s wars there. And yet, Israel has been repeatedly smeared with this damning accusation.

CNN’s Jake Tapper recently asked Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, a distinguished and experienced US military leader, if he thought Israel is conducting its war by the same standards — weighing the military value of targets versus the risk to civilians — that the US would use. His answer: “Yes, I do.”

The death of any innocent civilian is a tragedy, and too many have died in Gaza. My heart aches when I see the images and hear the stories of what they’re enduring. But Israel is fighting a war unlike any in recent memory. Urban combat is notoriously difficult, notoriously hard on civilians. That’s magnified in Gaza by Hamas’ deliberate effort to surround itself with civilians, embedded in tunnels, with the knowledge — accurate, as it turns out — that high death counts turn global opinion against Israel and create pressure to stop the war so that Hamas may survive to continue fighting.

South Africa formalized the newest incarnation of the blood libel when it brought a case to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide. The court’s response has been misreported, as its former president just explained. It found that Palestinians have a “plausible right” to be protected from genocide. Many had erroneously reported that the court said South Africa’s accusation of genocide itself was plausible.

Israel’s image is not helped by its current government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has brought into his coalition some extremist ministers whose utterances and behavior are beyond repugnant. But their words are not national policy. In fact, some Israelis themselves — including high-profile politicians — have condemned them in the strongest terms. Which is part of why Omar’s efforts to clean up her aspersions toward Jewish students by pointing to such rhetoric after she came under pressure is unconvincing.

One of the areas where Israel has failed is in the delivery of food to the region. The UN says parts of Gaza, particularly the north, are facing starvation, or are already in the midst of a famine. Any death from hunger is appalling, and Israel should have long ago improved the operations to screen deliveries. But the dire situation is hardly evidence of genocidal intent.

Aid distribution in the middle of a lawless war zone without police to protect supplies is incredibly difficult, and Hamas at times appears to be trying to make the situation worse. Hamas has “intercepted and diverted” food aid, according to the State Department. Trucks carrying food have been ransacked, looted and otherwise attacked, according to UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine James McGoldrick, though he didn’t specify by which groups. On Sunday, Hamas fired rockets in the direction of one of the main aid crossings, killing four Israeli soldiers and disrupting humanitarian deliveries. Even the pier being built by the US to boost aid deliveries has come under fire.

It’s fair to criticize Israel on many counts. Its conduct of this war can and will be debated for years to come. But protesters calling Israel’s defensive war a genocidal one, politicians accusing supporters of Israel of being pro-genocide and even journalists and other observers being so accepting of the premise that they let such charges stand unchallenged — as so often happens — is another ugly example of the resurgence of the oldest hate: antisemitism for the 21st century.