The Politicisation of Genocide: Netanyahu’s Speeches in Times of Crisis
- Jacob Griffith
- Jan 25
- 6 min read
On 5 December 2024, Amnesty International published a report concluding that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. This is the latest in a long line of accusations, most notably from the International Court of Justice, stemming from a conflict between Israel and Hamas in which over 46,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered, majority women and children, and which has threatened the onset of famine and disease across the Gaza strip. The present rulings and accusations are of immense personal significance for Israelis and Jews alike because of the historical relationship the Jewish people have with genocide. To understand the roots and dynamics of this relationship is essential for it gives a contextual basis upon which Israel’s reactions to international condemnation can be understood.
Genocide as a legal mechanism holds within it a sharp awareness of the Jewish experience. The specific character of Nazi mass murder spurred the introduction of a term which was specifically concerned with acts intended to destroy a social group because of the inherent characteristics of this social group. Jews were murdered because they were deemed leeches of society, it was their perceived otherness which marginalised and dehumanised them. With the events of the holocaust fresh on the minds of European society, the term genocide was first used in the Nuremberg Trials in 1945, and was codified in the Genocide Convention in 1948 as:
“Acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”
While the term is similarly rooted in the experiences of the Armenians, Cambodians, Bosnian Muslims and many more, the Jewish case is such an indicative one because the ‘Final Solution’ came so worryingly close to eradicating the world’s Jews in such a short space of time. As such, the significance of genocide to the Jewish people will always be of a special nature, which millions of Jews hold a personal connection to.
My grandfather was born into a Jewish family in Vienna. At the age of 3, in 1939, he fled as a refugee to London with his parents – his grandparents stayed behind in Austria and were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp and murdered. Exploring identity means tracing genealogy, confronting histories of exile and extermination. My family on my mother’s side moved from Lithuania to Ukraine to America, Poland to Austria to Israel, for generations being exiled and, as such, being rootless. It was this rootlessness which was the source of centuries of antisemitism, of pogroms and persecution, and it was this rootlessness which isolated the Jews as perfect targets for Hitler’s totalitarian ideology. Diaspora not just as a spatial but a social positioning has comprised the Jewish experience; this condition has led to long, precarious histories of marginalisation. The Holocaust has scarred the collective psyche of the Jewish people, the paint it dealt has intertwined into our very notion of identity, so that even Jews born today are marked by an event which occurred almost a century ago.
To be accused of committing genocide touches the core of this trauma. Because of the feelings which arise when the term is spoken, the destruction of one’s ancestry that the word genocide reminds the Jew of, to be accused of it means to feel akin to those evil people who orchestrated the Holocaust. While many of those accusing Israel of committing genocide do not believe that Netanyahu is a Hitler-esque figure, accusations of genocide can be taken as accusations of Nazism, and are therefore met with outrage and denial by many Jews and Israelis.
As a result of the global polarisation driven by this denial, genocide has become heavily politicised, and Benjamin Netanyahu has learnt to use Jewish trauma as a means of exempting him and his nation from international criticism. In a speech delivered on Yom Ha’atzmaut, Holocaust Memorial Day, Netanyahu commemorated Moshe Leiter, a fallen IDF officer who:
“Went to battle in the Gaza strip with the legacy of the Holocaust on his shoulders… Major Leiter led his soldiers in the war in Gaza, knowing that he was fighting for his great-grandfather as well, and for the six million Jews, our brothers and sisters”
According to this narrative, Leiter is a victim of the battle against Jew-hatred in the same manner that those who perished in the Holocaust were generations before him. The war against Hamas represents a continuation of the Jews’ struggle for their survival, and as such a war in which slaughter is indiscernible from self-defence, in which tens of thousands of dead civilians, famine and disease become admissible and necessary acts in a divinely ordained struggle for Jewish existence. Netanyahu’s comments leave no space for sympathy with Palestinian grief; according to him one either unconditionally and outrightly supports Israel or supports a second Holocaust.
The speech continues by speaking of Israel’s fight on two fronts:
“The first, the fanatical regime in Iran and its terror proxies, who act with the clear intention to destroy us; the second, the antisemitic volcano eruption that spits burning lava of lies against us, all around the world… previous generations spread lies of how Jews poisoned wells, used the blood of children to make matza, and spread disease. Today, they spread new lies, that we are committing genocide and causing famine in Gaza. This could not be further from the truth”
Here Netanyahu expands upon his stern, binary view of the conflict, framing a reality in which any criticism of Israel’s policies in Gaza are fuelled by antisemitic rage and intended, ultimately, to bring about the end of the Jewish people. From this position, Netanyahu nullifies any legal action or public outcry directed towards him on the basis that they are conspiracy. While antisemitism has ballooned since the October 7th attacks, charges made by the ICJ and NGOs such as Amnesty have no connection to centuries old antisemitic tropes; the rulings these institutions arrive at may be disputed, but it is wrong to mistake them as conspiracy.
However, Netanyahu knows that constructing a fictitious reality as he has done serves the purpose of exempting him and his nation from international outcry. Excessively inciting Jewish trauma as a political means of shoring up power and nullifying any international criticism is an ideological manoeuvre. Genocide is the primary instrument of this manoeuvre, supplanted from its legal foundations, where it was representative of and applicable to all of humanity, and reconstructed as a tool to evoke notions of victimhood and draw attention away from events in Gaza.
Many in Israel – and Jews around the world – find refuge in Netanyahu’s rhetoric precisely because the imagined world he constructs through his speeches is one which shelters individuals from the guilt arising from their country’s actions in Gaza. After all, one does not hold the capacity to process the victimhood of another if they are consumed with their own internal trauma. Each act of terror by Hamas, on October 7th but on many occasions before and after, inflame this trauma and bind the Jewish psyche evermore tightly to its intergenerational fear of destruction. From this position, to critique Israel means to be an enemy of oneself, to jeopardise one’s own reality as a consequence of objecting to the trauma which comprises one’s being.
To refuse to acknowledge and to refute the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle becomes a coping mechanism, such an act conserves both an individual identity and a national one. Netanyahu recognises this and uses this recognition as the driving force of his speeches. Ruling of the plausibility of genocide from an institution of the ICJ’s stature brings up memories of the Nazis and the Nuremberg Trials, which are firmly bound to any notion of genocide for Jews. Thus, to draw on the Genocide convention against Israel 79 years after the term was first used in the Nuremberg trials is a shocking event which is difficult to come to terms with.
Netanyahu offers a way out by delegitimising accusations, by giving and taking away the rights of who can experience genocide, redefining how genocide is prosecuted and presenting his nation as intrinsically unable to commit such a crime. It becomes exclusive to certain groups, from a legal term it is distorted into an ideological tool, constructed so as to conserve a collective national identity, and rendered incapable of protecting the people of Gaza. The disconnect between Jews and non-Jews culminating from an ignorance of the intergenerational nature of Jewish trauma only intensifies Israeli denial and further polarises the international community. Yet the reality is that the region will see no approach to peace if Israel refuses to look face to face with the horrors of its actions, and fails to understand that they can historically be the victims and still face prejudice yet simultaneously a perpetrator.
The present ICJ case is like no other because of the specific relationship Jews hold with the concept of genocide. This relationship complexifies proceedings tremendously and will likely be a source of polarisation for years to come. But the first stage towards progress is to recognise that universal mechanisms such as international law have very subjective meanings for varying social groups which act as an impediment to the laws’ equal application. To deny the existence of this subjectivity is to deny the deep-rooted pain held by a social group and accumulated over hundreds of years. To cut ‘against the grain’ of historical progression, as Walter Benjamin once put it, means to construct a future in which the experiences of those who have been marred by prejudice are represented. Done correctly and equitably, this future must represent both the pain of the Palestinians and the Jews.
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