By Steve Kramer in Kfar Saba, Israel
Many American Jews are unwittingly playing a dangerous game. They are much too critical of Israeli policies and Israel’s prime minister, and they are often loud about it. Progressive Jewish politicians take stands against Israel, playing to anti-Israel sentiment among voters including some hyper-critical Jewish ones. “Genocide” is bandied about when no such thing happened in Gaza.
Some Americans, including American Jews, believe it did happen. Fact: If Israel had been intent on eradicating the Gazan population, there wouldn’t have been messages and phone calls warning the population to remove itself from neighborhoods where IDF activities against Hamas were imminent.
Recap: Hamas terrorists, augmented by “civilian” Gazans, horrifically attacked Israel in a sneak attack, killing more than 1,200 Israelis and others and kidnapping more than 250. Babies, children, young adults, and older ones were slaughtered, many while attending a “love” music festival, and others sleeping in their beds. The Hamas strategy is hiding behind Gazan men, women, and children – human shields. Purposefully, the mass media designated Israel’s fierce response as “genocide”, ignoring the criminal Hamas leaders who depended on as many dead Gazans as possible to gain the world’s sympathy.
The Gazan so-called health ministry reports that 70-80,000 Gazans were killed during the fighting. The IDF accepts that estimate. However, the health ministry count doesn’t differentiate between fighters and civilians and includes Gazans killed by errant Hamas rockets and those who died of natural causes during the protracted war. Before the October 2025 ceasefire, the IDF said it had killed at least 22,000 combatants, as well as another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 onslaught.
West Point war expert John Spencer says: “I have been to Gaza four times embedded with the Israel Defense Forces. I have interviewed the prime minister of Israel, the defense minister, the IDF chief of staff, the leadership of the Southern Command, and dozens of commanders and soldiers on the front lines. I have reviewed their orders, watched their targeting process and seen soldiers take real risks to avoid harming civilians. Nothing I have seen or studied resembles genocide or genocidal intent.”
See NOTE below
Yet, many American Jews are dupes of the persistent media libel against Israel. A recent AP poll found that 30% of American Jews believe Israel committed genocide in Gaza (so do 31% of Americans overall). Nearly half of Jewish Democrats say the US is too supportive of Israel while 58% of Americans agree. The anti-Israel New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the highest-profile anti-Israel politician in the country, is more popular than Prime Minister Netanyahu among American Jews, 44% compared to about 33% for Netanyahu. Why?
I’ll admit that I don’t understand Jews who overly criticize Israelis for defending themselves. True, in our democratic country they have every right to express their opinions. But, what country wouldn’t defend itself against terrorists on its borders? Do they think that criticism of their fellow Jews will protect them from the Jew haters? Are Israel haters juxtaposing American Jews with Israelis, leading to more anti-Zionism and Jew hatred? I think so.
I remember a conversation that I had as a boy of about bar mitzvah age. The question was, Who would you fight for if America and Israel were at war? I responded: I would fight for Israel. My reasoning was that after the US defeated Israel, it would turn on American Jews. So I chose my Jewish identity over my American one. But what if I fought for the Americans and didn’t back Israel? You might think that would make me A-OK with the Israel/ Jew haters. That’s obviously not the case. Neither the Jewish supporters of the early National Socialist (Nazi) government, nor the Jewish Germans who had converted to Christianity were spared during the Holocaust.
So, do your best to sideline and/or educate those Jews, especially politicians, who decry Israel. You don’t have to be a Zionist to stand up for the Jewish people. But if you think that siding with the Israel haters will absolve and protect you, fuhgeddaboudit.
NOTE:
The Democratic Republic of Congo Genocide –Considered the bloodiest conflict since World War II, reports estimate that almost six million people have died since fighting started in 1996. Poverty, famine, disease and sexual violence continue to devastate the DRC. In 2010, a U.N. representative called the DRC the rape capital of the world. Additionally, civil unrest stemming from the postponement of the 2016 presidential elections displaced approximately 3.9 million people by the end of 2017.
The Darfur Genocide — Darfur is a region in Western Sudan with a population of around seven million people. Since 2003, the Sudanese government-backed militia called the Janjaweed have laid waste to many villages in Darfur. The violence and recent genocide began as a series of reprisals for a 2003 attack on a Sudanese Air Force Base, and it was claimed that the residents of Darfur were responsible for the attack. The Janjaweed target civilians, committing mass murder and rape and looting economic resources. The U.N. estimates 4.7 million people have been affected by the fighting since 2004–half of them children. A 2016 report indicated that more than 600,000 people have died directly or indirectly because of the conflict.
The Yazidi genocide — Yazidis are a small, Kurdish ethno-religious group, primarily found in northern Iraq.] The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) killed, captured and displaced all 400,000 Yazidi people living in Sinjar, Iraq on August 3, 2014, in a genocide that disproportionately affected children. About 10,000 Yazidis were killed or abducted, half of all those executed were children [2], according to a report by multi-national researchers in the journal PLoS Medicine. All evidence points to an intentional and highly organized scheme by ISIS to end the Yazidi presence in Iraq, and potentially the world.
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Steve Kramer is an American Israeli freelance writer based in Kfar Saba, Israel.
While the Western world and many within our own community are consumed by debates over the political survival of Benjamin Netanyahu, a far more dangerous, civilizational war is being lost without a fight.
To focus the conversation on a single politician is to fall directly into a carefully laid trap. The true battlefront is not political; it is semantic. And the ultimate tragedy is that from the very beginning, mainstream Jewish organizations failed to aggressively expose and counter the calculated, linguistic hijacking of our shared history.
We must speak the truth clearly: the weaponization of the word “genocide” on college campuses and in international forums is a deliberate, psychological inversion designed to erase the memory of the Holocaust and turn the ultimate victims of industrial extermination into the perpetrators.
There is a profound, sickening irony in the current discourse. The word genocide did not emerge from a vacuum. It was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin—a Polish-Jewish lawyer who lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust. Lemkin created the term by combining the Greek genos (race or tribe) with the Latin cide (killing) specifically to give the world a legal and moral vocabulary to describe the systematic, state-sponsored annihilation of European Jewry.
For decades, the Holocaust stood as the historical baseline for this ultimate crime against humanity. We need to reclaim the word Genocide.
Today, we are watching a highly coordinated attempt by anti-Israel activists to hijack Lemkin’s word, strip it of its historical context, and weaponize it against the Jewish state. This is not a standard political debate; it is a linguistic coup. By plastering the label of “genocide” onto a defensive, highly targeted military campaign—where the Israeli Defense Forces routinely warn civilians to evacuate—the opposition seeks to achieve a singular, malicious goal: to neutralize the moral memory of the Holocaust.
If they can convince the world that Jews are committing “genocide,” they can argue that the lessons of the Holocaust no longer apply, thereby clearing the path for the total delegitimization and destruction of Israel.
When the “genocide” accusation was first launched, the response from legacy Jewish and Zionist organizations was tragically weak. Instead of playing offensive, they played defense. They went on the defensive, explaining, apologizing, and trying to prove how many warning leaflets were dropped or how much aid was delivered.
By debating the execution of the war rather than aggressively rejecting the premise of the accusation, our organizations allowed the word to take root. They allowed the opposition to define the terms of the debate.
While our leaders were busy discussing Netanyahu’s popularity or trying to appease academic administrators, the campus movements were successfully replacing the memory of the Holocaust with a fabricated narrative of Israeli-led extermination.
Whether one supports or opposes Benjamin Netanyahu is entirely irrelevant to this civilizational struggle. Netanyahu did not create the “genocide” blood libel, and his political departure will not end it. The activists marching on our campuses do not hate Israel because of its Prime Minister; they hate Israel because it exists.
If we throw our leadership under the bus in a desperate bid to appease a hostile public, we are merely feeding the beast. The opposition will not suddenly say, “Now that Netanyahu is gone, we support Israel.” Instead, they will see it as a victory, a sign of internal weakness, and they will press forward with their demands for total divestment and dismantling.
It is time for Jewish organizations and community leaders to stop playing by the rules of an enemy that wants us erased. We must stop explaining, and start exposing.
We must demand that our organizations return to the offensive. We must aggressively remind the world of the origin of the word genocide. We must relentlessly expose the sickening hypocrisy of activists who accuse Israel of “genocide” while staying completely silent as actual genocidal campaigns are executed in Tibet, Sudan, and Syria.
We must refuse to let the ultimate tragedy of the Jewish people be stolen, twisted, and used as a weapon to execute the next one. The truth is our shield, but only if we have the courage to wield it.
So true! If you’re on FB Steve, there’s a group called Jews against genocide 🙄 I copied and pasted your piece on there. Their posts could use comments from people like you. There is at least one other person that follows them that challenges them.