On October 8, 2023, while Israel was still reeling from the Hamas-led massacre of the previous day, accusations that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza were already appearing at demonstrations and on social media.
For the organizations behind the now viral Gaza GenoLIE campaign, that timing is central to their argument: that the accusation was part of a broader effort to delegitimize Israel—one that has since helped fuel hostility toward the Jewish state and Jews around the world.
The campaign is a joint initiative of over 100 pro-Israel and Jewish organizations from over 20 countries, including the Anti-Defamation League, World Jewish Congress, CAMERA, HonestReporting, the International Legal Forum (ILF), Students Supporting Israel (SSI), the Israeli-American Council (IAC), Christians United for Israel (CUFI), and others. The GenoLIE, whose name combines “genocide” and “lie,” highlights eight aspects of the Gaza genocide accusation, including examining the legal definition of genocide, famine allegations, the alleged “war on journalists,” Hamas’s use of human shields, allegations that Israel deliberately targeted journalists, and Israel’s treatment of civilians.
An effort to twist language
At the heart of the campaign is a legal distinction: genocide is not simply another word for a war or a conflict that results in significant civilian deaths.
Under international law, genocide requires specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected national, ethnic, racial or religious group. GenoLIE argues that applying the term to Israel’s war against Hamas strips the word of its specific meaning and turns it into a false political accusation.
“Words like ‘genocide’ carry legal and moral weight,” notes Sara Friedman, CEO of World Jewish Congress Israel, “and when they are stripped of their meaning and weaponized against a democracy defending itself from a terrorist organization, the term is degraded for every real victim of genocide, past and future. Exposing how this accusation was manufactured and spread is about restoring truth to public debate before the lie hardens into accepted history.”
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), in a 2024 ruling on genocide charges brought by South Africa against the Jewish state, issued provisional measures directing Israel to take certain steps under the Genocide Convention, but it did not find that Israel had committed genocide.
The initiative points to Israeli evacuation warnings, humanitarian pauses, and vaccination drives for Gazan civilians as evidence that Israel has taken meaningful measures to reduce civilian harm. GenoLIE argues that these measures demonstrate that Israel’s war is directed at Hamas, not the Palestinian population, and that Hamas’s deliberate use of civilians as human shields demonstrates that civilian casualties are a result of Hamas’s tactics, rather than evidence of an Israeli campaign to destroy Palestinians.
For Arié Bensemhoun, executive director of ELNET France, the accusation has a particular resonance because of Israel’s history.
Israel, he notes, is the state established after centuries of Jewish persecution and the Holocaust, making the accusation of genocide against Israel particularly significant.
“The Gaza GenoLIE seeks to invert that history,” he says, “to transform the state born from the ashes of genocide into the perpetrator of a fabricated genocide, in order to delegitimize the Zionist project at its very essence.”
An attack on Jewish identity and communities abroad
GazaGenoLIE.com has been translated to five languages in addition to English: German, Spanish, Italian, French, and Hebrew. The website describes the genocide accusation as a modern form of the blood libel: an old accusation of inherent Jewish evil recast in the political language of the 21st century.
GenoLIE also places the Gaza accusation in a much longer history of efforts to delegitimize Israel, tracing what it describes as a modern anti-Israel lexicon of racism, apartheid and genocide from the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism through the 2001 Durban conference and the rise of the BDS movement. In this telling, the accusation has changed, but the objective remains the same: isolate Israel and undermine its legitimacy as the Jewish state.
According to Bensemhoun, the genocide accusation has created a situation in which Jews in the Diaspora can increasingly be portrayed as morally suspect simply for maintaining a connection to Israel.
“It tells Jews that the one place created to guarantee Jewish self-determination and protection is itself illegitimate,” he said. “Jews are tolerated only if they publicly renounce their attachment to Israel.”
A spokesperson for the Anti-Defamation League concurred, telling the Jerusalem Post that “[d]isinformation that distorts the reality of the Israel-Hamas war, including efforts to falsely label Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide, does real damage far beyond the battlefield. These false narratives are weaponized to justify harassment and hate against Jews everywhere, feeding the global surge in antisemitism. Correcting the record with facts is essential.”
Bensemhoun also argues that the accusation reflects a deeper psychological dynamic in parts of the West.
“If the Jewish [refugee] has become the perpetrator, then Western guilt towards the Jews can be inverted into condemnation of the Jews,” he explained.
October 7 as the beginning of an information war
The GenoLIE initiative organizers do not view October 7 and the subsequent war as two separate stories. Hamas’s massacre, they argue, was the opening of a conflict that quickly developed a second front—one fought through images, social media, international institutions and public opinion.
“Hamas understood that it could not defeat Israel militarily, so it pursued an asymmetric war in which information, images and international opinion became weapons,” Bensemhoun said.
The campaign highlights a widely circulated 2025 photograph of an emaciated Gazan child that appeared on the New York Times front page. The newspaper subsequently corrected its presentation of the image after medical records indicated the child suffered from serious pre-existing conditions.
The campaign similarly argues that some Palestinian journalists killed during the war had affiliations with Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and that Hamas deliberately operated from within civilian areas.
Episodes like this are why the organizers say the campaign is necessary: they want individual allegations and evidence examined on their own merits, rather than allowing a single predetermined overarching narrative to dictate how every event is interpreted.
A strong and broad coalition
One of the campaign’s most striking features is the breadth of organizations that are leading it. Jewish organizations, Israel advocacy groups, legal organizations and activists from different political and national backgrounds have joined a common effort despite disagreeing on other issues.
Reflecting upon this, Bensemhoun remarked that “organizations that disagree on almost everything can recognize the danger of transforming a demonstrably complex war into a simplistic accusation of genocide against the Jewish state.”
New Times Square billboard
The Gaza GenoLIE campaign has obtained a digital billboard in the heart of Times Square, next to the Nasdaq market site. The billboard includes the campaign’s attention-grabbing jigsaw puzzle design, and directs readers: “Don't believe the lies. See for yourself: GazaGenoLie.com.”
A battle over Israel’s legitimacy
According to its leaders, the GenoLIE campaign is ultimately part of a broader battle over Israel’s legitimacy as the Jewish state. They argue that the genocide accusation does more than condemn Israel’s conduct in one specific war. It seeks to portray the country established as a refuge for the Jewish people as itself a genocidal state, attacking the very legitimacy of Israel as the Jewish State.
The campaign’s growth reflects a conviction among its participants that the battle over Israel’s legitimacy is no longer confined to diplomats, governments or international organizations. It is being fought in universities, newsrooms, social media feeds and Jewish communities around the world.
“In the short term, we want journalists, educators, and policymakers to have the facts at hand before they repeat a charge that does not withstand scrutiny,” explains Friedman. “In the long term, we want the record corrected so that a future generation does not inherit a blood libel as settled fact.”
“[The campaign is] about more than defending Israel,” Bensemhoun posits. “It is about defending the integrity of language, historical memory and moral judgment, and refusing to allow the word ‘genocide’ to become a political weapon against the Jewish state.”
Learn more about the Gaza GenoLIE initiative at www.GazaGenoLIE.com
This article was written in collaboration with Gaza GenoLIE initiative.