Rhetoric
Political scientist Omar Shahabudin McDoom and others have identified several techniques of denial:
- "Framing large-scale violence as both a legal right and a moral duty"—synthesizing claims of self-defense and minimizing Israeli agency in a form of interpretative denial.
- Deflecting all blame to Hamas for starting the war and allegedly using human shields, a kind of implicatory denial.
- Claiming that Israel is unfairly singled out for allegations of genocide - an example of whataboutism - as part of an orchestrated campaign, motivated by antisemitism or anti-Zionism and intended to delegitimize the state of Israel. [7] [9] For example, major newspapers such as The New York Times , The Washington Post , and The Wall Street Journal published editorials denying the genocide and calling the allegations "a moral obscenity", a "blood libel", and a "media manufactured genocide".
- Falsely claiming that Israel goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties and has "the best civilian-combatant kill ratio in the world".
- Delegitimizing the accuser, including accusations of supporting Hamas and being antisemites. [1] [12]
- Demonizing Israel's enemies while emphasizing Israel's alleged superior moral character. Variations of this argument include contending that the Palestinians are terrorists or equivalent to Nazis, arguing that the IDF is "the most moral army in the world", [7] and posing the idea that, as some Israeli citizens are descended from Holocaust survivors, it is therefore impossible for Israel to be guilty of genocide. [7] [14] [15] [9]
- Exaggerating the threat posed by Hamas. [7]
- Redirecting compassion from Palestinians to victims of the 7 October attacks.
- Trivializing and/or normalizing violence as inevitably occurring during wartime, such as through asserting that all civilian destruction is "collateral damage". [7]
- Pointing to irrelevant information such as Gaza's long term population growth, in an strategic attempt to misdirect or derail the discussion.
Separately, Genocide Watch has identified twelve rhetorical strategies of denial: "Minimize deaths", arguing that all statistics are inaccurate; "Attack truth-tellers [as] “antisemitic”, liars, or Hamas sympathizers"; "Deny intent. Civilian deaths are unintentional 'collateral damage' in self-defense"; "Dehumanization"; "Blame Ancient Conflict"; "Blame mistakes" to portray civilian deaths as an unfortunate accident; "Claim appeasement. Critics are appeasing Hamas killers, rapists, and genocidists"; "Justify arming Israel"; "Claim good treatment" of Palestinians; "Legalism", arguing that "Israel’s attacks don’t fit the legal definition of genocide"; "Blame the victims"; and "Peace trumps justice". [17]
Downplaying the scale or scope of victims
A core tactic of Gaza-genocide denial is to minimize the scale of Palestinian casualties by casting doubt on official death counts, [17] mirroring long-established strategies used in Holocaust denial. [18] Denialists criticize the credibility of statistics issued by Gaza’s Health Ministry (despite their corroboration by independent sources [18] ), exclude deaths caused by starvation or disease (despite these conditions being created by Israel), and exploit gaps in data collection that stem from the destruction of hospitals and communication networks. [18] However, the crime of genocide is not established by a minimum number of victims [20] [21] or intended victims [23] or by the degree to which the group has already been destroyed. [24] Canada and several European states stated in a joint intervention in Gambia v. Myanmar that victim numbers are not decisive because perpetrators may choose slower or less direct methods of destruction.
Marc Owen Jones, writing in Third World Quarterly , states that Pallywood, which he defines as "a derogatory term suggesting that Palestinians stage scenes of suffering for propaganda purposes", has been "a recurring theme in disinformation campaigns against Gaza", and that "As Israel's killing of thousands of Palestinian children and babies became harder to hide, high-profile Israeli accounts and media outlets claimed that Palestinians were fabricating casualty numbers and staging the killing of babies." [26] According to Israeli sociologist Ron Dudai, the predominant attitude in Israeli society in regards to the Gaza Strip famine and other atrocities is, "It's all fake — and they deserve it." [27]
Accusations of antisemitism
One recurring denialist strategy is the framing of criticism of Israeli state actions as antisemitic, [28] [7] [12] in what is sometimes described as the "weaponization of antisemitism." [3] While antisemitism historically referred to prejudice or discrimination against Jews, the concept has been expanded to encompass criticism of Israel and Zionism. According to scholars Putra, Shadiqi, and Figueiredo, this expansion allows Israeli officials and supporters to 'control the interpretation of who is labeled antisemitic,' [29] The claim that antisemitism motivates genocide allegations is further complicated by the fact that various Jewish organizations, scholars, activists, and even Holocaust survivors have themselves described Israeli conduct as genocidal. [30] [29] As one example, critics such as Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky have been described as “antisemitic or self-hating Jews” due to their persistent opposition to Israeli actions. [29]
Martin Shaw writes that Israel's supporters used the ideology of anti-antisemitism as institutionalized in the United States, in Germany, and in other Western countries to block recognition of the genocide. [3]
According to McDoom, accusations of antisemitism are logically flawed because 'it is not the Jewish people who stand accused; it is only the state of Israel.' [31] The academic Fassin states that "the confusion between the criticism of Israeli policies and antisemitism...allows for the discrediting of any opposition to the current repression in Gaza." [32] McDoom argues that accusations of anti-semitism 'instrumentalizes a serious form of hatred,' weakening its meaning and impeding efforts to combat genuine antisemitism. [33]
Abuse of international humanitarian law
Some legal scholars have argued that Israel used permissive interpretations of international humanitarian law to justify its actions. For example, three write that "an array of IHL concepts like safe zones, evacuations, human shields, and "hospital shields" have been mobilized by Israel as technologies of settler-colonial displacement and genocide, creating conditions of life leading to the destruction of Gaza's Palestinians 'in whole or in part.'" [34] [35] [3] At an extreme, deniers have rejected that Israel has committed any war crimes whatsoever.
Analysis
Legal scholar Sonia Boulos notes that many "liberal elites" who are not "the usual supporters of Israel" have denied the genocide. She argues these liberals tend to acknowledge violations of international law but minimize them by rejecting the term "genocide" to describe them and denying links between the Gaza genocide and the Nakba, in an effort to reduce the impetus for systemic change. She also criticizes responses to the Gaza genocide that center on the emotional distress of Israeli observers rather than Palestinians who are experiencing the genocide. [36]
McDoom writes that denial is not "merely after-the-fact justification but a constitutive part of violence itself". An alternative to denial is approval and justification of atrocities, which is widely accepted by Israelis according to polls. Historian Taner Akçam compares Gaza genocide denial to Armenian genocide denial:
If we strip away the exceptionalist vocabulary and normalize our field, what lies before us is something remarkably familiar: a textbook case of denialism. For those working on the Armenian Genocide, the rhetorical playbook surrounding Gaza feels like déjà vu. The language currently used by denialists of the mass atrocities in Gaza – fear of annihilation, appeals to self-defense, and the inversion of victimhood – has been rehearsed for over a century in Turkish denialism. The logic is familiar: violence is always framed as a response, never as an initiative. And whatever happened is explained solely by the victims' own behaviour. [4]
Some scholars have argued that the United States government's response to the Gaza genocide is part of a decades-long pattern where it "denied, downplayed and rationalized atrocities by its allies". [39] [40] Enzo Traverso writes that Germany's memory culture, in which the uniqueness of the Holocaust is taken for granted, leads to denial of Israel's responsibility for the destruction of Gaza. [9]
Following the UK government's denial that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, [41] Amnesty International issued a statement that the UK had misinterpreted the ICJ judgement on Gaza. [42] According to Tom Dannenbaum and Janina Dill, the UK government frames its supposed lack of obligation to prevent genocide in Gaza based on this misinterpretation of the ICJ judgement. [43]
In Australia, Senator David Shoebridge accused the Liberal–National Coalition of genocide denial for their refusal to acknowledge the Gaza genocide following the UN declaration finding that Israel was committing genocide. [44]
Iranian-American academic Hamid Dabashi wrote an article in the Middle East Eye in June 2025, in which he argued that denying the genocide in Gaza should be considered a criminal offence worldwide, just as how Holocaust denial and Armenian genocide denial is outlawed in some countries. Dabashi also condemned Western governments and media for enabling and censoring Israel's atrocities, as well as calling for legal accountability, public shaming of deniers, and international recognition of 15 May as a "Palestinian Genocide Commemoration Day". [45]
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