What Constitutes Genocide, and is Israel Guilty?

 By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

Genocide is a grave and exceptional violation of international law, defined and prohibited by the Genocide Convention of 1948. But maybe Raphael Lemkin did us no favour in coining the word during the Holocaust. It is now used by antisemites against Israel.

Raphael Lemkin was a Polish-Jewish jurist who escaped from Europe when the Nazis occupied Poland. He moved to Washington, DC, in the summer of 1942, and went on to document Nazi atrocities in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. In this text, he introduced the word “genocide,” the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, ethnicity or tribe) and the Latin cide (killing).

But it’s not that cut and dried. Even before the antisemites accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, as a way of ridding themselves of any residual guilt about the destruction of European Jewry, the word had become little more than a term used by states and “human rights” groups who for one reason or another want to punish their adversaries.

Most of the time they really are talking about “ethnic cleansing,” pogroms, massacres and war crimes. By such criteria, every participant in World War II committed “genocide.” The mass killings of civilians in Hiroshima and Dresden in 1945 would today qualify. But these were acts against even far worse perpetrators of what we now call genocide, designed to speedily end the war.

What about the American war in Vietnam, and of course the almost numberless conflicts across Africa? The wars that dismembered Yugoslavia involved terrible massacres, particularly in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, but did they really meet the criterion for genocide? The numbers killed needn’t be huge. About 8,000 Bosniak Muslims were murdered in Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb militias in 1995 during the Bosnian war. In the Western Hemisphere it would -- and lately does -- refer to the cultural and also physical extinction of pre-contact peoples from the Arctic down to Patagonia.

Are ideological attempts to kill groups of identifiable people within a state -- the Holodomor in Ukraine, but also elsewhere in Stalin’s USSR -- genocide? What about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia? Should we call this an “auto-genocide,” since it was perpetrated by the nation’s own mad Maoist regime? Was China’s Cultural Revolution a genocide? Millions probably died. Rwanda is an interesting case -- obviously a mass murder by one class-cum-ethnic group against another, a giant pogrom involving intertwined peoples, but where the victims have now turned the tables.

Actually, there have been very few ideologically intentional attempts to destroy a powerless and helpless people, in whole or in part. Only a few qualify by that definition, the Holocaust being an obvious one, as well as the Turkish mass murders of Armenians in World War I. The allegations that Israel committed this crime do not meet the established definition and standards of genocide, are unsupported by established facts, nor do they stand up to common sense scrutiny.

A finding of genocide requires evidence of acts that are intended to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. Israel has neither intended to, nor destroyed, Palestinians as a group in Gaza. Israel’s accusers allege genocide mostly because of the supposed number of civilians killed in Gaza. Such claims are rife with flaws. Genocide is not a quantitative crime; there is no specific number of civilian casualties that constitutes genocide.

Israel set a high bar for how to conduct urban warfare against an enemy who will stop at nothing, including the death of its own civilians. What kind of genocide is it when the population of Gaza is larger today than it was three years ago? And how could it be that Israel is trying to kill innocents when the ratio of civilian-to-combatant casualties is lower than that of other urban wars fought in even less-difficult conditions?

Dave Rich, an Associate Research Fellow at the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism, writes extensively about the intersection of anti-Israel activism, far-left politics, and modern antisemitism. He observes that people respond to the genocide charge through facts and data: Israel’s supporters take the charge of genocide on its face, as an evidence-based allegation of a crime, and try to construct the case for the defence. But there is no defence, because the charge is not made on that basis, or for that purpose, he states. 

The term “genocide,” he notes in “From Be’eri to Bondi: Global Antisemitism After October 7, published in Fathom, October 2026, has shed its legal meaning and become a political label, whose antithesis is “resistance.” These two terms represent two states of being: in a colonial setting, either you are engaging in genocide or you are resisting it. There is no middle ground. “Israel is condemned as genocidal, not by observation, but through logical deduction: Israel is colonial, therefore by definition it is genocidal. It cannot be otherwise. And Gaza represents resistance against the entire Western colonial and capitalist power structure.”

Maia Zelkha, editor-in-chief of Yad Mizrah, a Sephardi and Mizrahi cultural magazine, also contends that the left employs the word “genocide” as an ideological weapon. “Before Israel had even launched its ground invasion of Gaza, and before there was any evidentiary record of Israel’s military campaign,” she writes, in her article “Genocide and Its Jurors,” in Quillette, Sept. 24, 2026, many leftist groups “were already describing Israel’s response as genocide.”

On Oct. 8, just a day after Hamas’s massacre and kidnappings, thousands of demonstrators gathered in New York’s Times Square in an “All Out for Palestine” rally to support “Palestinian resistance.” Within days, other organizations were issuing statements describing Israel’s unfolding military response as genocide, situated within a pre-existing theory of Israel as a colonial project that had produced genocidal dehumanisation. Prominent academics, human-rights organisations, activists, journalists, and public intellectuals described Israel’s conduct as genocidal.

Although the conviction that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians is not new, it has garnered ever more strength since the beginning of this war. In March 2024, the UN special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, published a report alleging that the Israeli war in Gaza constituted a genocide. In December of the same year, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch did the same. Then in July 2025 came both Physicians for Human Rights and B’Tselem, followed almost immediately by the International Association of Genocide Scholars. A resolution from the latter organization requires a two-thirds vote of its members, academics in the field of genocide studies, to pass. One would be hard-pressed to find a more reputable source for the libel.

On Sept. 16, 2025, a UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza; other prominent left-wing organisations and scholars have reached the same conclusion. And finally, on Oct. 9, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that it awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to South African judge Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, who led the 2025 UN commission that found Israel guilty of genocide against the Palestinians while completely ignoring many of the world’s worst human rights abusers, including, of course, Hamas. Pillay’s commission found that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes. Yet it accused Israel of genocide. This is a staggering moral inversion. And now the award of the Nobel; this appears to be the greatest possible legitimization of the now-established consensus about Israel’s war in Gaza. The icing on the cake!

But remember this: When a jihadist terrorist organization like Hamas applauds a Nobel Peace Prize, the moral judgment of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee should rightly be called into question.

 

Suspicious Election Result in Brazil Means Trouble Ahead

 By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been re-elected president of Brazil in a result marred by controversy. He won an unprecedented fourth term after a dramatic comeback from a first-round defeat.

The Oct. 25 runoff saw Lula capture 51.8 per cent of the total vote over opponent Flavio Bolsonaro’s 49.2. It capped an evening of chaos at polling places following a last-minute decision to extend voting by two hours. Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin ruled three minutes before the scheduled end of voting to keep polls open for two more hours.

Bolsonaro, whose father Jair is serving a 27-year prison sentence for attempting a coup after he lost the 2022 presidential election to Lula, pointed out that Justice Cristiano Zanin is Lula’s former lawyer and criticized him for “changing the rules of the game in the middle of the game.”

Flavio Bolsonaro bested Lula in the first round of the election Oct. 4, coming in at 47 per cent to 45 per cent for the president. Almost all polling had continued to show Bolsonaro in the lead in the three weeks between the balloting. 

But with just 2.2 million votes separating the candidates in the first round, it turned out even a small change in turnout tipped the balance. This result marked the first time since Brazil’s military dictatorship ended in 1985 that the second-highest vote-getter in the first-round elections won the presidency.

Brazil over the past decade has been dominated by two political forces: Lula, who governed from 2003 to 2016 and again since 2023, on the left; and Jair Bolsonaro, who governed from 2019 to 2023. The imprisonment and electoral exclusion of Jair Bolsonaro attempt have not dissolved his movement

Both men had been hit by corruption suspicions involving family members and allies, so this is not the first time Lula faced an uphill climb. He had in the past been serving a 12-year sentence over a corruption scandal that appeared to have ended his political career. But his convictions were annulled by the Supreme Court in 2021 amid evidence that the judge, prosecutors and the police had colluded to put him behind bars. This freed him to run against the elder Bolsonaro in 2022, a race he won in a huge political comeback.

Jair Bolsonaro’s admission that he accepted about US$12 million from disgraced former banker Daniel Vorcaro to produce a film on his father’s life cast a shadow over his campaign. He is under investigation for corruption, money laundering and tax evasion in connection with the case. Last week the Brazilian magazine Piaui claimed that at the height of Brazil’s 2020 coronavirus outbreak, Bolsonaro attended a boat party attended by sex workers and vaccine lobbyists hoping to strike a deal with the government of his father.

The background to the election is a nationwide corruption case -- the so-called Banco Master scandal, which has tarnished many senior figures, including some in Lula’s entourage. This includes his own son, as well as a key political ally: the country’s most powerful judge, Alexandre de Moraes of the Federal Supreme Court, hero of the Brazilian left and the man responsible for taking down Jair Bolsonaro. Recently, the juror’s ties to the bank’s head, Daniel Vorcaro, now under arrest, have come to light. Investigators believe that Vorcaro acted on different occasions based on advice from de Moraes.

The Banco Master scandal is apparently the largest bank fraud in Brazil’s history. Five years ago, Vorcaro bought a nearly bankrupt bank and renamed it Banco Master. The institution grew exponentially, based on a highly risky strategy, selling fixed-term deposits with interest rates far exceeding those offered by the competition, and without verifying whether it would have the liquidity to pay investors.

The operation functioned, in practice, as a pyramid scheme, in which applications from new customers covered the deficit of previous customers. The bank evidently went as far as to also launder money from the Primeiro Comando da Capital, the largest drug gang in the Western Hemisphere and Brazil’s most powerful crime syndicate. The bank also overvalued the property and assets it offered as collateral.

The fraud was uncovered in late 2025 with the launch of Operation Compliance Zero by the Federal Police and the liquidation of the financial institution by the Central Bank. Vorcaro was arrested last November. The Central Bank is expected to set aside over US$970 million to cover transactions with the failed lender, and the bank’s missing funds may reach US$2.2 billion. A minimum of 1.6 million people may have been affected and lost money.

This has been huge, but not unprecedented. Corruption has been endemic on both sides. Lula’s handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached and removed from office in 2016, also for corruption.

Lula emerged on the political stage in the 1970s, making his name as a union leader on the outskirts of São Paulo. As president between 2003 and 2010, Lula, a former metalworker with a fifth-grade education, created generous social programs that helped some 20 million Brazilians climb out of poverty.

The fiercely contested presidential race has come to a chaotic conclusion, and Lula will face a hostile Congress, where Bolsonaro’s allies are in the majority, and a polarized country. Brazil’s politics, always volatile, may get even worse. Stay tuned.

 

Will the Fifth Republic Survive PAID?

 By Henry Srebrnik, Fredericton Daily Gleaner

Will the French Fifth Republic, now almost 70 years old, survive PAID (political assistance in dying)? The political “doctors” administering the coup de grâce might be Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, from opposite political ends of the spectrum.

Founded in 1958, upon the death of the short-lived Fourth Republic, the Fifth Republic was designed by war hero Charles de Gaulle to create a strong semi-presidential system. The Fourth Republic formed in 1946 was a multi-party parliamentary system with politically unstable coalitions that frequently collapsed. The result: 16 individuals formed a total of more than 20 administrations, in just 12 years. The executive was a revolving door.

De Gaulle had chaired the postwar provisional government from 1944 to 1946 to restore democracy in France but hated the Fourth Republic and left office. He came out of retirement in 1958 during the political crisis over the Algerian War and commissioned a new constitution.

It placed power in a directly elected president winning a nationwide majority vote, in a two-person runoff, if necessary. It established a seven-year term, reduced to five years following a 2000 constitutional referendum to align the presidency with parliament. A president is limited to a maximum of two consecutive terms. De Gaulle served as its first president, the first of eight, a position he held until his resignation in 1969.

The division of powers remained in force. National Assembly elections were separate, with premiers forming cabinets designed to do the president’s bidding. Other powerful men who became head of state included Georges Pompidou, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Mitterrand, and Jacques Chirac.

But the last three have been less stellar, with the current incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, an unpopular “lame duck.” As well, there have been six prime ministers over the last five years. Macron was elected president in 2017 with 66 per cent of the second-round vote. He defeated Marine Le Pen of the National Front, now the National Rally (Rassemblement National, or RN), who won 34 per cent. He beat her again in a second round in 2022, with 59 per cent to her 41, becoming the first French presidential candidate to win re-election since Chirac in 2002. Le Pen first ran in 2012, placing third with 18 per cent in the first round of voting.

As for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the head of France Unbowed (La France Insoumise, or LFI), he has also run for the presidency three times. In 2012 and 2017, he was knocked out in the first round, winning 11 and 20 per cent respectively.  In 2022, Mélenchon also came in third place with 22 per cent of the vote in the first round, behind Macron at 28 per cent and Le Pen at 23.

Presidential elections are scheduled to be held in France next spring. Will the fourth time be the charm for one of these two? It looks quite possible. An economically troubled, polarized and angry France may select one of these two so-called “far-right” and “far-left” candidates. The centre isn’t holding.

France’s underlying problem is a government caught between expensive social commitments, sluggish economic growth and mounting pressure to cut spending. It is nearing a debt crisis. The violent and massive student protests that began in September over crumbling schools are fueling more discontent, and experts warn that the country’s mounting financial troubles, President Macron’s weakened political centre, and radical movements are pushing the unrest far beyond its original educational grievances.

Between 250,000 and 500,000 people have taken to the streets. There have been rallies in roughly 110 places by Oct. 17, and large marches later took place that day in the country’s major cities, including Paris, Lyon, Nantes and Rennes. Nearly 8,000 people have been arrested, and about 900 police officers, as well as more than 350 students and staff members, have been injured. More than 100 high schools have been severely damaged, and several were burned down. In Marseille, firefighters responding to burning trash outside Saint-Exupéry high school were assaulted.

France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, suggested that student anger was being manipulated. Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin said outsiders had hijacked it; Interior Minister Laurent Nunez described troublemakers moving between schools to incite violence.

Le Pen seized on the violence to intensify her law-and-order message. She called the images “unbearable” and described the rioters as “a pack howling its hatred.” She has asked for a new anti-riot law, while RN president Jordan Bardella blamed the disturbances on “decades of laxity and mass immigration.”

Behind the chaos is a calculated strategy for Mélenchon. LFI lawmakers have appeared at school gates and called for blockades to spread. His allies include the Antifascist Young Guard (La Jeune Garde Antifasciste), accused of the murder of a far-right activist in Lyon last winter, and Hope Dignity Resistance (Espoir Dignité Résistance), a group that under the guise of fighting Islamophobia, engages in violent activism. It’s also hard to miss the prevalence of Algerian and Palestinian flags.

“We will establish the Sixth Republic!” Mélenchon shouted at a recent event. “A republic of popular power through citizen referendums!” No one retains respect for the outgoing president or for the rusted institutions of the Fifth Republic. What began with legitimate complaints is exploited by forces seeking confrontation with the state. The anger is real, but the violence is organized.