Since the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel – in which 1200 men, women, and children were tortured, raped, burned alive and murdered, and 250 hostages were taken back to Gaza, of which 58 remain captive, and of those 58, many have already been murdered as well, with those remaining living hostages tortured and starving in underground dungeons – a concerted effort has been made to reverse the victim and perpetrator in the mind of the public. That effort has now reached the pages of the Washington Post, in a piece by Post opinion columnist Shadi Hamid. (“A genocide is happening in Gaza. We should say so.” May 28, 2025.)
To know that the claim is false, one only has to ask, “What would happen if Hamas released the hostages unconditionally and surrendered tomorrow?” If this were actually a genocide, it would be the first genocide in history in which the government of the people being genocided had the power to stop it immediately, had that power from the beginning, and somehow chose not to do so.
The charge is so obviously false, and has been rebutted so many times in so many places by so many experts, that it is not even worth reviewing Hamid’s claims point by point here. As just one example, it ought to be obvious that Israel’s Agriculture Minister, Avi Dichter, has no decision-making authority over the conduct of the war. Hamid appears to have lifted this talking point about Dichter (“Just one month into the war, Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter said, ‘We are now rolling...
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