Genocide Apartheid and The Countless Claims against Israel that Never Stick
Inverted World
No court on Earth has ever convicted Israel of genocide. No court on Earth has been asked to stop trying. When a state has been accused of genocide and apartheid this many times and never found guilty, systemic bias and coordinated efforts of groups with shared antizionist ideologies can be brought to bear in their nefarious plots.
Since 1982, I have counted 28 distinct groups that formally or openly accused the state of genocide, ranging from governments and UN mandate holders to rights organizations, scholarly associations, and a private court with no legal standing. Since 1975, at least 14 distinct parties have claimed that Israel is practicing apartheid.
Add these together, and the count is above 40. Israel has zero convictions in any court with the authority to convict.
The number of times one of these groups has reversed its own ruling: 1. The number of times a report was withdrawn under pressure: 1. The number of times an organization’s affiliate disagreed with its parent body’s findings: 1.
This is not what a record of guilt looks like. It’s what unproven claims amount to when they are repeated at an unheard-of rate, decade after decade, from the same set of actors, with the same agenda towards the Jewish state.
The normal response is to go through each of these charges line by line and ask whether Israel was guilty. This article does something else entirely. It publishes the documentary history, names each party involved, and then turns the microscope around to see whose fingers were on the paper and whose pen recently lost ink.
There are two conclusions I ask you to decide on:
1: A country of 10 million people has attempted to destroy a protected group numerous times and over forty years and created a system of racial domination to such a degree that 40+ groups have stated as much since 1975.
or the second option:
2: An overlapping web of groups with shared political goals and funding, many of whom have common ideological influences, have filed innumerable legal grievances at a very high rate, continuing a pattern of making false and exaggerated claims even after being unsuccessful this many times.
I will leave that decision to you.
The genocide history begins early and is thinner than the current fervor would suggest. The word was associated with Israel by the UN Assembly in 1982, which called the Sabra and Shatila massacre “an act of genocide.”
The killings were carried out by Lebanese Phalangist militia, not the IDF. Israel’s commission found the state indirectly responsible for not preventing the massacre, a decision of negligence not ill intent.
The word genocide attached itself to the massacre, one the Israeli military never committed.
The MacBride Commission concluded that Israeli conduct towards Palestinian nationhood during the Lebanon War amounted to genocide. In 2001, a similar NGO running alongside the infamous Durban Conference Against Racism accused Israel of war crimes, genocide, and ethnic cleansing.
In 2013, the Malaysian Prime Minister convened a private mock-trial, and had it convict Israel in absentia of genocide.
Scholars and academics followed suite. Francis Boyle has said Israel is committing a “slow genocide.” Ilan Pappé describes it as an “incremental genocide.”
Not a government, or the G7, or the ICC, or any rights organization used the word genocide about the Gaza campaigns in 2008, 2009, or 2014. Before 2023, the genocide charge remained scattered among individuals, NGO forums, UN groups, and a private tribunal with no legal standing; it had not become a sustained campaign backed by major governments or a court with authority.
The current wave we have now has a point of origin: South Africa’s application to the ICJ alleged violations of the Genocide Convention. 19 other states have filed declarations, including Colombia, Mexico, Spain, Bolivia, Ireland, Cuba, and similar usual suspects.
Most of these are under Article 63 of the court’s statute on a question of legal interpretation, taking no position on the facts, something the media coverage completely ignores.
Colombia, Turkey, Chile, and Ireland regularly push the boundaries of this article with “acts of solidarity” being a motivating factor. This is why 63 states deliberately that “the Intervening State takes no position on the application of those provisions to the facts of the present case.”
Francesca Albanese presented her “Anatomy of a Genocide” to the UN Rights Council, concluding there were reasonable grounds to show Israel’s actions met the standard for genocidal conduct and intent. Michael Fakhri used the same term in a study on deliberate starvation. The UN Commission of Inquiry (CoI) chaired by Navi Pillay, released another finding in 2025, the first inquiry of its kind in UN history to conclude any state had committed genocide.
Amnesty International published a genocide report, and Human Rights Watch followed weeks after, though its findings were narrower than the headline leads people to believe.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution in 2025. Raz Segal wrote in Jewish Currents in 2023 as one of the earliest academic voices, followed by Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, and Martin Shaw. Four names, a couple of years, with one word doing what it does.
A short list of heads of state and foreign ministers put that word into use as well. Mahmoud Abbas called the Gaza war a genocide as early as 2014. Luiz Lula da Silva of Brazil compared Israel’s actions to Hitler’s at the African Union summit in 2024, drawing a declaration of persona non grata from Israel. Gustavo Petro of Colombia severed ties with Israel, citing genocide. Recep Erdoğan of Turkey called it “complete genocide” and repeated the claims at the UN that year. Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia joined them as well.
28 hands by a conservative count across 44 years, and none of them belong to a government of the G7, which have the most thorough and independent intelligence, foreign policy capacities, and legal means to evaluate the claims.
The apartheid accusations are similar, and no less volatile. Its rhetorical ancestor was the 3379 resolution, which declared Zionism itself “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Desmond Tutu drew a comparison in a widely cited piece for The Guardian, which said Israeli checkpoints and settlement policies were like apartheid-era South Africa.
It went into the UN record for the first time in 2007, when Special Rapporteur John Dugard reported that occupation practices “resemble aspects of apartheid.” In 2009, South Africa’s Research Council commissioned a legal study by Virginia Tilley that said the West Bank and Gaza practices met apartheid’s legal definition. It was an academic study and not a government one, though it is routinely cited as if this important difference does not exist.
The Russell Tribunal on Palestine in 2011, modeled on the ‘60s tribunal that judged the Vietnam War in absentia, made its apartheid assessment through a self-selected group of activists and sympathetic individuals with no state or legal authority.
Richard Falk, Dugard’s successor as Special Rapporteur, concluded in his report that the occupation amounted to apartheid and possible ethnic cleansing. The UN Commission for Western Asia published a report in 2017, authored by Falk and Tilley, reaching the same conclusion. UN Secretary-General Guterres ordered the report withdrawn from the UN’s website within two days. The commission’s secretary resigned shortly after, calling it “capitulation to political pressure.”
Michael Lynk, Falk’s successor, reached a similar finding in his final 2022 report. B’Tselem extended the word to the entire territory, the first Israeli group to do so, followed by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. That same year, South Africa called for Israel to be designated an apartheid state at the Human Rights Council.
Francesca Albanese called Israel’s relationship to the territory “settler colonialism,” producing an apartheid. She later added genocide to her list of legal pejoratives.
The ICJ, in a 2024 opinion, found Israeli practices in violation of Article 3, the article prohibiting apartheid. This is regularly reported as the world court ruling Israel guilty of apartheid. It’s narrower than the headline allows, and is a specific treaty violation rather than a freestanding declaration. Article 3 of the treaty condemns both "racial segregation" and "apartheid.” The Court found that Israel’s measures created a separation between communities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, amounting to a breach, it did not specify which of the two concepts it was finding a violation of.
Jimmy Carter’s 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid belongs on this list as well, though its claims are narrower than assumed.
Read straight through, these two histories reveal who Israel’s enemies actually are. One resolution was formally revoked by the body that made it in 1991. One report was withdrawn by the UN’s Secretary-General before it could spread through the public, over the objection of an author who resigned in protest.
One organization’s affiliate openly rejected its parent body’s headline finding within a month of its release, was suspended for two years for doing so, and complicated by citing claims of racism within the company.
One scholarly association’s vote was decided by a fraction of its membership, conducted over a mailing list, with dissenting comments removed, and a promised forum for objection quietly canceled. One UN fact-finding mission’s chairman, Richard Goldstone, retracted his report’s central charge in a Washington Post op-ed, writing that Israel had not intentionally targeted civilians as a matter of policy. The three colleagues who wrote the report with him refused to join the retraction.
None of this is what settled, independently corroborated facts look like. It’s what a system looks like when it has bad-faith actors who use it with more force than it was built for.
Let’s look at that system and some of its output: the Human Rights Council’s Agenda Item 7.
When the Council reorganized in 2007, it created 10 standing agenda items. 9 cover the human rights condition of the entire world in general or under themes, an entire planet’s grievances, separated out politely. Item 7 exists for a singular country: Israel is the only state with a permanent place on the Council’s agenda, present at every regular session whether or not anything happened that year to warrant it.
The United Kingdom’s official explanation at the Council’s 40th session dropped all the usual niceties: “Item 7 represents systematic institutional bias and as such weakens the voice of the Council and hardens positions.” Ban Ki-moon had made a milder version of the same point.
A system built to indict one country will keep doing so until its mechanisms are changed. The output proves its design by the sheer numbers. It says nothing about the conduct underneath. The bloc behind the instrument did not arrive at its interests incidentally.
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, 57 member states, was founded in 1969 in direct response to an arson attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Palestinian cause was present at its creation. The OIC’s Council of Foreign Ministers adopted a recurring resolution on the cause of Palestine, continuing a decade-long pattern of advocacy across its membership.
57 states voting in near lockstep on a single question is not corroboration. They are not independent conclusions. They’re a bloc which votes as one. One witness with 57 mouths, and it should be weighed as one rather than counted as 40 separate confirmations.
The vocabulary this bloc use was not invented for the current time. Between 1967 and 1988, the Soviet Union ran a state propaganda project known as “Zionology,” which produced roughly 50 books, up to 10 million copies, and distributed in more than 100 countries under the supervision of security services. It cast Zionism as racist, fascist, and colonial.
Its signature achievement was the resolution mentioned before, 3379 which, as a reminder, stated “Zionism is a form of racism.” Ambassador Daniel Moynihan told the Chamber what happened the moment it passed: “The abomination of antisemitism has been given the appearance of international sanction.”
Then four words that have outlasted everyone there, came out of his mouth: “Now, this is a lie.”
16 years later, the assembly agreed with him and revoked it. It’s the only time a resolution reached a formal conclusion and ran against its authors by more than four to one.
Technically, 4.44 to 1.
A vocabulary designed in Moscow to delegitimize a state does not become evidence by resurfacing decades later in a UN report’s footnotes.
The commission that produced the 2025 genocide finding carries a mandate no comparable body has ever had: no finishing clause or investigation of root causes broad enough to make the state’s legitimacy a permanent subject of scrutiny.
If we turn the spotlight around for a second, perhaps we can see something all these people share.
Commissioner Miloon Kothari said in a that he and his colleagues were very disheartened by the social media that is controlled largely by “whether it is the Jewish lobby or it is specific NGOs,” and went on to ask why Israel was even a UN member.
He apologized ten days later, calling the phrase “incorrect, inappropriate, and insensitive.” Pillay defended Kothari in the open, saying his words had been “deliberately misquoted.” They were not.
When the council reconstituted the commission, it reappointed Chris Sidoti, the one member who had served throughout. His record is not clean either. He described groups supporting the international definition of antisemitism as “government-organized fronts.”
Pillay and Falk were not strangers before any of this. While serving as UN High Commissioner, Pillay appointed Richard Falk as special rapporteur. He produced the 2014 and 2017 reports.
Falk’s history goes to 1979, where his New York Times op-ed, titled Trusting Khomeini, called the depiction of the Ayatollah as a “fanatical reactionary” “certainly and happily false,” and praised Khomeini’s “new model of popular revolution” as “a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third world country.” A Times colleague, Anthony Lewis, called the piece “outstandingly silly.”
Writing under his title for Al Jazeera, Falk questioned the official account of September 11th and promoted a 9/11 conspiracy online. Ban Ki-moon called his remarks “preposterous.” Pillay’s office defended Falk, saying he had spoken in his “personal capacity” and did not remove him from the mandate.
Francesca Albanese, whose report gave the current hype its title, carries a history of using similar language. An old social media post described the United States as “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.” She referred to the language as “imprecise.”
Hours after the October 7th massacre, she posted that “today’s violence must be put in context.” The context being “almost six decades of hostile military rule.” Four days later, she cast doubt on the reports of rape and beheading, warning that “divulging unverified information” about Hamas’s conduct “risks escalating tensions.”
Ehen Emmanuel Macron called October 7th the century’s greatest antisemitic massacre, she corrected him openly. The victims, she said, were not killed for their Judaism but “in reaction to Israel’s oppression,” a formulation the French government found antisemitic enough to protest.
The U.S. State Department sanctioned her over her advocacy role in pressure campaigns targeting American and Israeli citizens.
A rapporteur who called the United States a country subjugated by a Jewish lobby wrote the report which gave the entire genocide hysteria its name.
Amnesty’s report produced the strangest internal event on any account. According to accounts from Amnesty staff at the time, the project carried the word genocide as its working title from early in the research, months before the investigation was complete. One staffer described the resulting pressure with an unusual and shocking candor: “from the outset, the report was referred to in internal correspondence as the 'genocide report,' even when the research was still in its initial stages...Imagine how difficult it is for a researcher to work for months on a report titled 'genocide report' and then to have to conclude that it is 'only' about crimes against humanity.”
A document named for its answer before the evidence is gathered is a title looking to be justified, not a finding. Amnesty’s Israeli section broke ranks and rejected the finding, maintaining that Israeli conduct may have amounted to crimes against humanity, but not genocide. They were suspended for two years for saying so. The section’s board had already split, half for too little attention to Palestinians, and half for too little to Israelis.
The researchers closest to the country said the conclusion did not hold and were disciplined rather than heard. A report by advocacy group EiGHT adds that an Amnesty staff member praised the Hamas commander Yahya Sinwar online as “Legend!!”
Amnesty has responded to the wider antisemitism findings the report describes, but not to that post specifically. There are numerous examples the report gives of Amnesty staff either experiencing antisemitism in the workplace or feeling pressured to conform to an antizionist perspective. “The genocide report” is only one example of the Procrustean bias through which Amnesty must conform its materials.
Human Rights Watch’s founder made an analogous complaint about his organization. Robert Bernstein said the organization had strayed from its founding mission into a pattern of reporting that was “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.” The man who built the tent of Human Rights Watch said this 12 years before the organization’s apartheid report and described the trajectory the report would confirm.
Danielle Haas, the senior editor, made an almost identical case in 2023. Years of politicization of the Israel-Palestine work, she wrote, had “frequently violated basic editorial standards related to rigor, balance, and collegiality.” Of the 2021 report specifically, she wrote that its careful legal argument would rarely be read in full, and the organization knew as much when it published it. It was, in her words, “a one-word gift to those who want to categorize Israel with as little nuance as possible.”
The International Association of Genocide Scholars deserves its own part because the vote behind the 2025 resolution is worse than any headline could ever suggest. Of a roster of 500 members, only 129 cast their ballots. 86% of those who voted were in favor, but barely a 25% of the membership as a whole, conducted over a listserv and not a meeting. Sarah Brown of the advisory board said that no real discussion was allowed, dissenting comments were removed from the thread, and a promised town hall was never held.
More than 500 scholars of genocide, Holocaust history, and international law signed an open letter warning that diluting the legal definition of genocide for ideological purposes “is a form of moral violence.”
South Africa brought the case that anchors this entire wave, and its history deserves a mention. For instance, the ruling African National Congress has hosted Hamas delegations repeatedly, most recently in 2023, where the ANC’s international relations chair described meeting Hamas leaders as “an advantage for us.”
Separately, in 2015, South Africa’s High Court ordered the government to prevent Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir from leaving the country while an ICC warrant for his arrest, three counts of genocide among them, remained outstanding. The government let him fly out anyway, a decision its Supreme Court found unlawful and the ICC found in breach of South Africa’s treaty obligations.
What needs no speculation is the ANC’s conduct. The Zondo Commission final reports documented systemic bribery and state capture, reaching senior ANC-linked officials across Eskom, Transnet, and the tax authority.
The ANC’s deputy secretary general, Jessie Duarte, compared Israel’s conduct to Nazi Germany, asking whether “lest we forget” has “lost its meaning” for the Israeli people. A comparison South African Jewish organizations called obscene.
Turkey filed to intervene, while its official policy maintains that the Armenian genocide of 1915 is a matter of historical dispute, not to mention its military’s continuous operations against Kurdish populations that rights organizations have documented for decades. Nicaragua severed relationships with Israel, calling it an enemy of humanity, and was also the subject of a UN determination that its civilians are suffering crimes against humanity under the Ortega-Murillo government.
Syria’s government accused Israel of genocide on the floor of the UN Assembly, while the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has attributed repeated chemical attacks on Syrian civilians, and the UN Commission of Inquiry found its detention system amounted to extermination and a crime against humanity.
A list of governments this compromised does not corroborate a claim.
To be clear, this is a list of governments that are criminal. When the loudest and most legally consequential accusers are governments whose own conduct has found genocide, extermination, and crimes against humanity from the same UN system, their moral authority is not equivalent to the volumes of signatures they receive.
Nearly all of this in the UN rests on the authority of a single order from The Hague, one that’s routinely misreported. The ICJ’s provisional measures state in paragraph 30 that the court was “not required to ascertain whether any violations of Israel’s obligations under the Genocide Convention have occurred,” and finds that “at least some of the rights claimed by South Africa are plausible.” Rights, not violations.
Joan Donoghue, who presided over the court, corrected the record herself in a BBC interview: “It did not decide the claim that genocide was plausible. The shorthand that often appears that there is a plausible case of genocide is not what the court decided.” Marko Milanovic wrote that, absent any extraordinary new evidence, it would be “highly unlikely for a majority of the court to infer genocidal intent on the merits of this case.”
The strongest objection to everything I have mentioned above is that just because the accusers are of disrepute does not mean their accusations are false. While this is true, it’s important to note that these states have not conducted independent factual investigations.
Their filings address treaty interpretation and draw on the same base that I’ve spent this whole time examining: the same commission, the same NGOs, the same rapporteur reports. A democracy, even a healthy democracy, that adopts a false record without testing it, has not done its part for truth.
The case grows weaker the closer one gets to its makers. Resolution 3379 was revoked. The Falk-Tilley paper was pulled. Goldstone later rejected the claim that Israel deliberately targeted civilians as policy. Amnesty’s Israeli branch rejected its genocide finding. Human Rights Watch’s founder accused the group of helping make Israel a pariah; a senior editor later described politicization and failures of rigor. The International Association of Genocide Scholars spoke with the prestige of a field after little more than a fifth of its members voted for the resolution.
Meanwhile, UN officials, NGOs, states, scholars, and journalists repeatedly cite one another until it looks like corroboration.
That is the larger history of more than forty claims, zero findings of guilt, and the same set of people set against the state. Revocations, withdrawals, shared personnel, inherited language, coordinated voting, internal dissent, and circular sourcing now tell us as more about those who brought them then they ever tell us about Israel.
Repetition cannot substitute for proof forever. The next paper will carry a new date, perhaps some other author, but not a different history. It will have over forty attempts behind it. But now, that weight belongs to others.
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