Israel has been absurdly accused of "genocide" since 1948 ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Thursday, January 08, 2026

Israel has been absurdly accused of "genocide" since 1948

The first time Israel was accused of genocide was in 1948 during the very drafting of the Genocide Convention, when the Syrian delegation tried to ensure Israeli actions would be considered genocide.

As detailed by Holocaust historian Norman J.W. Goda:

There was another attempt to link Israel to the Genocide Convention during its drafting. In an October 1948 meeting of the UN Legal Committee, which completed the draft convention for consideration by the General Assembly, Syrian delegate Salah Eddine Tarazi insisted that Article I, which defined genocide as “committed in time of peace or in time of war,” should be expanded by the phrase “or at any moment.” The reason, Tarazi said, was what he insisted was Israel’s illegal status. The UN partition resolution on its own, he said, did not create a state; it only recommended one. Thus, the Arab states’ intervention in May 1948 was “not a war” with another state, nor had it occurred “in a time of peace.” Rather it was an attempt at “restoring law and order” in Palestine. And whatever Israel was, Tarazi said, “the Jews had committed atrocities against Arab civilians during the campaign, and those crimes deserved to be punished.”

But Tarazi was not finished. The Syrians also made a proposal to expand the definition of genocide under Article II to include “Imposing measures intended to oblige members of the group to abandon their homes in order to escape the threat of subsequent ill treatment.” On October 23, Tarazi asked that it be included, because, as he put it, “. . . any measures directed towards forcing members of a group to leave their homes should be regarded as constituting genocide.” This crime, he said, was “far more serious than ill treatment.”

The next time Israel was accused of "genocide" at the UN was by the Soviet Union in 1976, calling Israeli actions in the territories "racial genocide."

The 1982 Lebanon War mainstreamed the "genocide" narrative. Arab and communist delegates at the UN debates repeatedly accused Israel of the crime.

Tunisia: "Forty years after Hitler and Nazism~ which we thought we had buried forever,, here we have Begin seeking to make history by resorting to the same terrible outlawed methods of genocide."

Syria: "Israel, supported by the immense destructive potential of the United States, is committing the crime of genocide against the Arabs in Palestine and in Lebanon in order to eradicate the traces of. the crime committed without equivocation and without shame in 1948 and then in 1967."

PLO: "In the affected areas of Lebanon, ....almost one million children according to the estimate of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), are victims of the most recent of Israel's acts of aggression and genocide, of Begin's holocaust of the Palestinian and Lebanese civilian population....The United States has played the role of dillying and. dallying, giving the Israeli's more time and more diplomatic ·and material support to proceed with their criminal onslaught, this holocaust, this campaign of genocide."

USSR: "Israeli troops are attempting to drovn in blood the struggle of the Palestinian people for their freedom and independence. But the policy of genocide being pursued against the Palestinians is doomed to failure."

Lebanon: "So many speakers have described the holocaust and genocide that my delegation's testimony here would be superfluous. May I, however, say once more how appreciative and how grateful we are for such manifestations of support and friendship?"

Here is a Soviet poster saying "Stop the genocide in Lebanon" with the word "Zionism" formed in the chains.

The next major accusation of genocide against Israel came not from nations but from NGOs. At the NGO Forum at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001, Israel is accused no less than four times of "acts of genocide" as well as apartheid, racism, ethnic cleansing and other crimes. This one sentence can be seen as the blueprint for NGO's attitudes towards Israel over the past 25 years:

Appalled by the on-going colonial military Israeli occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (the West Bank including Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip), we declare and call for an immediate end to the Israeli systematic perpetration of racist crimes including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing (as defined in the Statute of the International Criminal Court), including uprooting by military attack, and the imposition of any and all restrictions and measures on the population to make life so difficult that the only option is to leave the area, and state terrorism against the Palestinian people, recognizing that all of these methods are designed to ensure the continuation of an exclusively Jewish state with a Jewish majority and the expansion of its borders to gain more land, driving out the indigenous Palestinian population.

These earlier accusations didn't even pretend to define genocide - they just declared it. I'm not sure if that is better or worse than current nations and NGOs who are purposely making up new definitions of the term and pretending they are authoritative.

In all cases, the provably false accusation comes before any facts. The narrative is that Israel is unfathomably evil, so genocide is a given; there is no attempt to first look at the real definition of genocide and see if the evidence fits. Whether by Syria, the PLO, the Soviet Union or Amnesty International, the accusation comes first, and the justification is either contrived later or not at all.

But then, like now, the driving force behind the accusation was antisemitism. Today everyone can see that the Syrians in 1948 and Soviets in 1982 and even the NGOs in 2001 were obviously antisemitic even as they all strenuously denied it; today's anti-Zionism is just as clearly antisemitic as its precursors for those who are willing to look at it objectively.