The genocide genie

There is an old structure to stories about wishes: You find the lamp, you rub it, the genie emerges, you say the word and the world rearranges itself to give you everything you wanted. The stories are never really about magic. They are about the wish, the person who made it and the fact that the wish was already inside him before the lamp ever turned up. The genie enables the wisher to obtain a level of power, influence or accomplishment that they did not and could not earn in the real world.

Today, the word that grants the wish is “genocide.” Say it about the Jewish state and a door swings open that had been, more or less, bolted shut since 1945. Behind that door is everything a certain kind of person has wanted to say and do about Jews and could not, because the memory of what happened the last time the door stood open was still fresh enough to shame him.

The genocide charge does not merely accuse. It grants permission. That is its function, and its function is the reason that it will not be surrendered, no matter how much evidence is piled against it.

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who lost dozens of family members in the Holocaust, invented the term because the crime he was watching had no name. He built the word out of Jewish death. To turn it around and hang it on the Jews is not an accident of rhetoric or an unfortunate excess of passion. It is the most efficient possible act of moral larceny, because it does not only indict the Jews, it evicts them from the one moral address history had left them. The accuser gets to occupy the vacated property. He gets the survivor’s standing, the martyr’s authority, the unanswerable voice. The Jew, stripped of all this, is left arguing about tonnage of flour and rules of engagement while the crowd has already moved on to the verdict.

I spend my working life sitting with people who are certain, absolutely certain, of the villainy of someone they are supposed to love. What I have learned is that the accusation almost never describes the accused. It describes what the accuser needs to believe to keep doing what he is already doing. The charge is not a conclusion he reached. It is a permission slip he wrote for himself. When a man tells me his wife is a monster, I am not listening for evidence about the wife. I am listening for what he intends to do next, and for the moral cover he is assembling in advance so that he can do it and still like himself in the morning.

That is the mechanism now operating on a civilizational scale. The genocide label and libel is load-bearing. Remove it and the entire architecture collapses: the encampments, the boycotts, the union resolutions, the tearing down of hostage posters, the exclusion of Jewish students from clubs and study groups and friendships, the sanctions, the arrest warrants, the arson at the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne, the young couple murdered outside the Jewish museum in Washington, the elderly Jews set on fire in Boulder while marching for the hostages, the mobs in the streets of Amsterdam hunting Israelis through the night. None of that survives contact with the ordinary truth, which is that this is a war started by a massacre and fought by an army that warns civilians while its enemy hides beneath them. Denying all of that is possible only under the genocide framing, and it requires the genocide framing absolutely.

That is why facts have failed and will continue to fail. The casualty figures in the Gaza war come from the ministry of the murderous organization that started the war and are laundered into unquestionable “data” by institutions that would not accept a parking ticket on such evidence.

Regavim researchers have shown how “settler violence” statistics were built the same way, out of unverified and misleading Arab self-reporting recycled into international authority. The BESA Center’s work on caloric supply to Gaza demolished the starvation narrative and changed nothing at all, because the narrative was never about the data. You cannot refute a permission slip. You can only decline to sign it.

Notice what the genie actually grants: It is not hatred. Hatred was always available and always cheap. What the genie grants is hatred with a halo. The man screaming at a Jewish teenager on a campus quad in 2026 does not believe he is a Jew-hater, and the terrible part is that, inside his own head, he is right. He experiences himself as an abolitionist. He is on the barricades. He is the one who would have hidden Anne Frank. He knows all this about himself with the serene self-congratulatory confidence of a man who has never once been tested. His fanatic cruelty is not a betrayal of his principles; it is the exercise of them. Every act of viciousness confirms his virtue, because viciousness against evil genocidaires is not viciousness at all; it is courage.

This is the peak of the mountain, the place antisemitism has always tried to reach and rarely managed to hold for long: A hatred of Jews that requires no shame, no concealment, no private accounting, because it presents itself to its owner as the defense of the helpless and the championing of justice.

There is one more thing the stories always tell us about wishes, and it is the part nobody thinks about before rubbing the lamp: The wish comes true, and then it goes on being true after you have stopped wanting it. The genocide libel will not be filed away when this war ends. It has been installed and instituted. It is in the syllabi and the resolutions and the mouths of children, and it will be there in 20 years, available to anyone who needs it, needing no evidence because the evidence was never what animated it.

It will not check whether the Jew standing in front of it voted for this government or that one, moved to Yitzhar or Tel Aviv or Toronto, signed the ceasefire petition or refused to. It will not care. It never has. The Jews who spent this war explaining to the mob that they were the good kind of Jew are going to discover, as their grandparents discovered, that the genie was never taking requests or explanations from them. As always, that discovery will come too late.

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