Why won’t Amnesty International call October 7 a genocide?

Unfalsifiable intent and the collapse of reason Despite this, Amnesty refuses to name October 7th a genocide. However, when it comes to Israel, the organization adopts a tortured approach that invents an entirely new legal category—“dual intent,” the incoherent notion that a state could comply with international humanitarian law while simultaneously committing genocide—and relying on speculative methodologies to sustain the accusation. Military operations against combatants and militarized infrastructure are reinterpreted as evidence of a concealed genocidal purpose, while counter-evidence—evacuation warnings, humanitarian corridors, aid coordination by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—is dismissed as camouflage for Israel’s “real” intentions. International law, however, rejects unfalsifiable intent and demands basic standards of reasoning. In Bosnia v. Serbia, the International Court of Justice held that genocidal intent may be inferred only when it is the sole reasonable explanation for the acts in question. Competing explanations must be excluded, not dismissed as “camouflage.” Under Amnesty’s logic, however, counter-evidence is no longer possible. When Israel is not committing genocide, it is said to be committing it secretly. This reflects a broader principle of rational inquiry, articulated by the philosopher Karl Popper in the aftermath of the 20th century’s ideological catastrophes: claims that cannot, even in principle, be falsified explain nothing. A discourse in which no one is allowed to point to conflicting evidence is not a discourse grounded in reason. What we have witnessed instead is the collapse of any semblance of rational deliberation around the charge of genocide, which functions not as an analytic claim but as an anti-Israeli race libel—one that actively fuels anti-Jewish violence and the mobilization of lynch-mob politics. What emerges from Amnesty’s report is a calibrated asymmetry. When Hamas openly declares its intention to annihilate Jews and carries out mass civilian slaughter in pursuit of that aim, the definition of genocide is raised beyond reach and the charge quietly set aside. But when Israel wages a defensive war against a genocidal enemy, the definition is lowered, and elaborate explanations are required to force and keep the label in place. This asymmetry has structured much of the discourse surrounding Israel since October 7th. In many cases, the drive to accuse Israel of genocide draws on longstanding patterns of Holocaust inversion that crystallized during the Cold War, when Soviet antizionist propaganda routinely depicted Israelis as Nazis, recoding Jewish sovereignty as the moral successor to fascism. Within this tradition, a number of antizionist academics, including Martin Shaw, Nadia Abu El-Haj, and Dirk Moses, have framed Holocaust memory as the centerpiece of a deceitful and immoral world order, one that converts Jewish suffering into political license for mass violence. What presents itself as genocide scholarship functions less as an inquiry into mass atrocity than as a sustained campaign against Holocaust memory itself: an effort to dismantle the “exceptionalization” of Jewish suffering by recoding it as a source of global injustice. Upending the narrative  This moral narrative has been reinforced through the selective elevation of certain voices whose function is less to argue than to authorize. Figures such as Brown University professor Omer Bartov have used their academic standing and Israeli origin to lend legitimacy to the genocide libel, writing in the New York Times that Israel is now marked with the “curse of Cain”—a phrase that unsettlingly echoes St. Augustine’s depiction of Jews as cursed wanderers for murdering Christ. Around the same time, New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein interviewed University College London professor Philippe Sands about whether labeling Israel’s actions genocide threatens not just U.S. support but the very meaning of Jewish identity in a world still shaped by the Holocaust. Naming Israeli actions as “genocide” but Hamas’ massacre as “extermination” serves a clear purpose. It ensures that Israel comes out “worse” than Hamas, providing narrative clean-up so as to maintain the pretense that the “deeper cause” of violence is Israel. Of course, what remains absent here is any real examination of antizionist violence—the intensifying murder of Israeli civilians domestically, and the legitimating logics for such violence to spread globally—as the core driver of the conflict. That violence inevitably provokes intensified state security, which is then cited as further evidence of Israeli guilt. The result is a mechanism of causal inversion: the genocidal ideology of antizionism recedes from view, while the response is treated as the origin. To name October 7th a genocide would collapse that framing entirely. It would mean recognizing that a second genocide was committed against the Jewish people. That acknowledgment would destabilize a narrative that depends on Israel being uniquely criminal and Jewish victimhood being permanently exhausted. It might even render Israel’s subsequent actions as a valid form of defensive response to genocidal violence, rather than as an expression of absolute evil. That is the symbolic line Amnesty International refuses to cross. It’s why October 7th must remain, in their version of the story, something less than what it was.