Risk and Extortion LXXIV Semantic Politics 2

Genocide and Antisemitism

In the ongoing debate over Israel’s actions in Gaza, a profound asymmetry has emerged in the way key legal and moral categories—genocide and antisemitism—are semantically interpreted and politically deployed. This asymmetry is especially stark in the German context, where the state’s relationship to Holocaust memory has produced a juridico-symbolic framework that upholds legal formalism when it protects state interests, but abandons it when those interests are threatened by uncomfortable truths.

In the case of genocide, Germany has rejected the International Court of Justice’s finding that a plausible case exists regarding Israel’s conduct in Gaza. The ICJ, adhering to rigorous legal standards, established in a declaration on the 26^th of January 2024, that the threshold for genocidal intent may have been met. This was based on extensive evidence: public incitement by Israeli officials, systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure, and the mass displacement and killing of Palestinian civilians. Rather than engaging with this evidence through counter-argumentation or providing alternative interpretations of intent, the German Foreign Office, led by the then Minister Annalena Baerbock (of the Green Party),  simply declared the ICJ’s finding to be without merit—thereby dismissing the authority of the very legal framework it claims to uphold. Whereas in the official declaration, this was not presented as rejection of international law as such, but of the consequences of law when they no longer align with state ideology. However, de facto, this means that the German State considers it legitimate to dismiss the findings of international law, if it does not agree with them.

Since then, more public statements from Israeli officials have confirmed this genocidal intent. More international organizations and more nation states have also declared that they believe that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza. And last but not least, genocide scholars such as Omer Bertov – who has recently published an op-ed in the New York Times – have stated that they too are now convinced that Gaza is the site of genocide.  The only nation states that are still unwilling to admit this are also the main trading partners of Israel and the main suppliers of arms and financial support to Israel. When semantics meet political and financial interests, the former becomes surprisingly flexible.

Genocide, however, remains a precise legal term, consisting of two parts: (a) the intention to kill large sections of a particular racial, ethnic, national or religious group and (b) actually killing them. In the case of Gaza both have been met. In the case of the West Bank, the situation is perhaps less extreme, but both conditions are also met, even if the main culprits here are Jewish settlers, supported by both the IDF and in some cases the Palestinian Authority. Because of the West bank, the argument that Israel is acting in self-defence against Hamas, no longer applies. This element is completely absent from current political debate in the western media public sphere. The genocide of Palestinians has nothing to do with Hamas, but everything to do with Zionism and its longing for a Jewish State of “Greater Israel”.

Despite the legal clarity and semantic precision of the concept of genocide, western media and politicians keep regurgitating Hasbara to spread confusion. The first confusion is that it is supposedly not clear that there is a genocide at all. Of course, this requires one to not only ignore all the evidence to the contrary, but also to ignore all those experts and organizations, including the UN, the ICJ and the ICC, who say that is a genocide. Those who deny that it is a genocide never do so on the basis of any objective evidence or logical consistency. Those who spread lies and confusion will not be able to answer the question why Israel does not allow any independent inspections and actually murders the journalists alongside the medics and other humanitarian aid workers) who are still in Gaza.

The second confusion is to state that the genocide – while being denied  – is justified because of Hamas. Starving people to defend oneself also flies in the face of every logical principle. It is no wonder that people are not merely opposing Israel, but with increasing anger and in some cases hatred. To be treated as if you are a complete idiot, by being lied to and gaslighted by individuals with self-satisfied smirks because they know that they can act with impunity, does not merely cultivate frustration, it starts to build up an account of the perpetrators as inherently evil.

The third confusion relates to this. By calling accusations of genocide as being expressions of “Israel-related antisemitism” is to deliberately confuse a condemnation of actions with a hatred for Jews because they are Jews. In the teachings of the Catholic Church, for example, it is explicitly stated that we should hate the sin but love the sinner. It does not say that you must hate the sinner if you hate the sin. Whereas it may be humanly impossible to love those who starve children to death, it is still humanly possible to refuse explaining the desire to starve children to death with reference to Jewishness. It is the identity-thinking of Zionism that claims that Jewishness is a race and consists of innate racial properties. It is also the thinking of antisemitism. Thus, by criticizing Zionism as a form of identity thinking and by rejecting all forms of identity-thinking, one has a much better base to also reject antisemitism.

Those that engage in identity thinking, that is, those who perform the identity-politics of nationhood, who claim that nationhood derives from specific hereditary ethnic (genetic-mimetic) properties, those who engage with nationalism as a political platform, are much more likely to succumb to anti-Semitic desires, as their nationalism was originally forged on the premise that Jews do not belong to that nation and perhaps even that Jews are the enemy within.

This may explain why in Germany, the refusal to take semantics seriously in relation to genocide, by rejecting its clarity, is also paired with a refusal to take semantics seriously in relation to anti-Semitism.  In contrast to genocide, anti-Semitism today is not clearly defined, but has become very malleable and plastic and can be applied to a very broad range of actions: varying from Holocaust-denial, definitions of self-hating Jews as the enemy within and claims of a Jewish-globalist conspiracy (which are traditional expressions of anti-Semitism) one the one hand, to endlessly expanding lists of symbols and expressions that criticize Zionism and human rights violations performed in its name on the other hand.

As an extreme example of this, compared to its treatment of genocide, Germany applies a radically different standard to accusations of antisemitism, particularly when they involve criticism of Israel or expresses solidarity with Palestinians. In this domain, the state embraces a hermeneutic model in which intent is not necessary for a statement to be deemed anti-Semitic. Under the adoption of the IHRA working definition, antisemitism becomes a matter of interpretation by authorities, not the speaker’s intention or even objective context. Thus, Palestinian voices, and even Jewish or Israeli dissenters, can be labelled anti-Semitic for expressing anti-Zionist views or for using analogies that challenge the moral exception granted to Israel in the name of Jewish safety.

The word that is used for this is “Israel-critical Antisemitism”. If we were to try to align the semantic accuracy of this term and do justice to its meaning, Israel-critical Antisemitism are expressions and actions that oppose the Israeli State because it believes that whatever that state does, is wrong because it is a Jewish state. That is, it would suggest that the genocide currently performed by the state of Israel is condemned because Jews are committing it, not because genocide is wrong. And it would have to go even further: Israel-critical antisemitism is the explanation that only Jews are capable of this kind of evil because they are Jews. It is clear that these conditions are most often not being met when used to condemn pro-Palestinian protests. Instead, what most protests criticize is not Judaism at all, but the crimes against humanity performed in the name of Zionism, which is a European nationalist ideology invented in the 19^th century as a response to the growing antisemitism in Europe. The ideology of Zionism did not oppose antisemitism, but instead sought to align its interest with those of antisemitism, by using it to strengthen its argument that the United Kingdom should establish a Jewish State on the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine.

Needless to say perhaps, there is absolutely no basis for arguing that the war crimes and crimes against humanity performed by Israel in the name of Zionism are inherently different from crimes against humanity performed by France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the United States etc. What these crimes have in common is simply the belief that one’s race, ethnicity or nationality is superior to those being violated in its name. There is absolutely nothing specifically Jewish about supremacism. It could be that thus may hurt the most, however.

This discrepancy between how the German state treats the semantic politics of genocide and those of antisemitism reveals a double standard that is not merely legal but theological in nature. While Palestinians are asked to prove, often impossibly, that their extermination is intentional, Israel is granted the power to define the meaning of critique as hatred, effectively shielding itself from legal accountability by sacralizing its vulnerability. The semantic weight of “Never Again” is thus monopolized: it functions not as a universal ethical injunction, but as a proprietary shield around one state and one people. As a result, we cannot learn any lessons from the Holocaust unless they apply to Jewish people.

In this configuration, Palestinians are subjected to a colonial hermeneutics of suspicion, in which their pain must be verified, their deaths audited, and their accusations neutralized unless they adhere to an impossible proceduralism. Meanwhile, the state that occupies and devastates their territory is granted the authority to interpret both its own motives and the moral legitimacy of any critique it receives. This is not simply a failure of international law—it is the political hollowing of its semantic foundations.

Reclaiming the meaning of genocide and antisemitism requires confronting this epistemic asymmetry and insisting that legal and moral language must not be instrumentalized to protect the powerful while silencing the oppressed.