It has become a refrain among Israel’s enemies. Israel, born from a successful war of national liberation, is not merely a “colonial entity.” Israel, where one in five citizens is Palestinian and has, as he should, full civil rights, is not merely an “apartheid state.” The Jewish state, according to this globalized vox populi, is a “genocidal” state.

The term genocide has become the magic word, the lethal word, the dehumanizing word. It is also the word that absolves Europeans — and the world — of their historic guilt, from having for centuries massacred Jews, by the millions. Which culminated in the “Final Solution” — a true genocide — 82 years ago.  

This accusation circulates among non-governmental organizations and diplomatic circles. It inflames Amsterdam’s pogromists; those who unfurl massive banners in the French stadiums; Spanish ministers haunted by a 1492 redux; and Belgian politicians currying favor with Islamists.

Not to mention the woke zealots of Harvard and Princeton whom I met during my recent campus tour; and the so-called “Unbowed” in Paris, who dream of a Palestinian state stretching to the Jordan from the Mediterranean envisioning the expulsion of the 8 million Jews currently living on that land.  

Now this accusation has been echoed by one of the most prominent and supposedly “infallible” voices of our time: Pope Francis. Just this past week, he quotes “experts” who claim that “what is happening in Gaza” bears the “characteristics of genocide” and calls for this accusation to be “carefully studied.”  

Now, much to the chagrin of the head of a Church that has done so much, from Pope Leo XIII to John Paul II, to seal the alliance with the Jews, this “attentive study” is unnecessary. One can mourn — as I do — the civilian victims in Gaza, but one cannot characterize as genocidal an army that warns before firing and floods the neighborhoods it is about to bomb with evacuation messages.

One can find – as I do – that a life shouldn’t be tossed about by battles, shuttling from north to south and then from south to north, and living in makeshift shelters, sometimes tents: but a tent is not a gas chamber; the evacuation corridors, opened daily to allow people to seek shelter, are not death marches; and if civilians do not use them more, it is because Hamas holds them hostage and uses them as shields.

One can consider – this is already less certain, but still – that the Israeli Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, does not send enough humanitarian aid to Gaza: hundreds of convoys pass every day; if more do not get through, again, this is the responsibility of Hamas, which either blocks them on the other side of the border or confiscates the cargo to sell it; and there are no limits on these movements from the Israeli side.

And I won’t even talk about the younger sister of the late Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas, who was treated in a hospital in southern Israel. Or about the vaccination campaign organized in the midst of war that reached 90 percent of Gazan children. Or, ten days ago, the 231 children suffering from rare diseases transported to Emirati hospitals to receive treatment…

Have we ever seen such “genociders”? Can we imagine the Wehrmacht warning: “Ladies and gentlemen, Jews… we are about to attack… or to vaccinate… please evacuate your ghettos and shtetls without delay… thank you for using the designated corridors for this purpose…”?

I have “studied” these subjects in depth. I have seen genocides in Srebrenica and Darfur with my own eyes. I have filmed those tortured by Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the bodies burned alive, thrown from rooftops, beheaded, by ISIS at Mosul. I have documented, on the ground, the indiscriminate killings by Russia in Ukraine. 

I covered, long before that, the carnage of the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, from which the French writer Kamel Daoud escaped. I have borne witness to those survivors in the Christian villages of the Middle Belt of Nigeria, their lives decimated by the Islamist Fulani. 

In short, I know what it means to be promised death. I have seen skeletons exploited to their last strength and, when that strength expired, thrown into a pit. In other words, I know what genocide and crimes against humanity mean. 

The world has willingly forgotten that, in this war of Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran and its puppets, the IDF is the first army in the world to take so many measures, sometimes to its strategic detriment, to ensure that as few innocent civilians as possible are caught in the furnace of battles. 

Thus, myths are forged. 

Thus, we go from the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, or Judeo-Bolshevik, or Judeo-Capitalist conspiracy, to the Judeo-genocidal conspiracy of which all the Jews of the world would be more or less complicit. And thus we insult, not only the truth of facts and names, but the holy memory of the victims of the genocides of the last century.