Israel isn’t the only nation harmed by Mamdani’s ‘genocide’ charge
When former Mayor Bill de Blasio recently defended current Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s labeling of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “war criminal,” he pointed to one metric above all: the number of civilian casualties in Gaza.
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Mamdani and de Blasio are not alone. Throughout the progressive left and much of the press, the accusation of Israeli “war crimes” and “genocide” has quietly transformed into an accepted default narrative.
But there’s a vital question almost nobody bothers to ask: If large civilian casualties alone prove war crimes or genocide, where does that logic stop?
Harry Truman authorized the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Franklin Roosevelt directed a total war that leveled German cities.
John F. Kennedy dramatically escalated America’s involvement in Vietnam, a conflict that claimed immense civilian tolls.
Would Bill de Blasio call Truman a war criminal? Would Mamdani seek an ICC warrant for FDR?
Few Americans would answer yes. Deep down, most people understand that war is judged by context, military necessity and, above all, intent. Or, at least, they used to.
To test these assumptions, we conducted a national survey of 505 Americans.
Our results suggest Americans are rapidly abandoning these crucial legal distinctions, driven by a widening partisan and generational chasm.
We expected disagreement over Gaza, but we discovered a profound, systemic erosion of basic definitions.
A majority of respondents (54.6%) labeled Israel’s defensive response to the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre as genocide.
But the breakdown reveals a striking ideological split: Democrats and younger Americans are far more likely to adopt a flawed “civilian deaths equals genocide” framework.
For a massive swath of the electorate, the traditional legal standards of warfare have completely collapsed into raw body counts.
Nor is this true only for Gaza. Respondents also applied the term “genocide” to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (63%) and even Islamist massacres of Black Christians in Africa (52.3%).
Nearly half (44.5%) said Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented genocide, and over 40% said the same about Vietnam.
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The core issue here isn’t just Israel. It’s that a generation of Americans no longer understands what genocide actually means.
When Raphael Lemkin coined the word after the Holocaust, he wasn’t searching for a dramatic synonym for tragedy.
He was isolating history’s most exceptional crime: the deliberate attempt to destroy an entire national, ethnic, racial or religious group because of its identity.
This understanding became the basis of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention.
Under international law, genocide requires explicit intent.
Civilian casualties — even catastrophic ones — are not enough.
Without intent, a military action that results in many casualties may be a tragic mistake, a use of disproportionate force or an unlawful attack. But it’s not genocide.
Perhaps our most revealing survey finding came when we tested whether respondents would change their minds after being reminded that Hamas openly declares its intention to annihilate Israel and murder Jews. Almost nothing changed.
Many Americans are no longer evaluating the law. Instead, they judge exclusively by the visible, heartbreaking consequences of modern warfare captured on social media.
But humanitarian tragedy and genocide are not the same thing.
And words matter, because they distinguish between entirely different realities.
Manslaughter is not murder. Assault is not attempted murder.
Unintended civilian casualties are not deliberate war crimes.
These are not semantic niceties; they are the bedrock of global justice.
Tragically, this collapse of definitions is fueled by a wider historical amnesia.
Our survey found almost half of those polled either did not know or explicitly disagreed with the fact that radical Islamists were responsible for the attacks of 9/11.
We have entered a dangerous age of ignorance, where historical facts are discarded if they conflict with a preferred ideological narrative.
Falsely labeling the war in Gaza a genocide does more than just slander Israel; it degrades the entire architecture of global justice.
When the ultimate crime is weaponized against every brutal conflict, the word loses its boundaries.
Ultimately, when everything is called genocide, nothing is.
Irwin J. Mansdorf is a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. Charles Jacobs is founder of the International Freedom Coalition, which represents communities victimized by jihadist violence.
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