In an extraordinary act of collective moral clarity, more than one hundred of the world’s leading Holocaust and genocide scholars have issued a forceful rebuke against what they describe as the cynical corruption of one of the gravest words in human history: *genocide*. Their protest, articulated in a meticulously reasoned letter signed by 112 distinguished academics and institutional leaders from across five continents, condemns the misuse of the term by a group calling itself the “Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention"-an organization that, according to the Lemkin family itself, has no legal or moral authority to use the name of Raphael Lemkin, the jurist who coined the term genocide and gave it its precise legal meaning.
The letter represents far more than a technical dispute over semantics. It is a declaration of intellectual resistance against what the scholars describe as the weaponization of language, the distortion of international law, and the moral inversion of Holocaust memory. At stake, they argue, is not only the integrity of historical truth but the future credibility of human rights discourse itself.
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar who lost most of his family in the Holocaust, introduced the word “genocide" in 1944 to describe a specific crime: the intentional destruction of a people as a people.
His concept was not rhetorical, emotional, or political-it was juridical, precise, and designed to create legal accountability for the systematic annihilation of national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups. Lemkin’s life work culminated in the Genocide Convention of 1948, a cornerstone of modern international law that defines genocide not by casualty numbers, but by intent, purpose, and policy.
It is precisely this definitional clarity that the scholars say is now under attack.
The organization styling itself as the Lemkin Institute has publicly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, invoking Lemkin’s name to lend moral authority and legal gravitas to its claims. But according to Joseph Lemkin, a member of the Lemkin family, the institute has no authorization to use the family name and no legitimate connection to Raphael Lemkin’s legacy. In their letter addressed to him, the scholars make clear that the issue is not merely unauthorized branding-it is historical and legal falsification.
“Israel’s counter-terror campaign in Gaza is not genocidal, either in intentions or actions," the scholars wrote. “The civilian deaths there are the result of Hamas embedding itself in residential areas and using the population as human shields."
This sentence alone carries profound weight. It reflects not political advocacy, but legal reasoning rooted in international humanitarian law. The scholars distinguish between tragic civilian casualties in war and the crime of genocide, which requires demonstrable intent to destroy a people as such. They argue that collapsing this distinction is not only intellectually dishonest but morally dangerous.
The signatories of the letter represent a global cross-section of academic authority: genocide scholars, Holocaust historians, department chairs, legal theorists, and leaders of Holocaust remembrance institutions from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Great Britain, Israel, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, and the United States. Their geographic diversity underscores a crucial point: this is not a parochial or politically driven defense of Israel-it is an international scholarly defense of historical accuracy and legal integrity.
Dr. Rafael Medoff, historian and director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C., which organized the petition, described the campaign in stark terms. “The false accusation of genocide in Gaza is nothing less than Holocaust-inversion," he said. “The fact that extremists are exploiting Lemkin’s name to do so adds insult to injury."
The phrase *Holocaust inversion* is not rhetorical hyperbole. It refers to a documented phenomenon in which Jewish historical trauma is reframed against Jews themselves-transforming victims of genocide into alleged perpetrators of the same crime. Scholars have long warned that such inversion does not merely distort history; it erodes the moral architecture that protects minority communities by hollowing out the meaning of atrocity itself.
Prof. Thane Rosenbaum, a human rights scholar and co-organizer of the petition, articulated the danger even more bluntly. “The false equivalency here is despicable," he said. “The Lemkin Institute knows it, but they are banking on the public’s ignorance about the definition of genocide."
Rosenbaum’s recent book, *Beyond Proportionality: Israel’s Just War in Gaza*, explores precisely this erosion of legal and moral categories. His intervention in this debate is not about defending any particular government policy, but about safeguarding the distinction between lawful military action and crimes against humanity-distinctions without which international law collapses into political theater.
What makes this protest especially significant is not merely its scale, but its clarity. The scholars do not equivocate. They do not engage in rhetorical balancing acts. They assert, plainly and directly, that labeling Israel’s military actions as genocide is false, legally unsound, and historically perverse. They identify Hamas’s operational strategy-embedding within civilian infrastructure and weaponizing civilian populations-as the primary cause of civilian suffering, a fact documented by multiple international observers and war law experts.
This is not a denial of tragedy. It is a refusal to falsify its meaning.
The scholars’ letter also exposes a deeper crisis in contemporary discourse: the transformation of moral language into political currency. Words like “genocide," “apartheid," and “ethnic cleansing" increasingly circulate not as legal concepts but as emotive slogans, detached from their definitions and redeployed for ideological effect. In this environment, accusation becomes performance, and moral outrage replaces evidence.
By invoking Lemkin’s name without authorization, the so-called Lemkin Institute does more than mislabel a conflict-it appropriates a legacy built on intellectual rigor, legal precision, and moral seriousness. Raphael Lemkin devoted his life to ensuring that genocide would never again be trivialized, relativized, or politicized. To use his name to advance claims that contradict the very framework he created is, as the scholars argue, a profound ethical violation.
There is also a deeper cultural implication. Holocaust memory has long served as a moral anchor in global ethics, shaping postwar human rights institutions and international law. When Holocaust language is distorted, its moral gravity erodes. When genocide becomes a rhetorical device rather than a legal category, it loses its power to mobilize real accountability where true genocides occur.
This is not an abstract concern. Real genocides-against the Yazidis, the Rohingya, in Darfur, in Rwanda-have struggled for recognition precisely because political interests, narrative manipulation, and definitional confusion delay action. When genocide becomes a universal accusation, it becomes a meaningless one.
The scholars’ protest is therefore not only about Israel or Gaza. It is about the survival of moral vocabulary itself. It is about preserving the difference between war and annihilation, between tragedy and extermination, between collateral harm and systematic destruction.
The misuse of the term genocide does not elevate the suffering of Palestinian Arabs, they argue-it degrades the memory of actual genocides and sabotages the legal tools meant to prevent them.
What emerges from this moment is a rare phenomenon: academic consensus in an age of polarization. Across national, ideological, and institutional boundaries, these scholars converge on a single principle-that truth, especially historical and legal truth, must not be sacrificed to political fashion.
Their letter stands as a defense not only of Israel’s right to self-defense against terrorism, but of intellectual honesty itself. It is a reminder that words matter, that definitions matter, and that moral language cannot be severed from factual reality without becoming a tool of manipulation.
In the long arc of history, Raphael Lemkin’s legacy was never about slogans. It was about law. It was about accountability. It was about naming a crime so precisely that the world could no longer look away.
To defend that legacy today is not an act of politics. It is an act of moral stewardship.
And in a world increasingly saturated with noise, distortion, and performative outrage, the scholars’ letter stands as something increasingly rare: a quiet, rigorous, and devastatingly clear assertion of truth.
Fern Sidman is Senior News Editor at Jewish Voice.