Dr. Alex Grobman is a Holocaust scholar trained at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who directed Holocaust centers in St. Louis and LA. He has written extensively on the Shoah including c-authoring Denying History, Who Said the Holocaust Never Happened? published by the University of California in Berkeley. He is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI).
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has repeatedly declared that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. In July he went further. While invoking the International Criminal Court warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu, he called Netanyahu “the architect of the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza" and insisted that these were “facts of public record," not his personal assessment.
There is an immediate problem: the ICC warrant does not charge Netanyahu with genocide. It alleges war crimes and crimes against humanity. Genocide is a separate allegation before the International Court of Justice, which has not ruled that Israel committed genocide.
Mamdani did not establish a fact. He pronounced a verdict.
He has company. Amnesty International and a United Nations Commission of Inquiry have made the genocide accusation. In 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars adopted a resolution making the same claim. Headlines repeatedly reported that “86 percent of genocide scholars" agreed.
However - the association itself later clarified that only 28 percent of its membership voted, and 86 percent of that minority supported the resolution. Also - its membership also extends beyond academic genocide scholars to activists, artists, survivors, journalists, policymakers and NGO professionals.
Prestige is not proof. Neither is repetition.
The Genocide Convention requires the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such. The United Nations describes this intent as the element distinguishing genocide from other crimes.
So where is the evidence that Israel’s institutional purpose was to destroy Palestinian Arabs because they are Palestinian Arabs?
Start With the Numbers
On April 27, 2025, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry reported 52,243 deaths since the war began. It does not distinguish civilians from terrorists or other combatants. At approximately the same point, Israel estimated that it had killed about 20,000 Hamas and other Palestinian Arab terrorists.
Take both sides’ headline numbers exactly as reported.
Do not reduce the Hamas-run ministry’s total by one death. Do not subtract anyone killed by a failed Palestinian rocket, internal fighting or executions. Classify every person other than the approximately 20,000 terrorists Israel says it killed as a civilian.
The result is approximately 32,243 civilians and 20,000 terrorists-equivalent, for purposes of the standard civilian-to-combatant calculation, to about 1.6 civilians killed for every combatant.
Now deliberately rig the calculation against Israel.
Arbitrarily cut Israel’s estimate of terrorists killed by 25 percent-to 15,000-while leaving the Hamas-run ministry’s number untouched. The ratio becomes approximately 2.5 civilians per combatant.
Cut Israel’s estimate in half-to only 10,000 terrorists-and the ratio becomes approximately 4.2 to one.
Civilian deaths are tragic. They are not self-interpreting. Numbers offered as evidence of genocide must actually demonstrate exterminatory intent.
These do not.
Nor is Israel’s estimate of approximately 20,000 terrorists killed facially implausible. Six days after October 7, Reuters quoted a source close to Hamas describing its military wing as 40,000 strong, with specialized units and formal military training. Hamas operated brigades, battalions, command structures, weapons factories and a vast tunnel network.
After more than two years of fighting, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir stated in February 2026 that all Hamas front-line battalions had been dismantled and Hamas had been defeated as an organized army, although it retained weapons and guerrilla capabilities.
An organized terrorist army numbering in the tens of thousands did not lose its commanders, battalions and conventional military structure without suffering enormous combat losses.
The destruction of Hamas’s organized military therefore makes Israel’s estimate of approximately 20,000 terrorists killed entirely plausible.
And our crude ratio is still constructed in the manner most favorable to the accusation.
By November 9, 2023, approximately 9,500 rockets had been launched toward Israel. IDF tracking found that about 12 percent-roughly 1,140-landed inside Gaza itself. The same data showed approximately 900 launches originating from civilian locations including mosques, schools, hospitals and cultural centers.
How many Palestinian Arabs did those failed projectiles kill? We do not know, so do not invent a number.
How many were killed in clan warfare, executions of alleged collaborators or internal Palestinian Arab violence? Again, do not invent a number.
But stop pretending that an aggregate Gaza war-death figure is automatically a count of civilians killed by Israel.
It is not.
The familiar phrase “women and children" presents another statistical problem. These are demographic categories, not combatant classifications. The United Nations has itself documented Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad exposing children to military activities and has verified recruitment of boys by Palestinian armed organizations.
Someone under 18 remains classified as a “child" in an age table even if he participated in hostilities.
Age and sex do not establish civilian status.
A major study led by military historian Danny Orbach examined allegations of deliberate civilian killing, indiscriminate bombing, starvation and casualty manipulation. The researchers reviewed evidence underlying major accusations and concluded that it did not demonstrate a systematic IDF policy of killing civilians or an intention to destroy Gaza’s population.
Their statistical analysis concluded that a ratio around 1.5 civilians per combatant could not be ruled out-remarkably close to the simple calculation obtained by accepting Gaza’s reported overall death toll without reducing it at all.
Now Look at Intent
If Israel were institutionally pursuing genocide, its conduct should reveal that purpose.
Instead, by March 31, 2024, the IDF reported approximately 100,000 evacuation telephone calls, 9.3 million leaflets, 15.5 million text messages and 17 million recorded evacuation messages directed to Gazans.
That is not public-relations trivia.
It bears directly on intent.
An army attempting to physically destroy a civilian population does not expend enormous operational resources repeatedly informing that population where it intends to fight and urging civilians to leave.
It does not voluntarily surrender surprise in order to separate civilians from terrorists and military targets.
John Spencer, an urban-warfare specialist and former U.S. Army infantry officer, entered Gaza four times with the IDF and examined military orders and targeting procedures. He reported reviewing orders, watching targeting processes and seeing Israeli soldiers take additional operational risks to avoid harming civilians.
His conclusion was unequivocal: what he observed did not even resemble genocide or genocidal intent.
Orbach and his colleagues reached the same institutional conclusion. In examining a major database of alleged deliberate killings, they found incidents containing specific evidence or claims of intentional killing accounting for only a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of reported deaths, with some allegations themselves proving unreliable.
They also documented Israeli operations that senior commanders vetoed because anticipated civilian harm was considered excessive.
That is evidence of institutional posture.
In another recent article, I made the same distinction regarding Jewish vigilantism in Judea and Samaria: conduct that violates a society’s governing norm cannot simply be presented as proof of that norm. Israel arrests Jews who attack Arabs because such attacks violate Israeli law and policy.
The same analytical rule applies in war.
A soldier who commits a crime violates the institutional rules under which he serves. His crime does not magically become evidence that the institution ordered extermination.
Wars produce errors, misconduct and crimes.
The genocide accusation requires something entirely different: a policy directed toward destroying the protected population as a people.
Where is it?
Israel targeted Hamas terrorists, their commanders, their weapons, their tunnel systems and their military formations.
It warned civilians.
It established evacuation mechanisms.
Its commanders cancelled attacks when expected civilian casualties were considered too high.
And it ultimately dismantled the organized terrorist army it said it was fighting.
That is not evidence of genocide.
It is evidence of an extraordinarily difficult urban war against a terrorist organization deliberately embedded within a civilian population.
The comparison with other urban battles reinforces the point. An Associated Press investigation estimated that 9,000 to 11,000 civilians died in Mosul during the nine-month U.S.-backed campaign to destroy ISIS there.
Nobody serious concluded from that civilian toll that the United States or Iraq had embarked upon a genocide against the people of Mosul.
There is no magical civilian-to-combatant ratio that makes a war humane.
There is, however, an obvious problem with claiming that Gaza’s casualty statistics themselves prove genocide when, accepting both sides’ headline figures at our chosen checkpoint, approximately 38 percent of the reported dead were terrorists killed in combat.
That is an extraordinary way to conduct an extermination campaign.
The Verdict Existed Before Gaza
There is an even larger problem for the genocide narrative.
It predates the evidence supposedly proving it.
At the NGO Forum accompanying the 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism, the declaration accused Israel of “acts of genocide," ethnic cleansing and apartheid. It called for the “complete and total isolation of Israel," comprehensive sanctions and embargoes, and the severing of diplomatic, economic and military relationships.
That was 22 years before October 7.
No present Gaza war.
No present casualty figures.
No Israeli military response to the October 7 massacre.
The genocide verdict was already written.
Durban supplied the vocabulary: apartheid, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, isolation.
Gaza later supplied devastating images through which that preexisting delegitimization framework could be marketed to a vastly larger Western audience.
This fits a transformation I have documented for years.
Arab rejection of Jewish sovereignty preceded 1967 by decades. Arab leaders rejected partition in 1937 and again in 1947. The PLO was founded in 1964, before Israel controlled Judea, Samaria or Gaza. Its 1968 Charter declared Israel’s establishment illegal and armed struggle its strategy.
Soviet sponsorship subsequently helped recast a movement organized around defeating Jewish sovereignty in the progressive language of “national liberation," a vocabulary readily absorbed by the Western left.
The modern genocide accusation completes the inversion.
Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish jurist who coined “genocide" in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, fought to make the destruction of peoples a specifically defined universal crime.
The Jewish response to catastrophe was not permanent victimhood.
Zionism restored agency: sovereignty, institutions, an army and responsibility for Jewish survival.
“Never Again" did not mean that Jews must remain sufficiently powerless to retain the world’s sympathy.
It meant Jews would never again entrust their continued existence entirely to someone else’s government, someone else’s army or someone else’s conscience.
Now that achievement is turned against them.
The Palestinian Arab becomes the symbolic Jew.
The Israeli becomes the symbolic Nazi.
Jewish defensive power becomes evidence of criminality by definition.
Palestinian Arab suffering becomes the entire history, while the decisions, ideologies and violence of Palestinian Arab actors progressively disappear from the story.
Mamdani’s rhetoric is the political endpoint of that inversion.
He invokes an ICC warrant that contains no genocide charge and nevertheless presents genocide as a “fact of public record."
He does not establish the required genocidal intent.
He simply declares it.
The accusation then performs precisely the political work such terminology is designed to accomplish.
Israel is no longer a country whose government's military decisions can be debated or criticized. It becomes a genocidal state whose legitimacy itself can be challenged.
Its supporters become “complicit in genocide."
Its soldiers become perpetrators of genocide.
Zionism becomes an ideology associated not with Jewish national restoration but with humanity’s ultimate crime.
Jewish self-defense is thus morally contaminated through association with the very crime whose modern legal definition emerged from the destruction of European Jewry.
Look at the evidence again:
52,243 reported deaths. Among them, approximately 20,000 Hamas and other Palestinian Arab terrorists killed. A Hamas military force numbering in the tens of thousands before the war. Its organized battalions subsequently dismantled. More than 40 million evacuation communications. Israeli attacks cancelled to protect Palestinian Arab civilians. No demonstrated institutional policy to physically destroy the Palestinian Arabs.
Then ask the elementary question Mamdani never answers:
Where is the genocide?
The accusation did not emerge from these facts.
It was waiting for them.
Mamdani did not discover a fact.
He inherited a narrative.