The Wall Street Journal Has Many Ways to Deny Genocide
Gregory Shupak
As more and more scholars, and one rights group after another, confirm that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, it’s becoming ever more obvious that those who deny the genocide are the intellectual and moral equivalents of people who deny other genocides, such as the ones inflicted on the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, or the Holocaust, or the Armenian Genocide.
Yet the Wall Street Journal persists in running genocide denial. Looking at how the paper does so enables us to not only refute their falsehoods, but also to gain insight into the tactics Gaza genocide denialists, and genocide deniers in general, employ. These include:
- Hand-waving: brushing off the cataclysmic damage Israel and the US have done to Palestinians as merely the unavoidable byproducts of war;
- Victim-blaming: saying that Palestinian resistance groups such as Hamas are to blame for the suffering in Gaza;
- Inverting perpetrator and victim: presenting Palestinians, and not Israelis, as genocidal, with Israelis, rather than Palestinians, cast as the targets;
- Obscurantism: offering dubious pieces of information, usually in a decontextualized manner, as if they showed that Israel has pursued its military objectives humanely;
- Repudiation: flatly rejecting well-documented facts while offering little or no counter-evidence.
'Justifiable, even necessary'
Avi Shafran (Wall Street Journal, 7/22/25): "When critics distort Israel’s goal of self-preservation into a desire for genocide, the accusers have gone from righteous protesters to ignorant haters."
Ami Magazine columnist Avi Shafran’s Journal piece (7/22/25) utilized both hand-waving and victim-blaming. He asserted:
When critics distort Israel’s goal of self-preservation into a desire for genocide, the accusers have gone from righteous protesters to ignorant haters…. Civilians suffer and die in the prosecution of justifiable, even necessary, wars. That tragedy is intensified when you are fighting an enemy who hides behind human shields. Eradicating the engines of terror in Gaza requires attacking the places from which they operate: hospitals, schools and mosques.
Israel’s supposedly “justifiable, even necessary” war has entailed such policies (as Human Rights Watch—12/19/24—notes) as
intentionally depriv[ing] Palestinian civilians in Gaza of adequate access to water since October 2023, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths and thus committing the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide.
Rather than offering a reasoned, evidence-based defense of such Israeli conduct, Shafran blithely wrote as if consciously withholding drinking water from a civilian population were as natural and inevitable as water boiling at a hundred degrees Celsius.
The author’s next move was to blame Palestinians for Israel killing Palestinians. Shafran, of course, didn’t offer a scintilla of proof for his claim that Palestinian fighters force their own people to be human shields, probably because it’s Israel—not Hamas—that routinely uses Palestinians as shields (FAIR.org, 5/13/25).
'Systematically and deliberately devastated'
From the health workers' open letter (Common Dreams, 10/2/24): "The human toll in Gaza since October is far higher than is understood in the United States. It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population."
Equally weak is Shafran’s suggestion that it’s Palestinians’ fault that Israel attacks Palestinian hospitals, schools and mosques. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory said that Israel damaged and destroyed more than 90% of the school and university buildings in Gaza, and found just one case where Hamas had also used a school for military purposes. The commission also said that Israeli attacks have damaged more than half of all religious and cultural sites in Gaza, and noted that
all ten religious and cultural sites in Gaza investigated by the Commission constituted civilian objects at the time of attack, and suffered devastating destruction for which the Commission could not identify a legitimate military need.
Similarly, the UN Human Rights Commission published a report late last year examining 136 Israeli strikes on at least 27 hospitals and 12 other medical facilities, and said that Israel did not substantiate its claims that Palestinian armed groups were using the structures for military purposes. In some cases, the report pointed out, Israel’s “vague” allegations “appear contradicted by publicly available information.”
Moreover, 99 American healthcare professionals who volunteered in the Gaza Strip in the months following October 7, 2023, published a letter saying that the signatories
spent a combined 254 weeks inside Gaza’s largest hospitals and clinics. We wish to be absolutely clear: Not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities.
We urge you to see that Israel has systematically and deliberately devastated Gaza’s entire healthcare system, and that Israel has targeted our colleagues in Gaza for torture, disappearance and murder.
Shafran pretended such evidence doesn’t exist, perhaps hoping that his audience is racist enough to believe his diatribes about wily Arabs who use places of healing, learning, worship and sanctuary to conceal “engines of terror.”
'That side isn't Israel'
Former Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker wrote a Journal piece (8/5/25) that inverted victim and perpetrator in Gaza. He asserted that, in the war between Israel “and its enemies in Gaza,” one side “would, if it could, conduct a genocide against the other, wiping every last remnant off the face of the planet. That side isn't Israel.”
Baker’s strategy is to focus on what he claims Palestinian fighters “would” do in imaginary circumstances, rather than on the genocide that is actually taking place. Such speculation is pointless, because by definition it’s not possible to know what would happen in made-up scenarios. Since Baker doesn’t even bother to explain the reasons for his view that Palestinians “would” commit genocide if they could, his make-believe does not merit serious consideration.
While it is by definition impossible to decisively prove what might happen under nonexistent conditions, there is zero doubt that Israel has—in the really existing world—carried out a genocide and engaged in a pattern of conduct consistent with trying to “wip[e] every last remnant [of Palestinian life in Gaza] off the face of the planet.” Days before the Journal ran Baker’s screed, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published a report (7/25) documenting the Israeli genocide in Gaza:
Israel’s conduct of warfare in the Gaza Strip, which has included—among other things—massive, indiscriminate bombardment of population centers; starvation of more than 2 million people as a method of warfare; attempts at ethnic cleansing and formally including the ethnic cleansing of Gaza's residents in the war aims; systematic destruction of hospitals and other medical facilities, which are entitled to special protection under international law, along with the vast majority of civilian infrastructure there; and the unprecedented killing of medical personnel, aid workers, persons in charge of maintaining public order, and journalists. Israel's claim that Hamas fighters or members of other armed Palestinian groups were present in medical or civilian facilities, often made without providing any evidence, cannot justify or explain such widespread, systematic destruction.
Baker’s inversion of victim and perpetrator depends on ignoring the voluminous proof that Israel is carrying out a genocide, focusing instead on fantasies based on nothing more than orientalist depictions of Arabs as bloodthirsty savages.
'Every martyr is a trophy'
Bernard-Henri Lévy (Wall Street Journal, 9/3/25): "To speak of genocide in Gaza is an offense to common sense, a maneuver to demonize Israel, and an insult to the victims of genocides past and present."
The notorious French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy published an op-ed in the Journal (9/3/25) headlined “Three Big Lies About the Israel/Hamas War.” In his view, one such lie is that “Israel is committing 'genocide' in Gaza.” He explained: “To say ‘genocide’ means a plan—a deliberate, targeted initiative to destroy a people. That isn't what the Israeli army is doing.”
Here Lévy engaged in the repudiation approach to genocide denial, writing as if a well-established body of Israeli intent weren’t readily available to anyone with access to the internet. Just six days into the US/Israeli onslaught, Israeli historian Raz Segal wrote (Jewish Currents, 10/13/23) that what Israel had undertaken was “a textbook case of genocide.”
One piece of evidence Segal pointed to was Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant’s announcement that the state was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”
For Segal, Gallant’s use of the phrase
"complete siege"...explicitly indexes a plan to bring the siege to its final destination of systematic destruction of Palestinians and Palestinian society in Gaza, by killing them, starving them, cutting off their water supplies, and bombing their hospitals.
Similarly, in February, US President Trump put forth a genocidal plan (Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 2/5/25; Truthout, 2/9/25) to empty Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants so that the US could annex the territory. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded by saying he was “committed to US President Trump’s plan for the creation of a different Gaza.” Subsequently, Netanyahu suggested that implementing Trump’s scheme was a condition for ending the conflict.
More recently, Human Rights Watch (5/15/25) commented that an Israeli government plan codenamed “Gideon’s Chariot” was designed “to demolish what remains of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and concentrate the Palestinian population into a tiny area," and that this "would amount to an abhorrent escalation of its ongoing crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide.”
Thus Lévy’s denialism depends on repudiating the extensive record of Israeli leaders articulating “a plan” to “destroy a people.”
Lévy's next move was to victim-blame: “Perhaps [Israel] is waging the war badly,” he wrote, but wondering, “who would do better in an asymmetric conflict when the enemy's goal isn't to minimize casualties on its own side but to maximize them, so that every martyr is a trophy?” Here Lévy traded on the racist myth that Palestinians are fanatical barbarians indifferent to the suffering of their own people.
His language is vague, so it’s hard to know for sure what he's talking about, but it sounds like he might be invoking, as Shafran did, what Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), calls the “double lie of ‘human shields’” (Mondoweiss, 9/21/24).
'A genocidal army doesn't take two years'
Al Jazeera (9/14/25): "Fifteen out of 17 doctors described encountering children under 15 with single bullet wounds to the head or chest. Together, they identified 114 such cases during their missions in Gaza."
Lévy then engaged in obscurantism, denying the genocide by selecting questionable tidbits that he seems to think cast Israel in a positive light:
A genocidal army doesn’t take two years to win a war in a territory the size of Las Vegas. A genocidal army doesn’t send SMS warnings before firing or facilitate the passage of those trying to escape the strikes. A genocidal army wouldn’t evacuate, every month, hundreds of Palestinian children suffering from rare diseases or cancer, sending them to hospitals in Abu Dhabi as part of a medical airlift set up right after October 7.
That Israel hasn’t conquered Gaza to this point is a non sequitur. What Israel’s inability to subjugate Gaza shows is that Israel isn’t omnipotent, and that Palestinian fighters and their allies have mounted an effective resistance to the attempt to exterminate Gaza-based Palestinians (FAIR.org, 1/24/25). That tells us nothing about Israel’s intent or the severity of the devastation it has inflicted. (It's worth recalling that the Warsaw Ghetto survived more than two and a half years under siege from genocidal Nazi forces.)
The SMS warnings that Lévy hails add to the “confusion, chaos and mass displacement” characterizing life in Gaza for the last two years (NPR, 12/7/23). More to the point, any “warnings before firing” that Israel has sent out aren’t going to save many Gaza residents when these messages are disseminated in the context of Israel leveling much of the Strip (BBC, 7/18/25; Guardian, 1/18/25) by bombing it with the “equivalent to six Hiroshimas,” leaving the population with effectively nowhere safe to go.
Approximately 70,000 Palestinians—the overwhelming majority of them civilians—are known to be dead, or are presumed dead under the rubble (to say nothing of the many more dead due to starvation, disease, unsanitary conditions, and lack of access to clean water), so it’s as absurd as it is obscene for Lévy to suggest that Israel is making a sincere effort to reduce Palestinian casualties. That’s what Lévy’s paragraph seems to be suggesting, irrespective of all data to the contrary.
For instance, a group of 45 American physicians and nurses who volunteered in Gaza wrote a letter to the Biden/Harris administration describing treating children whose injuries the medical professionals were sure had been intentionally inflicted; “specifically, every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest,” the letter said (CNN, 7/26/24). Deliberately sniping children every day is, to paraphrase Lévy, something a genocidal army does.
'Delayed or denied'
Bragging about the IDF evacuating "hundreds of Palestinian children" is actually an admission of the inadequacy of Israeli relief efforts (MSF, 7/17/25).
Nor was Lévy on solid ground when he denied that Israel policies are genocidal by claiming that it “evacuate[s], every month, hundreds of Palestinian children suffering from rare diseases or cancer.” Compare that to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières report (7/17/25) that
an estimated 11,000–13,000 people—including more than 4,500 children—require medical evacuation to access care unavailable in the Strip. Yet Israeli authorities have allowed only a few of those requesting medical evacuation to do so, with many critical cases being delayed or denied regardless of medical urgency….
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has only managed to medically evacuate 22 patients, including 13 children to our reconstructive surgery hospital in Amman, Jordan, for comprehensive rehabilitative care.
The World Health Organization (WHO) told a similar story (4/14/25):
Far too few patients have been able to leave Gaza for the urgent care they so desperately need. We estimate that up to 12,000 patients need medical evacuation but, since [Israel intensified its blockade of aid in March] we have only been able to evacuate 121 people, including 73 children.
The number of people allowed to leave Gaza for healthcare has been a minuscule portion of those who need it—never mind that the reason Palestinians need to leave Gaza for medical treatment could have something to do with destroying the Strip’s health system by “deliberately attacking and starving healthcare workers, paramedics and hospitals to wipe out medical care” in the territory. Because that’s the reality of Israel’s assaults on Palestinian healthcare, and because Lévy's project is genocide denial, he has no choice but to obscure what Israel has done and is continuing to do.
'Charges are a travesty'
Alan Dershowitz (9/16/25) combines two of the Wall Street Journal's favorite causes: defending genocide and demonizing New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani (FAIR.org, 7/30/25).
Attorney Alan Dershowitz—himself rather notorious—also engaged in genocide denial on the Journal’s op-ed page (9/16/25), selecting obscurantism and repudiation as his rhetorical weapons. Dershowitz mocked New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for saying that, if elected, he will enforce the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant for Netanyahu, should the prime minister visit the city:
The ICC's charges against Mr. Netanyahu are a travesty. Its arrest warrant accuses him of intentionally starving civilians in Gaza—never mind that Israel has facilitated the delivery of more than a million tons of food to the strip. Mr. Mamdani also accuses the Jewish state of "genocide," a charge that not even the ICC levies.
Dershowitz wrote as though it is self-evidently absurd for Mamdani to say that Israel is carrying out genocide, pointing to the fact that the ICC has not charged Israel with doing so. Yet the International Court of Justice ruled in January 2024 that it’s “plausible” Israel is committing genocide, and is working toward a definitive ruling (Guardian, 7/27/25). This is to say nothing of the many scholars and rights groups, already cited in this piece, who have concluded that the term aptly characterizes Israel’s actions. Dershowitz simply pretended this evidence doesn’t exist.
Dershowitz obfuscated Israeli policies by celebrating the volume of food allowed into Gaza, as though it were sufficient. A "million tons of food" sounds like a lot, but divided among 2 million people over two years, it amounts to a little more than one and a third pounds of food per day. (A pound and a third of rice has about 800 calories,while “the standard humanitarian ration is 2,100 calories per person per day”—London Review of Books, 5/14/25.)
It’s uncontroversial that Israel is deliberately starving civilians in Gaza. The UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) assessed that “half a million people—a quarter of Palestinians in Gaza—are suffering from famine,” a catastrophe resulting from Israeli policies, including what aid groups describe as its “systematic obstruction” of food entering the Strip (BBC, 8/22/25).
Even more contemptible
As I’ve argued previously (Electronic Intifada, 7/15/24), denying an unfolding genocide like the one in Palestine is even more contemptible than denying genocides that happened in the past, because an ongoing genocide can be stopped before even more people in the targeted population are killed, maimed and bereaved. That’s why every genocide denial is at the same time pro-genocide propaganda: Fewer people with an accurate grasp of the US/Israeli attempt to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a people means fewer people to try and stop it from happening.
Fortunately, despite all the lies from outlets like the Journal, millions of people around the world have made Palestine solidarity activism a regular part of their lives. The more widely genocide-enabling mendacities can be exposed, the more likely to succeed will be the movements to stop the crime of crimes—and to achieve peace through liberation across the Middle East.
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