Why is it so difficult for some to accept that the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza? The case for genocide is compelling, but some governments and members of the public resist acknowledging it. The reason lies in not only Israel’s history as a haven for the Jewish victims of genocide but also an unduly narrow understanding of the meaning of the term, by both the public and the international court of justice (ICJ).

Israel benefits from a halo effect associated with the Holocaust. Because the state of Israel was founded in response to the Nazi genocide, it is harder to accept that the Israeli government in turn would commit genocide. One obviously does not preclude the other, but Israel benefits from the cognitive dissonance.

One would have hoped that a history of genocidal victimhood would yield an appreciation for human rights standards that prohibit oppression, but some leaders seem to have drawn the opposite lesson. They interpret the vow “never again” to mean that anything goes in the name of preventing renewed persecution, even the commission of mass atrocities. Indeed, they weaponize the genocidal past to suppress criticism of their current atrocities.

That was the experience in Rwanda. The genocidal slaughter of some 800,000 Tutsis in 1994 was stopped by the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front, an exile rebel group based in neighboring Uganda. Under the military leadership of Paul Kagame, who went on to become Rwanda’s long-serving president, the RPF executed some 30,000 Rwandans during and immediately after the genocide.

Kagame’s government went on to repeatedly invade neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), ostensibly to chase remnants of the genocidal forces that had fled there but, these days, mainly to capitalize on Congo’s mineral wealth. An estimated 6 million Congolese have died from the violence and resulting humanitarian crises. Meanwhile, the Rwandan government imprisons critics on the spurious grounds that they are promoting a vaguely defined “genocide ideology”.

The Israeli government has followed a similar logic, using increasingly brutal means to crush any perceived threat. Like Kagame, Benjamin Netanyahu and his predecessors have used ostensible self-defense as a pretext for a land grab. Israeli settlements have gradually cannibalized large portions of the occupied West Bank, and the prime minister is now threatening to forcibly deport 2 million Palestinians from Gaza. Meanwhile, the government and its partisans dismiss critics as “

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