Eighty years ago today, a liberation took place at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp in southern Poland. Soviet troops arrived to free the survivors, but by then, over 1 million people — the vast majority of them Jews — had already been murdered in the camp.

In the aftermath of World War II, Western leaders vowed to prevent genocide from ever occurring again. Yet today, we see the term weaponized and diluted, casually applied in ways that defy its legal and historical gravity. This misuse dishonors the memory of Holocaust victims, undermines international law and diverts attention from contemporary genocides — the very crimes the world swore to confront.

This week, as I stand at Auschwitz to mark 80 years since its liberation, I am reminded of our collective duty to honor the memory of the victims by resisting the degradation of the term “genocide.” Bodies like the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, and organizations such as Amnesty International must stop politicizing and redefining this critical term, specifically in ways that distort its meaning to denigrate the state of Israel.

Since Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel and the terror group have been at war. In Gaza, Hamas has exploited humanitarian zones and U.N. infrastructure to maximize civilian casualties and stoke global outrage. This strategy has succeeded — and accusations of genocide against Israel have grown deafening.

​​​In a bitter twist of irony, some of the most vocal anti-Israel protesters who invoke the Holocaust to condemn Israel often indulge in genocidal rhetoric themselves, chanting slogans like “From the river to the sea,” which calls for the elimination of the Jewish state.

The word genocide was

© The Hill