I consider myself an expert on antisemitism based on lifelong lived experience dating back to my childhood. Throughout my life I have been the target of over 2 dozen antisemitic incidents beyond simple microaggressions which themselves have always been plenty.

In Grade 7 my parents pulled me out of a Winnipeg junior high school after fellow students screamed at me that “we burn Jews here”. I have heard more “f—cking Jew” that I can count. I have been physically threatened, chased down the street, prevented under threat from leaving an acquaintance’s apartment and ostracized by a group of nurses during medical school in Winnipeg because “you wear expensive shirts”, all because I am Jewish. Like many Jews I had relatives killed in pogroms and in the Holocaust. And I have read obsessively about antisemitism.

The accusation of genocide against Israel sets off existential alerts of antisemitism in my soul, bones and guts. The genocide charge brings back a lifelong apprehension and fears of danger simply for being Jewish. I know antisemitism when I see it.

Gaza has endured a cataclysmic catastrophe and unimaginable horrors. You would have to be cold blooded or have a heart of stone for the conscience not to be shocked by the tens of thousands of innocent Gaza children and citizens who have been seriously inured or who have died during the war. The images are horrifying. But emotional reactions do not define genocide.

Israel’s actions in Gaza have led to the political charges of genocide against Israel and have drawn comparisons and parallels to the Holocaust. The accusations of genocide have been led by Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories since May 2022. Albanese who claimed to be a lawyer, and specifically a human rights lawyer but has never in fact been either, reposted an image comparing Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler. She has compared the Israeli war against Hamas to the Third Reich.

Dr. Omer Bartov, an Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University and former Israel Defense Forces member, in accusing Israel of genocide wrote in the New York Times on July 15 2025 that “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It”. Bartov may well thinks he knows and sees genocide. Many Jewish community members in Canada and the Diaspora grew up with antisemitism, experiences apparently unknown to Bartov and when they hear genocide “they know antisemitism when they see it.”

Recently perpetrators of the charge of genocide have been relying on a finding of genocide by the impressively named International Association of Genocide Scholars. This is a group which numbered about 500 individuals at the time it passed a resolution in August 2025 condemning Israel for committing genocide. 86% of those who participated in the vote, representing 28% of the membership at the time, voted in favor.

The IAGS is not a bona fide scholarly organization. As its website states, its members are “academic scholars, human rights activists, students, museum and memorial professionals, policymakers, educators, anthropologists, independent scholars, sociologists, artists, political scientists, economists, historians, international law scholars, psychologists, and literature and film scholars.” In other words, anyone can join, and no criteria need be met attesting to expertise in genocide.

So, their vote was no more than a straw poll of self-appointed individuals who were on a political mission. Not surprisingly, after being widely misrepresented as expert opinion, their straw poll has been turned into worldwide propaganda.

Anti Israel actors are also relying on a finding of genocide in September 2025 by a United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The Commission was established by the United Nations Human Rights Council.

In 2025 the UNHRC’s membership included such stalwart defenders of human rights including Qatar, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cuba and Ethiopia. The UNHRC has passed more resolutions condemning Israel and established more commissions of inquiry about Israel than all other nations combined. Israel and only Israel is a permanent agenda item at its meetings. The UNHRC is so brazenly biased that its findings are wholly unreliable and have no credibility.

Not be out done, last year, Médecins Sans Frontières Canada or Doctors Without Borders published full page ads in major Canadian newspapers accusing Israel of genocide, Israel only. This while a bona fide genocide was unfolding in Sudan, where the worst humanitarian crisis in the world is ongoing. No full-page ads for the victims of genocide in Sudan, just selective outrage by MSF.

The IAGS and UNHRC and others place the Israeli government’s conduct in the same category as the Holocaust with the Nazi regime’s mass cross border deportations of Jews, slave labour camps and subcamps, medical experiments, brothels and gassing up to 15,000 Jews a day. Such equivalency diminishes, trivializes and makes the Holocaust ordinary and hence is ipso facto antisemitic.

The term genocide arose directly out of the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were murdered industrially with explicit intent. Their victimhood in the Holocaust, which was the genesis of the United Nations 1951 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, is now being turned against them. In the case of the Gaza genocide charge, the Jews stand accused of perpetrating the same crimes against Palestinians as the Jews themselves endured during the Holocaust, adding another layer to the antisemitic envelope of genocide accusations.

The accusations of genocide are meant to cast Israel as an illegitimate, unlawful, illegal and rogue state. They are intended to lead to the dismantling or taking down of the only Jewish country imperiling the lives of over 7 million Jewish Israelis. They are also intended to deeply hurt the Jewish community, maim the Jewish psyche  and to denigrate the most traumatic event in Jewish history.

In the Diaspora the charge of genocide has become personal and implicates and endangers all Jews everywhere. Jews who remain “silent” about the alleged genocide are accused of being complicit and being “genocidists”. They are accosted on the streets with screams of “murderers” and “baby killers”. They have been physically assaulted for being supposed supporters of genocide.

In Canada, synagogues have been graffitied, vandalized, shot with bullets and firebombed. Arson has been committed at Jewish businesses; protests have been held outside buildings that house Jewish Holocaust survivors and in one case outside a residence for Jewish children with special needs. Police guard Jewish day schools, synagogues and community centers.

In a December 17 editorial The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, pronounced on the definition of antisemitism. It included “…mak(ing) unproven assertions of genocide…” along with “regular rallies that demand the eradication of Israel…” and “thirst for a global intifada” as “antisemitic and “clear(ing) a path for violence.”

In Canada the federal New Democratic Party (with a few scattered Liberal Party of Canada members) has led the charge of genocide accusations and other rhetoric against Israel. It was initiated as official NDP policy by then leader Jagmeet Singh during the federal election debates in April.

The NDP’s public position on the purported genocide in Gaza meets one element of the Globe’s definition of antisemitism, “…mak(ing) unproven assertions of genocide…” It is the only major political party which through its accusation of genocide is contributing to animus against Jewish peoplehood.

The unconstrained global slick of many academics, professional associations and unions, non-governmental organizations, country leaders and the United Nations accusing Israel of committing genocide, does not make it true. It does not matter to these accusers that in April 2024 Joan O’Donoghue, president of the International Court of Justice when it made its order in South Africa’s case alleging Israel is committing genocide, confirmed that the ICJ “did not decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.” She said that “this is something where I’m correcting something that’s often said in the media.”

The ICJ did not find that Israel had or has the specific intention or “dolus specialis” as the United Nations puts it, to …”to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

The label of genocide approaches in potential the accusation of deicide, the killing of Jesus by Jews, also held to be a universal truth and lasting for 2 thousand years. Countless massacres of Jews were perpetrated over the centuries because of the myth of deicide. The pronouncements and belief that Israel is committing genocide are permissive and inevitably lead to the attacks on Jews everywhere and in some cases murder.

Antisemitism permeates all domains of the genocide charge. Jewish Canadians alone cannot halt and reverse this calumny against Israel and Jews. It needs to come from the political and intellectual class, the unions and churches, human rights organizations and academics.

None of this requires a cessation of criticizing policies of the Israeli government, the settlements, the differential treatment of Arab citizens in Israel, how Israel prosecuted the war or even simply describing and documenting the devastation in Gaza. It does require protecting Jewish Canadians from the hatred and violence that has arisen directly from the genocide charge. A good start would be to cease making the unproven allegation of genocide.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)