When I first started referring to Israel’s systematic assault on the civilian population and infrastructure in Gaza as a “genocide”, back in November of 2023, I faced a great deal of pushback from readers more familiar with my work in the health freedom movement than on US foreign policy.
Within my networks in the health freedom community, and by many of my own newsletter subscribers, I was accused of “anti-Semitism”, an ad hominem attack viewed by my accusers as a sufficient subsitute for any kind of reasoned response.
I’d grown accustomated to that accusation after decades of criticizing the US government’s support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, including in my definitive treatise on the subject, Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Some did try to produce arguments to defend Israel’s actions, but for the most part, the response to what was happening within the health freedom community was silence. In my own networks, I was among a handful of individuals willing to speak out.
Many probably just felt insufficiently knowledable to express an opinion, which is a position I can understand and respect. Too many people are far too eager to express opinions on matters they now next to nothing about. And as I always say, most of what people think they know about the Israel-Palestine conflict just isn’t true.
But there is one reason for the silence in particular I found particularly widespread: people simply did not want to take a position contrary to that of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. while he was campaigning to get into a position of government power.
Because of his fervent support for Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, I withdrew my support for his presidential candidacy in November 2023. After he ended his campaign to join forces with Donald Trump, launching “MAHA™ (Make America Healthy Again) as a subsect of “MAGA” (Make America Great Again), I warned that Trump, like Biden, would support Israel’s genocide (and warmonger against Iran); and I warned my fellow health freedom advocates that the community was facing the choice of whether we believe that all children’s lives matter, or not.
I expressed my view that dead Palestinian children were not a price worth paying to get RFK, Jr. into government. And, yes, a Harris admininstration would have continued Biden’s support for the genocide, too—which was likewise a sufficient reason for nobody to vote for her, either.
I maintained that there are certain positions that ought to automatically disqualify any candidate from our consideration, no matter how great they may be on every other issue, and that genocide is certainly one of them.
Mine was not a popular position, but it needed to be said. Sadly, very few wanted to listen.
Unfortunately, my warning came true. After entering the White House for a second term, Trump literally encouraged Israel to violate a ceasefire that Hamas was honoring and to “unleash hell” on Gaza.
And Trump has not only continued the warmongering against Iran; Jointly with Israel, and on false pretexts, he has launched a war of aggression against Iran, defined at Nuremberg as “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”.
Over time, as the death and destruction in Gaza raged on, the voices trying to defend it became fewer and fewer. It was just too hard to continue denying that the definition of genocide under international law has been met.
It became too hard to deny Israel’s intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza as a people, in whole or in part, including by:
- Killing members of the group
- Causing seriously bodily or mental harm to members of the group
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
On December 29, 2023, the government of South Africa filed an application instituting proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Israel of violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention).
The genocidal intent, South Africa argued, was properly inferred “from the nature and conduct of Israel’s military operation in Gaza”, including the declared policy of collectively punishing the civilian population by denying them access to “food, water, medicine, fuel, shelter and other humanitarian assistance”—goods and services necessary for their survival.
It was properly inferred as well by the inherently indiscriminate nature of Israel’s attacks, including the systematic targeting of Gaza’s health care system, and the massive death toll.
It was inferred by the words that were put into action to render Gaza uninhabitable.
South Africa’s application included several pages of statements from Israeli leaders expressing clearly genocidal intent.
On January 11, 2024, South Africa presented its oral argument for why Israel’s actions constituted violations of the Genocide Convention, urging the ICJ to issue preliminary measures ordering Israel to take actions to comply with its obligations under the Convention.
The ICJ did not have to wait until a final judgment was rendered on the question of whether Israel was committing genocide, South Africa argued. A sufficient grounds for preliminary measures was that a plausible case had been made that Israel was committing genocidal acts.
South Africa sought to preserve the human rights protected under the Convention through the measures requested—principally, their “right to exist”. As argued,
As well established in the Court’s jurisprudence, and most recently in this Court’s decision in The Gambia case, for the Court to exercise its power to indicate provisional measures, the rights claimed by South Africa on the merits—and for which it is seeking protection—must be “at least plausible”.
This threshold does not require the Court to “determine definitively whether the rights which [South Africa] wishes to see protected exist”.
… For the purposes of the indication of provisional measures, the rights asserted by South Africa under the Genocide Convention and their protection corresponds with the very object and purpose of the Convention. Based on the materials before the Court, the acts by Israel complained of are capable of being characterized as at least plausibly genocidal.
On January 26, having found South Africa’s argument persuasive, the ICJ acceeded to the request and issued provisional measures, ordering Israel to take actions to demonstrate its compliance with the Genocide Convention, including ceasing indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure and allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza on the scale required to meet the population’s needs.
In other words, the ICJ assessed that Israel was perpetrating a plausible genocide.
Violating its obligations as a member of the United Nations, also, Israel ignored the ICJ’s order.
On February 12, after Israel had declared its intent to invade Rafah, the last area in Gaza where Israel had ordered civilians to flee and they could get at least some access to humanitarian aid and medical care, South Africa submitted a request for additional provisional measures.
Four days later, the ICJ issued its decision, stating that it did not need to issue any additional provisional measures; it was rather required that Israel implement those measures already ordered to prevent an expontential increase in what was already “a humanitarian nightmare”, as it had been appropriately described by UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
On March 6, after Palestinian children had started dying from hunger and malnutrition, another request for provisional measures was submitted.
The ICJ complied, issuing additional measures on March 28 in light of “the spread of famine and starvation”, which required Israel to open the crossings and allow in humanitarian aid at full capacity.
Israel began its assault on Rafah on May 7, and three days later, additional provisional measures were requested. As South Africa noted,
Rafah is the last population centre in Gaza that has not been substantially destroyed by Israel and as such the last refuge for Palestinians in Gaza. Not only is there nowhere for the 1.5 million displaced people and others in Rafah safely to flee to — so much of Gaza having been reduced to rubble — if Rafah is similarly destroyed there will be little left of Gaza or of the prospects for the survival of Palestinian life in the territory.
The ICJ responsed on May 24 by issuing the provisional measures and ordering Israel to immediately cease its military assault on Rafah to comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention.
Israel once again ignored the ICJ’s order.
In May 2024, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) also announced that he was seeking arrest warrants for three Hamas officials, all now dead, and two Israeli leaders: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
The warrants were issued in November, with Netanyahu and Gallant being wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
On December 5, 2024, Amnesty International published a report concluding that Israel’s assault on Gaza meets the definition of genocide under international law.
On December 13, 2024, the report of a UN Special Committee mandated to investigate Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinians in the occupied terroritories was released, which concluded that
[T]he policies and practices of Israel during the reporting period are consistent with the characteristics of genocide. The targeting of Palestinians as a group; the life-threatening conditions imposed on Palestinians in Gaza through warfare and restrictions on humanitarian aid—resulting in physical destruction, increased miscarriages and stillbirths—and the killing of and serious bodily or mental harm caused to Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are violations under international law. Civilians have been indiscriminately and disproportionately killed en masse in Gaza, while in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Israeli colonial settlers, military and security personnel have continued to violate human rights and humanitarian law with imputy.
On December 19, 2024, Human Rights Watch issued a report concluding that Israel had been perpetrating the crime of genocide.
The same day, the international humanitarian medical organization Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, issued a report documenting “Israel’s campaign of total destruction” and concluding that “ethnic cleansing and genocide are taking place in Gaza.”
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has received bipartisan support from Washington, DC., with both the Biden administration and the Trump administration also violating the Genocide Convention with their complicity and direct facilitation of this crime against humanity.
Yet still to this day, you will encounter people desperately trying to claim that Israel has done no wrong, that its actions are wholly justified and amount to no violations of international law at all, much less the crime of genocide.
The anti-intellectualism of these Zionist extremists is astonishing.
A standard trope of theirs is that civilians only ever die in Gaza because they’re being used as “human shields”. But this argument employs a euphemistic use of that term bearing no relationship to its definition under international law. [Protocol I additional to the Geneva Conventions, Chapter II, Article 51(7)].
Instead, what is perversely meant by “human shields” is any civilians killed in Gaza by virtue of being in Gaza.
We can get some sense of the indiscriminate nature of Israel’s killing by examining some basic data:
- The reported death toll as of April 15 was 72,344, including 71,444 idividuals whose remains have been identified. [OCHA]
- 30% of identified fatalities have been children.
- 15% have been women.
- 7% have been elderly.
- The reported death toll from Gaza Ministry of Health data is inherently underestimated. [Lancet]
- Only 12.7% of Palestinians killed are estimated to have been combatants, indicating that “there is robust evidence for civilians being an object of war, with civilians identified as the primary focus of the conflict.” [Frontiers in Public Health]
Despite the data, you will still hear the claim that Israel has a civilian-to-combatant “kill ratio” indicating that it has “the most moral army in the world”.
Netanyahu himself has made that argument, claiming that the civilian to combatant ratio (CCR) in Gaza since October 2023 has been 1.5 to 1.
But that is simply a brazen lie. Netanyahu just made it up.
An analysis of the avalable data published in January 2026 by the organization Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) estimated that the true ratio is between 5 to 1 and 8 to 1.
As the authors stated (emphasis added):
“Even a 1 to 1 ratio would signal grave disregard for civilian life, but the ratios observed in Gaza are far worse than those seen in Afghanistan, Iraq or other western-led conflicts. They even exceed crude aggregate ratios derived from the second world war. Using improved methods that correct for systematic bias in the killing of civilian men of combat age, and cross-checked against historical Israeli and independent casualty data, the analysis finds that civilian harm in Gaza is not incidental but structurally extreme. When likely undercounted violent deaths and indirect deaths from starvation and disease are included, the civilian toll rises further, reinforcing the conclusion that Israel’s conduct in Gaza involves widespread and wholly disproportionate civilian loss….”
Disproportionate use of force is, of course, a war crime, and on the scale it has occurred, coupled with wanton destruction aimed at rendering Gaza uninhabitable, it rises to the level of a crime against humanity.
Another argument I have continued to encounter is that the population of Gaza has risen dramatically since 1948, and therefore there’s been no genocide.
But of course, that increase is irrelevant. It doesn’t logically follow that since the population today is much larger than it was in 1948—when Israel was established by ethnically cleansing Palestine of most of its Arab inhabitants—that therefore no genocide has been occurring since 2023.
Some will take that argument a step further and claim the Gaza population has increased since 2023.
However, according to data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), that’s not true. The population in 2023 was estimated to be 2.23 million. It had been projected to increase to 2.41 million by 2026.
Instead, though, the population is most recently estimated to be 2.11 million, “a decrease of 10% from what was estimated for mid 2025.”
That’s an approximate 5.4% decrease in population since 2023 resulting from Israel’s “systemic war of extermination”.
Hence, by the genocide apologists’ own logic, whereby “genocide” is defined as violence causing a decrease in total population, Israel’s violence amounts to a genocide.
But we can set aside that logic since it’s invalid. Even if the population had increased since 2023, it would not logically follow that no genocide has occurred. This is a non sequitur fallacy.
The Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy a people “in whole or in part”, as a people—not by whether the total population declines.
Nothing in the definition suggests that a total population decline is required for a genocide to have occurred. The Zionists’ argument itself simply indicates their own willful ignorance of international law.
Astoundingly, while refusing to acknowledge any violations of international law by Israel in Gaza, its most extreme defenders will claim that Hamas perpetrated genocide on October 7, 2023, with its “Operation Al Aqsa Flood”.
But, again, we can utilize their own fallacious arguments to prove, by their own logic, that the perpetrator of genocide is Israel.
Take the total population argument: the population of Israel was 9.26 million in 2023, and it has increased each year since to stand today at about 9.65 million.
Therefore, by their own argument, Hamas can’t have perpetrated genocidal attacks on 10/7, whereas the reduction in Gaza’s population proves genocide has occurred there.
Take also the “kill ratio” argument. On 10/7, according to AOAV, 1,270 people were killed in Israel, including:
- 816 civilians
- 382 military
- 59 police
- 13 emergency service
An indeterminate number of Israeli civilians were killed by Israeli military forces. [Haaretz / Ynet / The Crade / Electronic Intifada / The Grayzone / UN]
Of course, when Israel kills police in Gaza, it counts them as combatants; and even health care workers and ambulance drivers are characterized as “terrorists”.
But setting aside such improper use of language, for the purposes of this “kill ratio” estimate, there were 888 civilians killed and 382 members of the Israeli military, for a CCR of 2.3 to 1.
As we’e already seen, the same source has estimated a CCR in Gaza between 5 to 1 and 8 to 1.
Therefore, if we accept that Hamas perpetrated a “genocidal” assault in Israel on 10/7 for killing 888 civilians, then it is hard to escape the conclusion, given the incomparably greater number killed by Israel in response and the even more indiscriminate nature of its attacks, means that Israel’s assault on Gaza is also genocidal.
Of course, we can set aside the “kill ratio” argument, too, since it is irrelevant to the actual definition of genocide under international law.
As already noted, Israel has violated the 1948 Genocide Convention by (a) killing Palestinians, (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to Palestinians, (c) deliberately inflicting on Palestinians conditions of life calculated to bring about their physicial destruction in whole or in part, and (d) imposing measures to prevent births—all with the intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza, in whole or in part, as a people.
It is genocide. Don’t let the unhinged Zionist extremists perversely and hypocritically trying to justify this US-supported criminal violence tell you otherwise.
That goes for the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran being waged by religious extremists, too.
Yet another argument I still keep encountering is that Israel had no choice but to commit genocide. What else could Israel have done, the question has repeatedly been put to me, besides what it has done? I’ve consistently responded that Israel could choose not to perpetrate genocide, but, alas, there are those whose minds are so twisted that they persist in justifying even the most heinous crimes against humanity.
And then they have the chutzpah to characterize others as barbarians.
While most early defenders of Israel’s assault on the civilian population of Gaza have ceased their attempts at justification, and Israel’s popularity among Americans has appropriately plummeted, even to this day, I find myself having to remind some individuals in the health freedom community of the following logical truism:
Genocide is not self-defense.
I appeal to all my readers—whether you follow my work for matters of foreign policy or health freedom—to join me in speaking out against the illegal and immoral violence perpetrated and supported by the criminal organization in Washington.
There is a point, after all, where silence becomes complicity.
