“Genocidaire: A Twilight Zone Episode”

It was backstage after a show in Minneapolis that I had an hour to speak with a friend. He’s a reader of my Substack, and we quickly got around to the subject of Israel and Jews. We first talked about how a plurality of younger Jews, mostly those who, perhaps for lack of Jewish education and Jewish observance, have come to be aligned with Israel’s antagonists. Either way, imagine being a young Jewish high school student who supports Israel. It would be as if she were a Nazi or Ku Klux Klan supporter.

He then brought up the idea that the false genocide charge against Israel and its supporters resembles the way Jews were first dehumanized by the Nazis in the years leading up to the Shoah. “Traitors.” “Pornographers.” “Fifth column.” “Responsible for Germany’s defeat in World War I.” And then, “scum and vermin.” Like a thick coat of dark grey paint, these were the 1930s version of today’s words now being used to paint Israel.

It’s human nature that those seeking reasons for their failures, whether governmental or personal, will be receptive to scapegoating others. And when the label is applied so vigorously that people come to see it as fact, those being labeled are more easily seen as inhuman, deserving of whatever punishment comes their way.

It’s fascinating to me that the Jews have once again become the choice of scapegoat-hungry consumers everywhere. You’ll hear it’s not the Jews, it’s only the Jewish state.

Right. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say, Peter, why do you constantly conflate Israel with Jews? One is a religion, the other is a country!

In junior high my friends and I would simply reply with “duh” to a statement like that, one that completely misses the point. The country in question is home to half the world’s Jewish population.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” where the entire world believes that the water is sand and sand is water. And I’m the only one who knows how insane that is. Today, the charge is genocide.

Let’s understand the implications of that accusation. If a person, a nation, or a supporter of a nation is responsible for genocide, they are morally fit for elimination. That’s how strong it is.

Jewish institutions in America now spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on security. Jewish day schools have watched their security costs double since October 7th. Reinforced doors, bulletproof glass. Most institutions have armed guard posted at the entrances and security protocol reviews are commonplace. As the genocide charge has grown louder and more common, so has the price of just showing up to pray.

That these things have become part of ordinary Jewish life in America also feels like an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

I won’t turn this brief essay into a refutation of the genocide charge, although a few things merit mentioning. Throughout the war, even as kidnapped victims were still being held and tortured, Israel continued to supply water and electricity. It facilitated mass polio vaccination campaigns in Gaza and permitted enormous quantities of humanitarian aid to enter.

Remind me, please, what genocidal nation in history did that.

One also wonders how quickly this fact is forgotten: Hamas started this war. When that’s mentioned at all, it tends to get a nod at best. “Okay, I accept that Hamas did some terrible things…but.” Often, it’s not even that.

Here’s my guess, and it’s only a guess. If a proportionally equivalent share of Americans had been murdered and raped, or kidnapped, the way Israelis were on October 7th, would our response have been gentler? Would France’s? Germany’s? Australia’s? In a word: unlikely.

The charge of genocide goes hand in hand with another charge: that Israel willingly created a famine to annihilate Gazan Palestinians. The images and headlines were everywhere. “Israel was starving Gaza.” “Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war.” “Israel was deliberately starving children.”

In August of 2025, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, working with UN agencies including UNICEF, declared famine in Gaza Governorate. UNICEF reported that more than 12,000 children had been identified as acutely malnourished in July alone, and projected tens of thousands of severe cases by the following June. The famine became evidence for the genocide charge. The numbers went around the world, repeated at demonstrations and taught on campuses as settled fact.

Now we have some new information. Between the end of May and the middle of June of this year, UNICEF coordinated the first population-based SMART nutrition survey of its kind in Gaza. Researchers measured 1,335 children under five in accessible areas containing roughly 83 percent of Gaza’s population. The rate of acute malnutrition they found was 1.3 percent. The IPC subsequently classified acute malnutrition in the areas it analyzed as “Acceptable,” its lowest category.

UNICEF hasn’t entirely walked back the earlier famine finding. It says the ceasefire and the aid that followed explain the turnaround. Maybe so. Today, nobody seems to mention that Hamas, by many credible accounts, survived economically on aid it had stolen, aid intended for Gazan citizens. That’s a significant omission.

But more than numbers, it’s the photos that tell the story. A New York Times front-page photograph of an eighteen-month-old boy named Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq went around the world as a portrait of starvation caused by Israel. The photo itself was beautifully rendered, almost biblical in its sorrow. As has happened many times in this conflict, the paper of record later added an editors’ note disclosing that the child had preexisting health issues affecting his brain and muscle development. These were considered by some to be small details. I can only imagine the conversation: …let’s not get bogged down by the medical stuff.

Headline: Israel is starving children. It reached hundreds of millions of people in one fell swoop. It definitely captured my attention. The update, however, reached a fraction of that audience. It also helped convict Israel in the court of world opinion.

As my friend had mentioned, once an accusation this explosive becomes accepted as fact, it changes the moral status of the accused. Israelis become genocidaires. Zionists become supporters of genocide. Jews who support Israel become apologists for genocide.

When the accusation is as widespread as it’s now become, it can be morally acceptable to hate a Jew with a kippah just for standing in line at Starbucks. Voila! That’s a successful hate campaign if there ever was one.

The Nazis weren’t, let’s say, my favorite folks, but they weren’t stupid. They knew how to convince ordinary Germans that Jews were evil enough to make murdering them seem necessary. They had their words for us.

Today there are different ones. “Genocidaire” is the most dangerous one of all.

Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author.