Prior to the Hamas attacks of October 7, the term “genocide” literally meaning the destruc­tion of a race, held a position as the gravest crime a state can commit. It meant Rwanda, Srebren­ica, and of course, the destruc­tion of the European Jews.

The study of genocide has been critical to our under­stand­ing of the dark impulses of man to destroy and of the power of pro­pa­ganda. It equipped us with and an ability to detect and com­pre­hend the process of mass killing, iden­ti­fic­a­tion, legal exclusion, physical sep­ar­a­tion and ulti­mately anni­hil­a­tion.

The delib­er­ate assault on language in order to erase what it rep­res­ents has a long and sordid history in the anti-Israel movement and inter­sects closely with the dou­blespeak and dis­in­form­a­tion mastered by the Soviet Union.

November 10 will be the 50^th anniversary of a moment of great infamy, the passage of United Nations General Assembly Res­ol­u­tion 3379, which determ­ined that “Zionism is a form of racism and dis­crim­in­a­tion.” The US Ambas­sad­or to the United Nations Patrick Moynihan called the res­ol­u­tion “a great evil” that had given “the abom­in­a­tion of antisemitism the appear­ance of inter­na­tion­al sanction.” The adoption of the res­ol­u­tion, even­tu­ally repealed in 1991, per­man­ently stained the United Nations and created a blueprint of deceit and manip­u­la­tion that would become the currency of the political campaign to dismantle the Jewish homeland.

It started innoc­u­ously enough, within a stale sub-com­mis­sion of the United Nations that had been tasked with drafting a con­ven­tion on the “elim­in­a­tion of all forms of racial dis­crim­in­a­tion.” The pro­ceed­ings naturally focused on apartheid in South Africa, rising neo-Nazism and antisemitism.

The Soviets viewed the reference to antisemitism as a personal rebuke from the West which had long objected to the state per­se­cu­tion of Soviet Jews, including through bans on Jews entering certain pro­fes­sions, entry quotas into uni­ver­sit­ies, the ban on religious observ­ance and Hebrew or Yiddish language pub­lic­a­tions, a privilege afforded to other minor­it­ies in the Soviet realm but denied to the Jews.

Angered by what they were sure was American meddling in internal Soviet matters, the Russians served up an amendment that “was almost a joke,” as one member of the Soviet del­eg­a­tion put it.

The amendment inserted Zionism into the listed forms of racism. According to sources close to the delib­er­a­tions, the Soviets under­stood “full well that the idea that Zionism is racism is an indefens­ible position,” yet they floated it anyway, in part to turn the US-led ini­ti­at­ive into farce, and in part perhaps, to see whether the Communist Party talent for turning a lie into an incon­tro­vert­ible truth could be exported globally.

As they so often do, the western del­eg­a­tions backed down. They agreed to remove any reference to antisemitism, and the Soviets in turn withdrew their addition of Zionism. But the seed had been planted and a decade later, with the support of the Soviet Union and the non-demo­crat­ic nations of the world, the notorious “Zionism is racism” res­ol­u­tion was passed.

US Ambas­sad­or Moynihan correctly predicted that the res­ol­u­tion would do irre­par­able harm to the Jewish people, to the United Nations, and to the cause of fighting racism.

“The harm will arise first because it will strip from racism the precise and abhorrent meaning that it still pre­cari­ously holds today. How will the peoples of the world feel about racism, and about the need to struggle against it, when they are told that it is an idea so broad as to include the Jewish national lib­er­a­tion movement?”

With racism now stripped of its objective meaning, anyone could be labelled a racist and face the con­sequences.

Anti-Israel activists promptly got to work, using the General Assembly res­ol­u­tion to harass Jews in western insti­tu­tions.

In 1977, student unions across Britain debated motions along the lines of Res­ol­u­tion 3379. York, Salford, Warwick and Lancaster went further, passing motions to expel their Jewish societies “on the grounds that they are Zionist and therefore racist.”

The legacy of this remains with us today. The chant of “all Zionists are ter­ror­ists” is a mainstay of local anti-Israel protests. The pejor­at­ive term “Zio”, first coined by the Klansman David Duke, then pop­ular­ised by sup­port­ers of Jeremy Corbyn, and now deeply embedded in pro-Palestini­an discourse, is now the “yid” or “kike” of our time, delivered with the same gen­er­al­ity and snick­er­ing revulsion.

The “genocide” slur came about in almost the identical way. In 1976, just a year after the General Assembly had branded the concept of Jewish statehood as racism, the Soviet Union accused Israel of “racial genocide” against the Palestini­ans. The accus­a­tion ostens­ibly came in response to Israeli crack­downs in the West Bank, which left six Palestini­ans dead during a period of severely escal­at­ing terror by the Palestine Lib­er­a­tion Organ­iz­a­tion, including the hijacking of inter­na­tion­al flights and the taking of Israeli civilians hostage at the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv.

The Soviets had again used the United Nations to assail the West and strip another grave term of all truth and value. If Zionism was racism, then everything is racist. If Gaza is a genocide, then all war is genocide.

It came as no surprise that when Israel launched its response to the horrors of October 7, it was once again accused of the crime of crimes.

This time, the South African Gov­ern­ment led a push in the Inter­na­tion­al Court of Justice, to again associate Israel with genocide. South Africa’s gov­ern­ment had long main­tained cordial relations with Hamas, even following its violent ouster of Palestini­an rivals from Gaza in 2007. Senior Hamas leaders were welcomed in South Africa in 2015 for the signing of a letter of intent aimed at strength­en­ing ties between the African National Congress and Hamas. Ismail Haniyeh, assas­sin­ated by Israel in Tehran in July 2024, had spoken to the South African foreign minister just ten days after the October 7 attacks.

While the interim ruling of the ICJ merely upheld the pro­pos­i­tion that Palestini­ans had a right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had a right to present that claim to the Court, the mere linkage of Israel with the term, was suf­fi­cient to legit­im­ise the claim and set off a wave of media mis­re­port­ing that Israel had been found guilty of the crime.

Ed Husic ref­er­enced the ICJ and asserted that “there is a plausible case of genocide right now in Gaza.” Greens Senator Dave Shoebridge declared that the ICJ “found it plausible that Israel’s acts could amount to genocide.”

The fact that the ICJ said no such thing and the judge who presided over the pro­ceed­ings, Joan Donoghue, herself publicly stated that the court “didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible,” evidently made no dif­fer­ence to those intent on making the accus­a­tion.

When a three-member United Nations Com­mis­sion of Inquiry initiated by the Arab and Islamic states following an earlier war between Israel and Hamas in 2021, accused Israel of genocide once more, it was widely reported, including by the BBC, that the United Nations, as a whole, had found Israel guilty of genocide. The fact that each of three com­mis­sion­ers had long expressed hostility towards Israel, including calls for sanctions and accus­a­tions of apartheid, clear biases that should have resulted in their exclusion, was of course nowhere to be seen in the reporting.

While it is tempting to file these injustices away as yet more evidence of UN follies, as the “Zionism is racism” exper­i­ence shows us, there will be real life con­sequences. A new gen­er­a­tion is being inducted into a view of Israel as a rogue, an outlier, a state that will commit crimes that others wouldn’t dream of, an irre­deem­ably evil and cor­rupt­ing presence in the family of nations. This is why campaigns for Israel’s exclusion from song contests and inter­na­tion­al sports, and the United Nations itself, are now com­mon­place.

No state has been accused of delib­er­ately killing children with greater frequency or relish than Israel, despite far higher civilian death tolls in recent wars in Africa and the Middle East and far greater ratios of civilian to combatant cas­u­al­ties in western campaigns in Iraq.

The ABC’s John Lyons has repeatedly spoken of “Israel killing a classroom of children a day.” We will never know how many classrooms of Israeli children were left orphaned on October 7 or how many classrooms of children US and British soldiers killed battling ISIS in Mosul or Fallujah because Lyons reserves the metric for Israel and no one else.

All this has created an envir­on­ment in which anyone can say anything about Israel, level any accus­a­tion no matter how out­rageous or untenable, and face no con­sequence.

The veteran journ­al­ist Phillip Adams recently posted that “7000 Jews died in the Warsaw Ghetto. 68,000 Palestini­an have died in Gaza.” Bob Carr repeatedly likened mal­nu­tri­tion in Gaza to Stalin’s expro­pri­ation of Ukrainian peasant farmers which caused a mass famine in which upwards of five million people starved to death. The American activist/journalist Chris Hedges defended Hamas’s atro­cit­ies on October 7, likening them to the escape of Jewish inmates from the Sobibor death camp.

Each claim is easily debunked. But the mere exercise of dis­en­tangling the true events of the Ukrainian famine or the Sobibor purpose-built killing factory or the history of the 450,000 Polish Jews crammed into the Warsaw Ghetto, starved, sickened and then gassed in Treblinka, serves to entrench the asso­ci­ation, it suggests a credible accus­a­tion has been levelled, or why else would one seek to mount a defence.

And so it has always been. The Jews have had to defend the charge of deicide, now they are forced to defend against genocide. They have defended the claim of ritual murder of children, now they must respond to claims of delib­er­ately killing them by the classroom.

They cannot win no matter how con­vin­cing their defence. Yet they cannot sit idle either. The cost is not only in the indoc­trin­a­tion of fresh masses into antisemitism, the suc­cess­ful trans­mis­sion of a visceral hatred or suspicion of the Jews to yet another gen­er­a­tion. The cost is ulti­mately felt in the degrading of language and therefore the destruc­tion of what those words represent.

The unsaid purpose of this assault on language and history is to erase those parts of history which are incon­veni­ent or fail to conform to an ideology or narrative.

The Holocaust, among other things, demon­strated the complete vul­ner­ab­il­ity of Jews living without a sovereign homeland. It follows that if the Holocaust can be erased, or at least dis­figured and van­dal­ised to the point that Gaza is the Warsaw Ghetto and the West Bank is Sobibor, one need not study the Holocaust, much less feel empathy or under­stand­ing towards Jews wishing to live in their own lands.

This is why a pro-Palestini­an activist graf­fit­ied the words “Free Gaza and Palestine” on a wall of the Warsaw Ghetto in 2012. It is a sleight of hand to misdirect the gaze from the incon­veni­ent crimes of the Holocaust to the Palestini­an issue. This is why Mahmoud Abbas, in 2022, accused Israel of com­mit­ting “50 Holo­causts”.

This process of dis­place­ment and erasure was imma­turely displayed by the journ­al­ist Catherine Nay, who upon seeing the image of a Palestini­an man and his son caught in the cross-fire between Hamas fighters and Israeli soldiers during the Second Intifada, declared that the image of the Palestini­an boy, “cancels, erases that of the Jewish child, his hands in the air before the SS in the Warsaw Ghetto.” The photo to which Nay refers is one of the iconic images of the Holocaust and shows a terrified boy with arms raised up in surrender, standing at the head of a line of women and children captured during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, being led to deport­a­tion to a death camp.

Whatever Nay may have felt about the innocent Palestini­an child, her declar­a­tion of its “can­cel­la­tion” of the Jewish boy in Warsaw is fas­cin­at­ing. Why did one need to erase the other? Why could she not hold both images in her mind and in her sym­path­ies. It is because she craved to free herself from the incon­veni­ence of residual under­stand­ing or basic concern for the Jews. The Palestini­ans were the Jews now. And that makes the Jews Nazis.

It is impossible to prevent the United Nations from convening its com­mis­sions of inquiry with its pre­de­ter­mined findings. It is impossible to prevent Greens senators from per­petu­at­ing false­hoods. What else would they do with their time? And it is impossible to prevent activist journ­al­ists from punching out distilled ignorance on their iPhones.

What is possible is to challenge and hold indi­vidu­als to account for the harm they wilfully cause.

And what is essential is to fill the minds of Aus­trali­ans with real knowledge and real facts, a real command of history and an under­stand­ing of language. Only knowledge can ward off pro­pa­ganda. This is why our Holocaust centres have never been more vital. They preserve history as it occurred. They record testi­mon­ies that no shouted slogan or graf­fit­ied slur can diminish. And they ensure that all who come through its doors leave with the ability to under­stand what happens to a society, to great nations, when the ability to reason, to recognise true evil, is lost.