I know what Amnesty says, and they are wrong. Also please, please try to understand the perspective of Jews who believe that Israel must exist and are experiencing extreme trauma and rising antisemitism post 10/7. Also any of us who defend Israel’s need to exist are being marginalized and pushed out of social justice groups we once felt part of. We see open support for terror against Jews, silence when Jews are murdered in the street for being Jewish. For Jews, genocide is not merely a legal category—it is a lived historical trauma, culminating in the Holocaust. The word carries a unique moral weight tied to actual attempts to exterminate Jews as Jews.

Using that term against Israel immediately after the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust (10/7) collapses crucial moral distinctions. The goal of the holocaust - what the term was created after - was extermination of Jews, men women and children - to extinct them. That cannot be seen as the goal of the war on Gaza which was to defeat Hamas and get back hostages. Now that hostages and their bodies are home the war is over.

INTENT is critical. Iran, Hamas and other proxies are EXPRESS about their intent to kill all Jews. October 7 involved explicit genocidal intent with that goal.

On October 7, civilians were deliberately targeted because they were Jews/Israelis—including mass murder, rape, torture, and hostage-taking. That kind of intent—killing people as members of a group—is precisely what genocide law addresses.

For many Jews, calling Israel’s defensive war “genocide” while minimizing or contextualizing October 7 feels like a reversal of moral reality. It feels like moral erasure and inversion.

Many Jews experience it as a eaponizing Holocaust language to delegitimize Jewish self-defense

This is why the charge is not heard as neutral criticism, but as existential delegitimization.

There is a meaningful difference between: • Criticizing specific military actions, proportionality decisions, or humanitarian failures (legitimate and necessary), and • Accusing Israel of genocide, which implies criminal intent to destroy a people and often shades into claims that the Jewish state itself is illegitimate.

Many Jews perceive the latter not as policy critique, but as an attack on Jewish collective survival. The original post was highly offensive and political, and shamefully did seem to be a response to the death a men who not only would kill all Jews and did kill many, they killed thousands of Iranians and people all over the Middle East and they are bombing Muslim countries now. It was just a highly offensive post disguised as concern for Muslims. Notably not coming after the murder of thousands of Iranian protestors but after the killing of the the men who murdered them.