October 7th as genocide

Recognizing October 7th as a genocide has advantages beyond the fact that it plainly meets the legal criteria, as Avraham Shalev has shown with precision. It also addresses a deeper ideological distortion. Antizionists often argue that Holocaust memory has overdetermined the…

— Adam Louis-Klein (@adam_louis52328) August 21, 2025

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Recognizing October 7th as a genocide has advantages beyond the fact that it plainly meets the legal criteria, as Avraham Shalev has shown with precision. It also addresses a deeper ideological distortion. Antizionists often argue that Holocaust memory has overdetermined the concept of genocide, such that all genocides must resemble it—ignoring the basic legal principle that case law develops from paradigmatic precedents. In many ways, October 7th was a genocide that didn’t look like the Holocaust, but it was still a genocide, and the victims were still Jews.

Hamas lacked the power, control, and industrial methods of their Nazi predecessors. But their intent—racialized, delusional, and exterminatory—was no less extreme. Their hatred of Jews reached levels of dehumanization and genocidal fantasy fully comparable to Nazi ideology. That this occurred within the context of a “political conflict” does not mitigate it. It simply makes the genocidal nature of their actions more ideologically inconvenient for those who seek to justify anti-Jewish violence. And this time, Jews were able to defend themselves against annihilation (to antizionists’ chagrin).

At this level, the link claimed by scholars like Dirk Moses—between the Holocaust as paradigm and Jews as exceptionalized victims—breaks down. Jews were the victims of a second genocide. Not because the Holocaust was exceptional, but because it helped found a universal legal and moral framework—developed through case law—in which the genocide of any people is condemned, including Jews.

What antizionists ultimately cannot accept is not Jewish exceptionalism, but a universal moral principle: that racial hatred of Jews, like the racial hatred of any people, is wrong. That principle does not single Jews out but includes them. And in denying that inclusion, it is antizionists who reveal themselves as the true exceptionalists: insisting that Jews alone must be excluded from the protections afforded to all other peoples. They project the charge of exceptionalism onto Jews, when in fact it is their own discriminatory framework that treats Jews as the one people unworthy of universal norms.