Genocide is not a meme, so stop treating it like one.
In 10 years, millions will remember Israel as having committed a genocide it didn’t commit — and forget the genocides that actually did.
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This is a guest essay written by Avi Taranto, a New York-based artist.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
In the long history of human violence, genocide stands out as a uniquely horrifying category.
It is not simply war. It is not insurgency, or resistance, or collateral damage. It is the deliberate attempt to erase a people from existence. And so, when we use the word genocide, we invoke moral gravity of the highest order.
But what happens when the meme of genocide becomes cheapened? What happens when it is misapplied, algorithmically amplified, memetically inflated — used not to clarify truth, but to override it?
The term genocide is a memetic superweapon. Coined in the aftermath of the Holocaust, it carries the power of finality: To be accused of genocide is to be placed outside the circle of humanity. It is an accusation from which no nation easily recovers. It doesn’t simply describe death; it ascribes intent — and that is memetically irreversible.
But, as with any powerful meme, its overuse leads to dilution. Every time “genocide” is applied recklessly or falsely, its ability to mean anything at all is weakened. When every war becomes genocide, then genocide becomes just another word for war.
A meme, like a currency, must be backed by something real. Remove the backing (evidence, proportion, context) and you create the equivalent of moral counterfeit.
The war between Israel and Gaza is being reported — across major news platforms, university protests, and TikTok feeds — as the genocide of our time.
According to recent studies, the term “genocide” has been invoked in reference to Gaza more than all recognized genocides of the past two decades combined, including those in Rwanda, Syria, Darfur, Myanmar, and Xinjiang.
Pause for a moment. That should shock you.
Even if someone believed Israel was acting with excessive force, to leap straight to genocide (while ignoring actual genocides) is a memetic tell. It is not about accurate classification. It is about narrative override.
And override it does. Few bother to verify the numbers. Hamas’ reported death toll of over 54,000 goes largely unquestioned, despite being sourced from the same apparatus that has, for years, exaggerated or outright fabricated figures to shape global perception.
Recent analysis shows that at least 22,000 of the dead were fighters, and thousands more were likely natural deaths included in the total. What this means is staggering: Israel has achieved the lowest ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths in modern warfare history, especially in urban warfare. And yet the memetic narrative insists on the opposite.
This is Malicious Memetic Mimicry (MMM) in action: the mimicry of moral language to produce immoral results. The “genocide” meme here mimics humanitarian concern, but it functions as a weapon of psychological and geopolitical war.
When everything is genocide, nothing is. In a single year, the word has been emptied of its moral power and historical specificity. The Holocaust, the archetype of genocide, is now casually equated to a war Israel did not start and has repeatedly sought to avoid. Once that equivalence sticks, historical literacy collapses.
We are witnessing the manufacture of false memory at scale. In 10 years, millions will remember Israel as having committed a genocide it didn’t commit — and forget the genocides that actually did.
The “genocide” meme spreads because it is emotionally intuitive and structurally simple: good versus evil, oppressor versus oppressed. The West, already preloaded with postcolonial guilt and institutionalized moral relativism, has become a fertile host.
This simplification is not accidental. It is the outcome of narrative compression — a memetic process by which complex realities are flattened into emotionally viral tropes. The actual content is less important than the form: The meme must look like truth, even when it evacuates truth entirely.
And, for a generation trained to respond to optics, hashtags, and algorithms — more than facts or history — the aesthetic of the oppressed trumps the reality of oppression.
This is why Hamas and its global apologists have no need to win militarily. They only need to look like victims. They need children’s bodies. They need rubble. They need shock. Even if they engineer the deaths themselves, they win the war of memes if the world blames Israel.
While Hamas’ soldiers die in war, Jews around the world are attacked in cafes, schools, synagogues, and on the street. Not Israeli soldiers, but Jews. And it’s not because of anything they’ve done. It’s because the meme of “Israel as genocidal” now maps onto all Jews.
This is the logic of blood libel. It is memetically indistinguishable from medieval antisemitism, now cloaked in “anti-Zionism” but functionally the same: Dehumanize Jews, accuse them of child murder, justify punishment.
To call this “progressivism” is obscene. It is regression to the most ancient of hate.
Every time the West allows this narrative to metastasize, it plays into the hands of those who actually oppress and kill civilians at scale: Iran, Russia, China, Syria, North Korea. These regimes cheer when the West eats itself, when its students chant for Hamas, when its media spreads disinformation, when its intellectuals collapse under moral relativism.
They see what we do not: that the meme of “genocide” applied to Israel is not a humanitarian act. It is an act of civilizational sabotage.
There is something uniquely cruel and unmistakably intentional about accusing the descendants of Holocaust survivors of committing genocide. This is not a neutral misclassification. It is not an innocent exaggeration. It is a calculated memetic inversion, designed to sting.
Hamas, and many of its ideological allies, relish this inversion. They understand the psychology of trauma. They exploit it. To turn the Holocaust inside out — casting Israelis as Nazis, Jews as perpetrators — is to desecrate memory while inflicting new pain. It is a form of sadistic moral theater, and it works because it plays to an audience already primed to feel uneasy about Jewish power, Jewish trauma, and Jewish survival.
To accuse Jews of genocide in the shadow of the Holocaust is to strip them of their history, deny them their wounds, and blame them for surviving.
What’s more, the charge of apartheid against Israel has become another memetic staple of the current conflict: easily chantable, superficially resonant, and increasingly untethered from its original historical referent. It is designed to short-circuit discussion, not invite it. And like genocide, it is a term with genuine historical weight, cheapened through repetition until it functions more as a slur than a diagnosis.
The comparison to South African apartheid is not only false; it is maliciously misleading. Apartheid was a legal and territorial system of racial segregation, enforced by a white minority over a disenfranchised Black majority with no political rights or recourse.
By contrast:
Arab citizens of Israel vote, serve in the Knesset, sit on the Supreme Court, work in hospitals, teach in universities, and protest freely.
The West Bank is not sovereign Israeli territory; it is disputed land governed partially by the Palestinian Authority, with a history of failed peace offers and violent rejections.
Gaza has been entirely free from Israel since 2005, and is currently ruled by Hamas, an explicitly antisemitic, theocratic, armed faction that rejects peace.
And yet, the meme persists.
Why? Because apartheid, like genocide, is a memetic wildcard. It offers moral clarity without historical complexity. It gives the user a sense of righteousness without requiring context, nuance, or evidence. It mimics the moral urgency of the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, but its purpose here is not liberation; it is delegitimization.
This is not critique. This is rhetorical sabotage.
And it works. Because once a society is labeled “apartheid,” the normal rules of moral engagement no longer apply. Negotiation becomes appeasement. Defense becomes aggression. Coexistence becomes complicity.
The result is not peace. The result is a license to hate, draped in the language of human rights.
Just as the genocide meme inverts the Holocaust, the apartheid meme inverts the civil rights movement. It is a false analogy propped up by people who would never survive a day under Hamas rule — and yet feel empowered to condemn the only pluralistic democracy in the region as a racist regime.
Like genocide, apartheid was not merely a set of policies; it was a novel racial architecture, rooted in the pseudoscientific eugenics of the early 20th century. It sought not only to separate peoples, but to biologically and culturally justify domination through scientific discourse and bureaucratic precision. Its memetic uniqueness was its legibility — a systematic, codified regime of racial cruelty, unmatched in modern statecraft.
To invoke it casually is to engage in Scientific Malicious Memetic Mimicry: the appropriation of an empirically defined evil to emotionally justify an unrelated, far less clear-cut political agenda.
And perhaps most cynically, the accusation now comes loudest from South Africa itself, the nation that gave apartheid its name. In recent years, the South African government has wielded the apartheid accusation against Israel not as a defense of global justice, but as a domestic pressure valve.
Amid spiraling corruption, state collapse, and public disillusionment with the African National Congress’ post-apartheid failures, the symbolic projection of apartheid onto Israel offers a convenient external enemy.
It reframes South Africa not as a nation struggling under kleptocracy, but as a moral authority reasserting its legacy. Yet, in doing so, it diminishes that very legacy. It dilutes its own historical struggle by using its moral capital not to uplift truth, but to outsource blame.
When asking Western onlookers to resist a seductive moral narrative, a predictable script of deflection emerges: “You have to admit, it’s hell on Earth. Look at the children. Look at the rubble.”
A raw emotional appeal, used to justify memetic inversion.
“Israel is obviously guilty of war crimes tantamount to genocide.”
Translation: We don’t have proof, but it feels close enough.
“That’s just an excuse for Israel to commit atrocities.”
As if Jewish trauma itself were a con — millennia of persecution repackaged as villainy.
“What about Ben-Gvir and Smotrich?”
As if every government is reducible to its worst actors. As if their extremism defines Israeli society, rather than being checked and widely condemned within it.
“What makes you an expert?”
A classic dodge. From those who follow memes, not facts.
Let’s be clear: War is hell. This war, like all wars, has produced horrific suffering. But this war began not in ambiguity, but in massacre — on October 7, 2023 — when Hamas and allied groups broke through the border, slaughtered civilians, took hostages, and unleashed hell.
And in the aftermath? Many so-called civilians joined in. None of the hostages report having been helped. The societies that produced the Nazis and their collaborators conversely contained those with the courage and moral fortitude to save Jews. No Gazan has been named among the “Righteous Among the Nations.” Not one has entered the record having showed mercy.
Despite this, Israel has not granted itself carte blanche. On the contrary, it has undertaken more efforts to minimize civilian casualties — via leaflets, phone calls, humanitarian corridors — than any modern power in similar conflict. That includes the United States, the United Kingdom, and NATO. The civilian-to-combatant ratio remains the lowest on record for urban warfare of this scale.
Yes, Gaza has suffered tremendous destruction. That is not denied. But to call this genocide is to elevate the lie over the facts, and narrative over history. This is not genocide. This is a war Israel did not seek but now must finish, lest October 7th be repeated again, and again, and again.
This is not only about Israel. Or Jews. It is about whether the West can survive the collapse of its own moral language.
When genocide means “whatever is emotionally persuasive,” when victims are rebranded as villains, when truth is optional and memory is rewritable — we lose civilization itself.
Because civilization depends on categories: on the ability to distinguish between just and unjust, between war and massacre, between real suffering and manipulated spectacle.
In the fog of this memetic war, we must not be afraid to say: This is not genocide, the numbers have been manipulated, Hamas exploits its own people, accusing Jews of genocide is a desecration of history, and the moral compass of the West is spinning — and it is our duty to recalibrate it.
Because, if we don’t, the truth will not just be forgotten. It will be forbidden.
 | A guest post by
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Thank you for this. It’s brilliant and I agree with every word. The stupidity of these idiots that call it genocide is appalling. They don’t understand the meaning of the world.
At some level I've begun to understand this phenomenon but I've lacked the words to express the issue in a systematic way. Avi's incisive analysis captures this other war very insightfully.