If you haven’t been glued to the headlines, let me catch you up before CNN and the UN finish chiseling Israel’s tombstone. Israel is knee-deep in Gaza once again, this time bulldozing into Gaza City after months of firefights with Hamas. It’s messy, bloody, and about as “civilized” as a bar brawl at 2 a.m. in a sketchy part of town. But then again, that’s war. Nobody’s ever walked away from a battlefield and said, “Well, that was neat and tidy.”

Now, just to spice things up, Israel also decided to strike targets in Qatar, a peculiar Middle Eastern country that somehow manages to host U.S. military bases, luxury shopping malls, the World Cup, and Hamas leaders all in the same backyard. Picture Disneyland, but instead of Mickey Mouse, you get terrorist masterminds sipping espresso next door to American generals.

The White House responded by scolding Israel. Of course, this comes while the U.S. keeps cutting Israel giant checks and shipping them military hardware. Only in Washington can you lecture someone for doing something and then hand them more tools to keep doing it.

Meanwhile, the United Nations decided to put on its prophet robes and go all Jeremiah on Israel, except without the divine accuracy, and with a lot more bureaucratic jargon. Their latest proclamation? Israel’s military campaign equals “genocide.” That’s not a word you just toss around lightly. “Genocide” is the nuclear button of accusations. Once you drop that word, you’re not just criticizing; you’re laying the groundwork for sanctions, tribunals, and endless strongly-worded letters printed on fancy letterhead with way too many exclamation marks.

The whole situation feels like déjà vu. Israel fights back against terrorists. The West clutches its pearls like Aunt Mildred watching a horror movie. The UN condemns Israel with a brand-new resolution that sounds suspiciously like last year’s. And Hamas? They keep plotting their next “glorious” act of barbarism, which usually involves butchering civilians and then hiding behind more civilians. Wash, rinse, repeat.

But here’s the thing: if you’ve ever cracked open a Bible, you know this is nothing new. Israel has been the world’s favorite punching bag for about 3,000 years. Psalm 83 describes a time when Israel’s enemies said, “Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance” (Psalm 83:4). Sound familiar? It could’ve been ripped straight from a Hamas press release. And yet, despite Babylon, Rome, Hitler, and every modern-day terrorist network, Israel’s still here.

Zechariah 12 doubles down: “And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it” (Zechariah 12:3). Translation? Nations can huff and puff, pass resolutions, and host endless conferences about Israel, but in the end, the “burdensome stone” isn’t going anywhere. The Bible doesn’t promise Israel an easy ride, just survival. And survival in that neighborhood is nothing short of miraculous.

So yes, Israel’s back in Gaza, the West is wringing its hands, and the UN is dusting off its favorite gavel. But if history and Scripture tell us anything, Israel has outlasted every empire, every tyrant, and every genocidal maniac who tried to wipe it off the map. Spoiler alert: this won’t be any different.

Through the UN’s Lens: The Genocide Argument

Alright, let’s slip on the UN’s glasses for a moment and see why so many critics are throwing around the G-word. From their perspective, Israel isn’t just hammering Hamas; it’s hammering an entire population. Civilian casualties, blockades, and bombed-out neighborhoods look less like counterterrorism and more like collective punishment.

Civilian Casualties in the Spotlight

One of the most powerful arguments behind the genocide accusation is, quite simply, the body count. Numbers don’t lie, but they don’t always tell the full story either. Still, for those looking through the UN’s lens, the math is damning. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed since this war reignited, and those figures aren’t just faceless statistics. They include families crushed under rubble, children pulled from bombed-out schools, and entire neighborhoods reduced to dust.

The sheer scale of civilian suffering makes it easy for critics to paint Israel’s campaign as something more than a fight against Hamas. After all, if airstrikes keep wiping out households alongside militants, the line between targeting terrorists and targeting society itself begins to blur. And in the age of 24/7 media, every haunting photo, every viral video of grieving parents, becomes evidence for those building the case that Israel isn’t just dismantling Hamas; it’s dismantling Palestinian life as a whole.

To put it bluntly, the optics are brutal. When rubble and funerals dominate the headlines, precision strikes start to look more like carpet bombing, and military objectives get overshadowed by the human toll. For critics, the death toll doesn’t just suggest collateral damage; it screams intent.

Life Under Siege

Another cornerstone of the genocide argument is the blockade. For nearly two decades, Gaza has been described — sometimes dramatically, sometimes accurately — as the world’s largest open-air prison. With Israel controlling land crossings, airspace, and most maritime access, daily life for Palestinians isn’t just difficult; it’s suffocating.

Imports and exports are tightly monitored, fuel and electricity can be cut off during flare-ups, and rebuilding after each round of conflict is a Herculean task when construction materials are restricted.

Critics argue that this siege doesn’t merely weaken Hamas; it starves an entire society of opportunity. Hospitals struggle with medical shortages, businesses wither without supplies, and young people see few prospects beyond unemployment or radicalization. When two million people live under conditions that feel more like punishment than protection, it’s not hard for observers to label the policy as collective, rather than targeted.

From the UN’s perspective, the blockade transforms the battlefield into something bigger: not just a war against militants, but a slow suffocation of civilian life itself. And in their eyes, that’s a key ingredient in the genocide accusation.

Power Imbalance on Display

Few words get tossed around in UN reports as often as “disproportionate.” In this conflict, the imagery practically writes itself. On one side, Hamas fires crude rockets; dangerous, yes, but often intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome before they can wreak widespread havoc. On the other side, Israel responds with advanced fighter jets, precision-guided bombs, and a military budget that dwarfs anything Hamas could dream of.

The results are hard to ignore: Gaza neighborhoods flattened, infrastructure wiped out, and civilian losses piling up. From the outside, it looks less like two armies squaring off and more like a heavily armed superpower swatting a cornered adversary with civilians caught in the middle. Critics argue that when a nation responds to homemade rockets with high-tech air campaigns that level city blocks, the term “self-defense” starts to blur into “overkill.”

This perceived imbalance fuels the genocide narrative. It paints Israel not as a nation defending itself, but as a juggernaut grinding down a weaker people. For those watching from afar, it’s not the Iron Dome intercepts that define the story; it’s the smoking craters left behind in Gaza.

The Power of Rhetoric

Wars aren’t fought only with bombs and bullets; they’re also fought with words. And sometimes, those words hit harder than a missile. Over the past months, a handful of Israeli officials have let loose statements that critics say sound less like military strategy and more like population-level threats. Phrases about “erasing” neighborhoods, “removing” entire communities, or ensuring Gaza is “unlivable” don’t exactly scream restraint.

Even if such comments are intended as fiery rhetoric or political chest-thumping, once they’re out in the wild, they become ammunition for those building the genocide case. International observers take those quotes, line them up next to the destruction on the ground, and suddenly the narrative shifts: it’s not just collateral damage, it’s intent. And intent is the cornerstone of a genocide accusation.

From the outside, this paints a stark picture. It’s not just tanks rolling into Gaza or planes dropping bombs; it’s leaders’ words providing the soundtrack. And when the soundtrack sounds like collective punishment, critics argue the movie starts to look a lot like genocide. The perception, fair or not, is that Israel is holding the brush, painting in broad strokes, while Western allies keep providing the canvas and the paint.

Through Israel’s Lens: The Defense Against Genocide Claims

If the UN sees genocide, Israel sees survival. From Jerusalem’s perspective, this isn’t some grand campaign to erase a people; it’s a desperate fight to keep one’s own people alive. After all, Hamas didn’t exactly start this war by sending over fruit baskets and handwritten peace notes. The rockets, the tunnels, the kidnappings, the October 7 massacre, these are the realities shaping Israel’s defense. So, while critics line up charges of genocide, Israel pushes back with its own case: not extermination, but self-preservation.

The Spark That Lit the Fire

Any defense of Israel’s actions usually begins with the same date: October 7, 2023. On that day, Hamas launched a full-scale assault that shocked even a country accustomed to living under threat. Militants stormed across the border, murdering civilians in their homes, attacking a music festival, kidnapping children and grandparents alike, and parading hostages through Gaza as trophies. And to make sure the world noticed, they broadcasted much of it online, turning atrocities into a grotesque public spectacle.

For Israel, this wasn’t just another rocket barrage or border clash; it was a national trauma, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust. The government and the public alike saw it not as an isolated incident, but as proof that Hamas would gladly keep repeating such massacres if left unchecked.

From this perspective, the current war didn’t spring from nowhere, nor was it part of some long-planned extermination campaign. It was, in Israel’s telling, a direct response to a brutal attack that demanded a decisive answer. To them, the narrative doesn’t begin with airstrikes on Gaza; it begins with a massacre on Israeli soil.

Defining the Mission

When it comes to the genocide debate, intent is everything. International law doesn’t throw the G-word around lightly; it requires proof of a deliberate plan to wipe out an entire people group. That’s why Israel pushes back so strongly on this charge. Its leaders argue that the mission isn’t about erasing Palestinians, Muslims, or Arabs. The mission, as they frame it, is laser-focused on Hamas, the group that orchestrated massacres, fires rockets into civilian areas, and hides its weapons under schools and hospitals.

Israel points out that it has no interest in exterminating a population; if it did, it has the military capability to do so far more quickly. Instead, it emphasizes that its war aims are specific: dismantle Hamas’s military infrastructure, free hostages, and prevent another October 7 from ever happening again.

Critics may see the devastation and draw conclusions about intent, but Israel insists that intent is precisely where the genocide claim falls apart. In their view, the destruction is tragic fallout from targeting a terrorist network embedded inside a civilian population, not evidence of a campaign to wipe that population out.

The Fog of War

Another key point in Israel’s defense is the messy reality of warfare. Civilian casualties are a heartbreaking constant in modern conflicts, especially when the battlefield is an urban maze where fighters and families live side by side. Israel argues that while the civilian toll in Gaza is undeniably tragic, tragedy alone doesn’t equal genocide.

Here’s where the historical parallel often comes in. During World War II, Allied bombings of cities like Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo killed tens of thousands of civilians. Those campaigns were brutal, devastating, and controversial, but no one rebranded them as genocide. They were understood, rightly or wrongly, as part of the larger war effort to defeat an enemy. By that same logic, Israel says its actions — however destructive — are aimed at weakening Hamas, not erasing Palestinians.

To put it another way: collateral damage is the grim currency of warfare, not necessarily evidence of extermination. If every large-scale military campaign that resulted in civilian deaths were retroactively relabeled “genocide,” much of modern history would need rewriting, and Churchill, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower might all be awaiting subpoenas from The Hague.

Spotlight Politics

Another pillar of Israel’s defense is the charge of double standards. Around the globe, brutal regimes commit atrocities that dwarf even the worst days in Gaza, yet the UN rarely, if ever, rolls out the “genocide” label with the same enthusiasm. Think of China’s treatment of the Uyghurs, Assad’s chemical weapons in Syria, or the Iranian regime’s violent crackdowns on dissent. All horrific, all well-documented, and yet they rarely dominate the UN stage with the same urgency as Israel’s military campaigns.

For Israelis and their supporters, this selective outrage feels less like impartial justice and more like political theater. The world’s only Jewish state often finds itself at the center of marathon emergency sessions, while other governments with blood on their hands somehow avoid the same level of scrutiny. To Israel’s defenders, it looks suspiciously like a pattern: when Israel acts, it’s “genocide”; when others act, it’s “complicated.”

The takeaway, from Israel’s perspective, is clear. If the word “genocide” is applied inconsistently, it risks becoming less a tool of justice and more a weapon of politics — one aimed most frequently at Jerusalem.

Blessings, Curses, and Cautionary Tales

Beyond the political arguments, there’s the biblical lens, and it’s one that has shaped how many Christians view modern Israel. In Genesis 12:3, God tells Abraham, “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.” For believers, that promise doesn’t have an expiration date stamped on it. It frames Israel not just as another nation on the map, but as a people with a unique role in God’s unfolding story.

Now, to be clear, that doesn’t mean Israel’s leaders are infallible. They’re human, which means they’re just as capable of corruption, bad decisions, and messy politics as any other government. But history offers a sobering pattern: nations that set themselves against the Jewish people rarely end up with happy endings. Babylon rose and fell. Rome persecuted and eventually collapsed. Nazi Germany unleashed horrors beyond imagination and was crushed within a few short years.

For those who take Scripture seriously, these examples aren’t coincidences. They’re warnings. To curse Israel is, ultimately, to line up against a promise God made thousands of years ago, and history shows how that tends to play out.

Genocide or Just the Same Old Story?

War is ugly. It always has been, and it always will be. Israel’s campaign in Gaza isn’t clean, tidy, or free from controversy, but labeling it “genocide” is more than a stretch; it’s a full Olympic floor routine with bonus points for dramatic flair. What we’re really watching is a nation fighting tooth and nail for survival in a region where more than a few neighbors openly dream of its disappearance.

Meanwhile, Hamas has perfected the tragic art of human shielding. They launch rockets from schools, stash weapons under hospitals, and then cry foul when civilians inevitably get caught in the crossfire. It’s a cruel calculus: the higher the civilian death toll, the stronger their propaganda hand becomes. And sadly, it works, because instead of holding Hamas accountable for war crimes, the UN reaches for its favorite card in the deck: genocide. It’s the diplomatic equivalent of a kid flipping over the Monopoly board because he landed on Boardwalk with a hotel.

So, final verdict? Israel’s guilty of plenty: being aggressive, sometimes heavy-handed, and definitely terrible at public relations. But genocide? No. That charge collapses under the weight of both evidence and definition. What the UN calls extermination looks far more like warfare, however brutal, and what they call justice often looks suspiciously like moral equivalence.

Call it war, call it ugly, call it heavy-handed, but if you call it genocide, you’ve left reality for rhetoric.