OPINION:
No accusation has done more to morally isolate Israel since Oct. 7, 2023, than the claim that it is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip.
It casts Israel as the perpetrator of humanity’s gravest crime and those who defend it as apologists for monstrous evil. The charge now reverberates through governments, international institutions, newsrooms and protest movements.
Serious factual and legal challenges to the genocide charge have done little to slow its spread. The argument has become an endless contest of disputed facts and competing experts.
Still, the credibility of the genocide accusation rests on more than the evidence supporting it. It also rests on the authority of those making it.
When professors and university departments call Israel’s conduct “genocide,” the charge can appear not as advocacy but as expert judgment grounded in scholarship and specialized knowledge. Academic authority gives the accusation credibility far beyond campus.
Academia was among the earliest authoritative promoters of the charge.
Just three days after Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre and well before Israel began its major ground invasion of Gaza, the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, supported a global strike against what it called Israel’s “genocidal attack on Gaza.”
Two weeks later, the department sponsored “The Genocide in Gaza in Our Classrooms,” a workshop to help instructors “contextualize the unfolding genocide” for their students.
Similar accusations appeared in statements and department-sponsored events at universities across the country. Each of the more than a dozen academic units that advanced the genocide charge during those first weeks was led by someone who had endorsed an academic boycott of Israel before Oct. 7.
For more than a decade, we had studied faculty efforts to carry campaigns to boycott Israel into academic departments, classrooms and research. The apparent connection between those preexisting boycott commitments and the genocide charge demanded closer examination.
We examined hundreds of videos of Israel-related events sponsored by academic departments, centers and other units during the 2024-2025 academic year. Roughly one-third featured at least one speaker who, before Oct. 7, had publicly supported boycotting or sanctioning Israel or the broader Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
What we found was extraordinary.
Events featuring those pre-Oct. 7 BDS supporters were roughly 40 times more likely to include the genocide accusation than events whose speakers had no identified history of supporting BDS.
Eighty-five percent of the BDS-speaker events contained the accusation, compared with just 2% of the others.
The pattern extended beyond the speakers. In roughly 25% of the BDS-speaker events, the genocide accusation appeared in the event’s official title or promotional materials. Virtually every such event was sponsored by an academic unit led by someone who had supported an academic boycott before Oct. 7.
Together, these findings strike at one of the genocide charge’s greatest sources of credibility: the belief that its widespread embrace in academia represents independent scholarly confirmation. Rather, its academic use was overwhelmingly concentrated among a political constituency already committed, before the war began, to boycotting, sanctioning or isolating Israel.
That political alignment extended into the academic units, giving the accusation institutional standing. The link between preexisting boycott commitments and the accusation of genocide also makes political sense.
BDS is not simply a criticism of Israel. Its boycott campaigns seek to isolate the nation by severing or preventing ordinary relationships with it, while its larger effort works to delegitimize Israel and make such relationships appear unacceptable.
In academia, the two work hand in hand: Boycotting seeks to cut off Israel, and delegitimization seeks to make that isolation seem warranted and normal.
The genocide accusation is an especially powerful form of that delegitimization. By casting Israel as the perpetrator of humanity’s ultimate crime, it places Israel beyond the bounds of legitimate engagement.
Once “Israel is committing genocide” is treated not as an activist accusation but as an authoritative academic conclusion, hostility toward Israel and the Jews identified with it is recast as moral resistance to genocide. The charge becomes a moral license to shun, exclude, harass or otherwise target those portrayed as defenders of humanity’s ultimate crime.
That is what makes its academic legitimization so dangerous and why the genocide accusation increasingly functions as a modern blood libel.
What looked like broad, independent scholarly agreement was overwhelmingly the voice of a preexisting political constituency committed to boycotting, isolating and delegitimizing the Jewish state. Far from validating the genocide accusation, that academic chorus exposes just how politically driven the charge has been all along.
• Leila Beckwith is professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the co-founder of AMCHA Initiative. Tammi Rossman-Benjamin is the co-founder and executive director of AMCHA Initiative and was a faculty member at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for two decades.
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