Gaza and The Genocide Discourse: Appropriation, Manipulation, and the Reproduction of Stability in the International Order

The article addresses the limitations of using genocide discourse to describe Israeli crimes in Gaza by analysing how, over recent months, this discourse has been subjected to manipulation that empties it of its content and redirects its purpose from delegitimizing Israel to protecting it. This manipulation has frequently been deployed to contain escalating protests against the existing order at all levels, both internationally and within diverse local contexts. In the context of the Gaza war, the transformation of genocide discourse occurs hand-in-hand with a noticeable increase in Western states’ readiness to recognize genocide in Gaza—an acknowledgment that remains conditional upon the new meaning that genocide discourse has come to acquire.

In a debate held last week within the Democratic Party between three internal candidates contesting the U.S. Senate seat of Nancy Pelosi, a question was posed: Do you believe that what happened in Gaza constitutes genocide? Two candidates raised their hands in the affirmative, while the third hesitated and abstained—a move that was met with widespread disapproval from the audience in attendance. In a subsequent press interview, he returned to the issue to confirm that he does in fact believe that what is happening in Gaza is genocide,[1] in a statement that could be seen as an apology for his answer during the debate.

This position aligns with the numerous signals that have emerged since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, pointing to shifts in Western public opinion regarding the question of Palestine—shifts often framed as a qualitative transformation in global awareness and public consciousness. This reading is further reinforced by a range of specialized opinion polls conducted across several Western countries, which demonstrate clear popular condemnation of Israel as committing genocide in Gaza. Such condemnation has begun to penetrate even major political parties and the narrower realm of institutional politics, as illustrated by the aforementioned case.

This discourse is often accompanied, consciously or unconsciously, by expectations and analyses suggesting the emergence of a new international order—an idea advanced by many writers and analysts as well, seen optimistically as a positive transformation, especially among scholars and experts from third world countries. I would like, however, to approach this issue from a different perspective, specifically through the lens of appropriation, the hollowing out and construction of new meaning of discourses of sentiment. In this article, I examine the limits of this purported shift with respect to the question of Palestine, treating it as a reflection of broader claims about a new international order. I do so by demonstrating how genocide discourse, which was initially mobilized at the outset of the Israeli genocidal war by those in solidarity with Palestinians in order to delegitimize Israel, has recently begun to acquire a new meaning and content—one that does not necessarily entail Israel’s delegitimization, but rather the exact opposite: Safeguarding Israel from its own recklessness and madness.

This is achieved by portraying the ongoing genocide as a transgression of Israel’s own moral codes, a framing that ultimately allows the designation of Israel’s actions as genocide to be absorbed into the existing international order without undermining the foundations of the Zionist settler colonial project or its legitimacy in any way. In the final section, I link this process to the limitations of the optimistic “new international order” theses by explicating the mechanism of appropriation to which genocide discourse is subjected—a mechanism that has been, and continues to be, politically deployed to empty discourses that challenge the stability of the international order of their substance, thereby preserving that order’s stability.

Appropriation and the Manipulation of Discourse

I begin by analysing a general political-legal practice or strategy that is central to understanding what is happening today and where this shift in public discourse on Palestine is heading—namely, the strategy of appropriation and manipulation.

The scholar Marina Calculli, in her discussion of the political transformations of the concept of self-determination,[2] notes that the term—originally proposed by Vladimir Lenin to recognize and advocate for the right of colonized peoples to independence—underwent a process of liberal appropriation by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson sought to contain the growing global momentum toward socialism by adopting the same term, but he manipulated it to acquire a different meaning: recognizing the independence of European nations occupied during World War I, while simultaneously denying that right to anti-colonial peoples in the Global South.

Appropriation is an ongoing process of meaning-shifting to which discourse is subjected without clear or fixed outcomes. What is certain, however, is that the resulting meaning diverges from the original intent. The process may fail at times and succeed at others, but it is generally continuous. While Calculli notes that the United States was later forced to yield to mounting pressure from the Third World to recognize their right to self-determination, today self-determination—once unequivocally synonymous with independence—refers instead to “process” of which “independence is only one of several possible outcomes“[3] This demonstrates how the political-legal concept has reached a meaning entirely different from its original formulation, rendering its contemporary practical framework ineffective in cases such as Palestine and other Indigenous peoples living under settler-colonial regimes.

Other political and legal concepts tied to independence have gone through similar appropriation to suit colonial interests—most notably sovereignty, a cornerstone of genuine independence. In the 1960s and 1970s, sovereignty was reshaped to grant political independence to post-colonial states while denying them economic independence, binding them to agreements concluded during the era of formal colonialism that continue to shape their realities today. Western states have since revised the concept again, now emphasizing a stronger conception of sovereignty to curb Chinese imports and restrict migration from the Global South—an outright contradiction of the sovereignty model they previously promoted.

What concerns me here is not these shifts per se, which have been extensively discussed in Critical Legal Studies, but rather the capacity of hegemonic states to produce and normalize such shifts. The logic of appropriation does not merely involve altering meaning and attaching a new one to a concept or discourse; it also involves conditionality—the weaker party can only use the concept/discourse conditioned by its newly imposed meaning. Critical legal scholars have repeatedly examined this manipulation in law, but I aim here to highlight how the same strategy operates within political discourse as well.

Genocide Discourse and Its Transformations

Genocide studies scholar Douglas Irvin-Erickson notes that genocide discourse is generally used to establish moral superiority over the accused party and to justify external military intervention, portraying genocidal regimes as forces that will not stop unless removed by external power.[4] I argue, however, that in the current genocidal war—much like the case of self-determination—this discourse has been appropriated and manipulated to acquire meanings and implications different from those previously identified by Irvin-Erickson, since discourse, as a social construct, is always subject to continuous formation and re-formation.

It is worth noting that genocide as a legal concept was itself negotiated within the 1948 Genocide Convention in ways that excluded, for example, cultural genocide, out of fear that the term might be used against the United States and other settler-colonial states for their treatment of Indigenous populations. Here, however, I focus on genocide as political discourse, which is currently undergoing reconfiguration in the context of the genocidal war on Gaza.

Genocide as a legal-political concept is now widely used to describe what is happening in Gaza. Experts have previously employed the term to describe events during the 1948 Nakba, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and even Jenin in 2002. Like other concepts, it is susceptible to appropriation and manipulation. Western states have thus far resisted labelling Israeli actions as genocide due to the catastrophic implications this discourse carries for Israel, as Irvin-Erickson explains. Yet today we witness a growing readiness—particularly in the United States and within dominant currents of the Democratic Party—to accept the term genocide in reference to Gaza.

This shift comes hand-in-hand with the rise of liberal Zionist Jewish groups that have recently begun to adopt, or at least lean toward, the genocide discourse. These groups had previously supported Israel’s actions in Gaza and waited nearly two years before adopting a more critical tone. Among them is J Street, the largest liberal Zionist lobby in the United States and a direct competitor to AIPAC, alongside numerous other Zionist Jewish organizations and figures in the West. Most current estimates suggest that a large majority of Jews—Zionist and non-Zionist—outside Israel oppose Israel’s crimes in Gaza, reflecting a widening rift between Zionists inside Israel and liberal Zionists abroad, the trajectory of which remains unclear.

While Jewish-American activist Simone Zimmerman argues that this shift among liberal Zionists occurred later than it should and that it adapted to the Democratic anti-war current—and criticizes it for adapting to that current rather than leading it earlier[5]—I believe this assessment lacks precision. In my view, this shift aims indeed to lead the anti-war, anti-Israel current within Democratic circles, but to redirect (appropriate and manipulate) it so that it aligns with liberal Zionist orientations and the Zionist Jewish supremacist project more broadly, rather than drifting toward explicitly anti-Zionist positions. Such a drift would have been likely had anti-Zionist Jews and non-Jews remained the primary voices shaping genocide discourse, as was the case during the early phase of the war.

This transformation among liberal Zionists does not seek to adopt genocide discourse as it was initially deployed—by anti-Zionist actors who framed Israel as a racist settler-colonial project—but rather to appropriate and manipulate it. In this new framing, genocide becomes an act that contradicts Israel’s own Jewish values, harms Israel itself, and represents an excess beyond the “acceptable limits” or the boundaries of “just war.” Palestinians disappear from this version of genocide discourse, except as passive victims deserving of sympathy—nothing more.

Through this appropriation, liberal Zionists deploy genocide discourse to protect Israel’s future as a Jewish supremacist state from collapsing under the weight of its own actions. This logic was articulated by an American rabbi speaking at an anti-war protest, noting that the protest coincided with his son’s joining the Israeli army and stating: “My stake in the future of Israel as a democratic state with a moral army is greater than ever.”[6] From this perspective, we can understand various practices aimed at protecting Israel from its current government’s madness including the appropriation of genocide discourse and even the recent recognition by several Western states of a non-existent Palestinian state.

In short, this shift among Zionists outside Israel (who are predominantly liberal) has generated a readiness within Western states to adopt genocide discourse. However, the meaning and purpose this discourse acquires here are fundamentally different from its original deployment: it is now aimed at protecting Israel rather than delegitimizing it.

Conclusion: Reviving Narrative and the Limits of International-Order Transformation

The use of genocide discourse in Gaza, despite its importance, may operate alongside claims that Israel has merely “crossed a line,” implicitly suggesting that Israel’s broader settler colonial crimes—Jewish racial supremacy within Israel, apartheid, and occupation in the West Bank and Gaza—remain acceptable. This does not mean abandoning the genocide discourse for ascribing what is happening in Gaza (and potentially in the West Bank and East Jerusalem). Rather, it underscores the necessity of grounding genocide discourse within a narrative—the framework through which we “we come to know, understand, and make sense of the social world … [and] constitute our social identities”[7].

Genocide in Gaza must be situated as part of structural genocide, a persistent logic inherent to settler-colonial projects as such—a framework theorized by the late Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe[8]. Only through this framing can genocide discourse be shielded from appropriation and manipulation that reproduce the very injustices Palestinians have resisted for over a century.

The yet bigger crisis, however, lies in the absence of a unified Palestinian narrative since the Palestine Liberation Organization abandoned the national liberation paradigm under the Oslo Accords in favour of a racialized “two conflicting nationalities” framework, transforming the struggle into a “conflict” between two righteous and equal parties[9] and abandoning the representation of Palestinians inside Israel and in the diaspora. This fragmentation has produced multiple narratives shaped by disparate lived realities, without a unifying meta-narrative capable of confronting Zionist discourse.

Returning to the opening discussion, I would point to a connection that might seem vague at first glance, but I do believe that what I said about Gaza and the genocide discourse illuminate the broader conversation about a “new international order.” Despite recurrent political transformations and moments of crisis—both today and at various previous junctures—the existing order and its embedded injustices often find ways to persist, despite some formal changes. Gaza has once again been reduced to a humanitarian issue, while occupation and Mandate continue, and genocide discourse is manipulated to fit ongoing colonial injustice—just as concepts like self-determination and sovereignty were previously adjusted to prevent systemic rupture. This analysis gains particular significance today in the light of preliminary expectations in the United States pointing toward a likely Democratic victory in the upcoming congressional midterm elections[10].

[1] Starr, Michael. “After Debate Backlash, California Democrat Scott Wiener Says Israel Carried Out ‘Genocide’ in Gaza.” The Jerusalem Post, January 12, 2026. https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-883048.

[2] [2] Calculli, M. (2021). Self-determination: the story of the liberal appropriation of a socialist principle. In E. Fassi & V. E. Parsi (Eds.), The Liberal World Order and Beyond (pp. 137-149). Milan: Vita&Pensiero. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3223097.

[3] Cited in Massad, Joseph. “Against Self-Determination.” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 9, no. 2 (2018): 161-191. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hum.2018.0010.

[4] Irvin-Erickson, Douglas. “Genocide Discourses: American and Russian Strategic Narratives of Conflict in Iraq and Ukraine.” Politics and Governance 5, no. 3 (2017): 130–45. https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v5i3.1015.

[5] Zimmerman, Simone. “Rhetoric Without Reckoning: A New Wave of Liberal Zionist Criticism of the Israeli Government Rings Hollow without Accountability for the Genocide.” Jewish Currents, August 22, 2025. https://jewishcurrents.org/rhetoric-without-reckoning.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Somers, Margaret R., and Gloria D. Gibson. “Reclaiming the Epistemological ‘Other’: Narrative and the Social Constitution of Identity.” In Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, edited by Craig Calhoun, 37–99. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994.

[8] Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. doi:10.1080/14623520601056240.

[9] Wallach, Yair. 2023. “The Racial Logic of Palestine’s Partition.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 46 (8): 1576–98. doi:10.1080/01419870.2022.2151845.

[10] Wikipedia contributors, “2026 United States elections,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2026_United_States_elections&oldid=1333841486 (accessed January 20, 2026).