The Illusion of Genocide and the Reality of Antisemitism: A Canadian Perspective |
I consider myself an expert on antisemitism based on lifelong lived experience dating back to my childhood. Throughout my life I have been the target of over 2 dozen antisemitic incidents beyond simple microaggressions which themselves have always been plenty.
In Grade 7 my parents pulled me out of a Winnipeg junior high school after fellow students screamed at me that “we burn Jews here”. I have heard more “f—cking Jew” that I can count. I have been physically threatened, chased down the street, prevented under threat from leaving an acquaintance’s apartment and ostracized by a group of nurses during medical school in Winnipeg because “you wear expensive shirts”, all because I am Jewish. Like many Jews I had relatives killed in pogroms and in the Holocaust. And I have read obsessively about antisemitism.
The accusation of genocide against Israel sets off existential alerts of antisemitism in my soul, bones and guts. The genocide charge brings back a lifelong apprehension and fears of danger simply for being Jewish. I know antisemitism when I see it.
Gaza has endured a cataclysmic catastrophe and unimaginable horrors. You would have to be cold blooded or have a heart of stone for the conscience not to be shocked by the tens of thousands of innocent Gaza children and citizens who have been seriously inured or who have died during the war. The images are horrifying. But emotional reactions do not define genocide.
Israel’s actions in Gaza have led to the political charges of genocide against Israel and have drawn comparisons and parallels to the Holocaust. The accusations of genocide have been led by Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories since May 2022. Albanese who claimed to be a lawyer, and specifically a human rights lawyer but has never in fact been either, reposted an image comparing Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler. She has compared the Israeli war against Hamas to the Third Reich.
Dr. Omer Bartov, an Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University and former Israel Defense Forces member, in accusing Israel of genocide wrote in the New York Times on July 15 2025 that “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It”. Bartov may well thinks he knows and sees genocide. Many Jewish community members in Canada and the Diaspora grew up with antisemitism, experiences apparently unknown to Bartov........