Democrats have a “genocide” problem. And they need to face it directly.
Polls have shown that somewhere between 72% and 77% of Democrats believe that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. But a significant percentage disagree, with some — particularly American Jews — alleging that the charge itself is evidence of antisemitic bias.
Meanwhile, the word “genocide” has become a litmus test for Democratic candidates, both in the 2026 election and looking ahead to 2028. It is now routine for candidates to be asked to raise their hand if they think Israel committed genocide.
No answer is without its costs. To answer “no” is a deal-breaker for progressives — “disqualifying,” in the words of online commentator Matt Bernstein. Yet to answer “yes” is disqualifying for many centrists. And to say “it’s complicated” — as potential presidential contender Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and congressional candidate Scott Wiener of California have tried recently — doesn’t please anybody.
Behold, the Democrats’ circular firing squad.
The truth is, Democrats are never going to all agree about this issue; it’s too explosive and too divisive. (I speak from experience, having written about it for three years.) But they can learn to disagree.
The first step is to observe that different people mean different things when they use the word.
For many progressives, only the word “genocide” describes the horror of 72,000 dead Palestinians (including thousands of children), a society in ruins, many likely war crimes and a military campaign conducted with reckless disregard for the lives of the innocent people caught in the crossfire. Indeed, there was so much “crossfire” that at a certain point, it’s just fire. The “bystanders” are the intended victims. The civilians are the targets.
There is an undeniable moral truth here, and one that Democrats supportive of Israel must recognize.
The word “genocide” has become a litmus test for Democratic candidates, both in the 2026 election and looking ahead to 2028.
Yet “genocide” is also a legal term that may or not apply to Gaza. Legally speaking, genocide is a crime defined by Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It requires two elements: acts and intent. Israel is clearly guilty of the acts listed in the convention, including “killing members of the group” — in this case, the people of Gaza — and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
But the question of intent is less clear. The convention states that those acts constitute genocide only when they are “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Do Israel’s actions in Gaza qualify?
Maybe. Far-right members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition have called for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And one could argue that the sheer force of the attacks, on a mostly defenseless population, constitute evidence of an intent not merely to eradicate Hamas (a legally valid military objective) but to destroy the Palestinian population of Gaza (genocide).
Note too that the fact that “only” 72,000 out of 2 million Gazans were killed is legally irrelevant. In Srebrenica, for example, the Bosnian Serbs were found guilty of genocide after ethnically cleansing a single city of 40,000 Bosnian Muslims (8,000 killed, 32,000 exiled), despite the total Bosnian Muslim population being 1.8 million.
On the other hand, statements of intent must be clear to constitute evidence of genocidal intent. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić issued “Directive 7” in March 1995, explicitly calling for the elimination of the entire Muslim population of Srebrenica. And, of course, the Nazis had their Final Solution. There was no comparable statement by any Israeli decision-maker, and no official policy adopted by the Israeli government. On the contrary, there were warnings of bombing attacks, systems in place for humanitarian aid and, at least in 2023 and 2024, a clear military objective.
These are complicated legal and evidentiary questions, and the relevant court, the International Court of Justice, has not yet decided them. The court correctly observed in 2024 that there was “plausible” evidence that the Genocide Convention had been violated, but it was also correct to conclude that there was not yet compelling evidence, let alone enough for a formal trial.
The point is, reasonable people can and should disagree about this question. It is not nearly as clear-cut as the progressive left says it is, because it is legal as well as moral. Yet it is also not as clear-cut as Democratic centrists say, because it is moral as well as legal.
Instead, both sides have turned it into a purity test, disqualifying anyone who raises or doesn’t raise their hand when asked a reductive yes-or-no question. Many mainstream Jewish leaders even claimed, in a recent petition, that to accuse Israel of genocide is a modern-day “blood libel.” That is at once preposterous and offensive.
Both sides have turned it into a purity test, disqualifying anyone who raises or doesn’t raise their hand when asked a reductive yes-or-no question.
Pro-Israel Democrats need to recognize that the charge of genocide, whether it is legally accurate or not, points to something important. The American consensus on Israel is gone, and Netanyahu destroyed it. It is impossible to go back to Oct. 6, 2023 — both before Hamas terrorists massacred a thousand Israelis and before Israel struck back in such a brutal, unprecedented way, with American dollars and arms.
Maybe it was genocide, maybe it wasn’t, but it was certainly sociocide — the destruction of an entire society. And isn’t that the point?
At the same time, pro-Palestinian Democrats (whether anti-Zionist or not) can recognize that the legal charge of genocide is not as straightforward as a moral condemnation. We would never ask a political candidate to determine whether an act is second-degree murder or third-degree manslaughter, for example. And this is a crime against humanity with specific legal requirements that are as yet unresolved.
Again, the point isn’t for these two sides to agree, only to disagree, including strongly, without making the other side bigoted, racist or devoid of morality. Progressives are not going to stop fascism if we insist on unanimity rather than coalition.
The destruction of Gaza is a defining moral catastrophe of our time. It was also something that does not easily conform to preexisting definitions. It was not Auschwitz or Srebrenica. It was Gaza.
Jay Michaelson
Jay Michaelson will be a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 2025. He clerked for Judge Merrick Garland on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, was the Supreme Court columnist for the Daily Beast for eight years, and is the author of the bestselling book God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality. He holds a JD from Yale, a PhD in religion from Hebrew University, and nondenominational rabbinic ordination.