The Wall Street Journal Has Many Ways to Deny Genocide

Gregory Shupak, FAIR, October 9, 2025

As more and more scholars, and one rights group after another, confirm that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, it’s becoming ever more obvious that those who deny the genocide are the intellectual and moral equivalents of people who deny other genocides, such as the ones inflicted on the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, or the Holocaust, or the Armenian Genocide.

Yet the Wall Street Journal persists in running genocide denial. Looking at how the paper does so enables us to not only refute their falsehoods, but also to gain insight into the tactics Gaza genocide denialists, and genocide deniers in general, employ. These include:

Hand-waving: brushing off the cataclysmic damage Israel and the US have done to Palestinians as merely the unavoidable byproducts of war;
Victim-blaming: saying that Palestinian resistance groups such as Hamas are to blame for the suffering in Gaza;
Inverting perpetrator and victim: presenting Palestinians, and not Israelis, as genocidal, with Israelis, rather than Palestinians, cast as the targets;
Obscurantism: offering dubious pieces of information, usually in a decontextualized manner, as if they showed that Israel has pursued its military objectives humanely;
Repudiation: flatly rejecting well-documented facts while offering little or no counter-evidence.

‘Justifiable, even necessary’

Ami Magazine columnist Avi Shafran’s Journal piece (7/22/25) utilized both hand-waving and victim-blaming. He asserted:

When critics distort Israel’s goal of self-preservation into a desire for genocide, the accusers have gone from righteous protesters to ignorant haters…. Civilians suffer and die in the prosecution of justifiable, even necessary, wars. That tragedy is intensified when you are fighting an enemy who hides behind human shields. Eradicating the engines of terror in Gaza requires attacking the places from which they operate: hospitals, schools and mosques.

Israel’s supposedly “justifiable, even necessary” war has entailed such policies (as Human Rights Watch—12/19/24—notes) as

intentionally depriv[ing] Palestinian civilians in Gaza of adequate access to water since October 2023, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths and thus committing the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide.

Rather than offering a reasoned, evidence-based defense of such Israeli conduct, Shafran blithely wrote as if consciously withholding drinking water from a civilian population were as natural and inevitable as water boiling at a hundred degrees Celsius.

The author’s next move was to blame Palestinians for Israel killing Palestinians. Shafran, of course, didn’t offer a scintilla of proof for his claim that Palestinian fighters force their own people to be human shields, probably because it’s Israel—not Hamas—that routinely uses Palestinians as shields (FAIR.org, 5/13/25).

‘Systematically and deliberately devastated’

Equally weak is Shafran’s suggestion that it’s Palestinians’ fault that Israel attacks Palestinian hospitals, schools and mosques. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory said that Israel damaged and destroyed more than 90% of the school and university buildings in Gaza, and found just one case where Hamas had also used a school for military purposes. The commission also said that Israeli attacks have damaged more than half of all religious and cultural sites in Gaza, and noted that

all ten religious and cultural sites in Gaza investigated by the Commission constituted civilian objects at the time of attack, and suffered devastating destruction for which the Commission could not identify a legitimate military need.

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