Key Takeaways:
The same rhetorical pattern that preceded the 1994 Rwandan genocide — false accusations of genocide used to justify actual genocide — now frames post-Oct. 7 accusations against Israel, according to a McGill University anthropologist.
In 1993, Hutu intellectuals at the National University of Rwanda accused the Tutsi-associated Rwandan Patriotic Front of genocide, circulating inflated casualty figures in an open letter to Pope John Paul II. A year later, the Hutu regime carried out the genocide of the Tutsis, killing an estimated 800,000 people over 100 days. The false accusation served as a prelude to the violence.
"False accusations of genocide are nothing new," Adam Louis-Klein, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at McGill University, wrote in the Wall Street Journal. "In 1993 Hutu intellectuals at the National University of Rwanda accused the Tutsi-associated Rwandan Patriotic Front of genocide."
The genocide accusation against Israel since Oct. 7, 2023, flows from an academic framework that presents Israel as a "settler colonial" state founded by Europeans who don't belong in the Middle East, Louis-Klein argues. This framework, promoted by a network of academics associated with the Journal of Genocide Research, has sought to change or reject the legal definition of genocide enshrined in the 1948 Genocide Convention.
A. Dirk Moses, the journal's senior editor since 2011, has argued it is useless to distinguish intentional killing of civilians from collateral damage caused by strikes against terrorists. Amnesty International has adopted a "dual intent" framework that reads Israel as engaged in lawful warfare and genocide simultaneously — a neologism that, for a permanently illegitimate colonial state, makes even legal self-defense constitute genocide.
Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American historian at Brown University, is the highest-profile scholar to accuse Israel of genocide, supported by figures including Raz Segal, who less than a week after Oct. 7 described Israel's entire history as an ongoing genocide. All of them see Israelis as colonists, Louis-Klein writes.
The Hamitic Hypothesis and the Inversion Framework
The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was framed as an "anticolonial" genocide. When a Hutu movement embarked on violent revolution in 1959, it framed the Tutsi minority as proxy Europeans who didn't belong in Rwanda — a belief rooted in the Hamitic hypothesis, a colonial-era theory that held that Africa's advanced civilizations were the work of outside invaders. During the genocide, perpetrators threw Tutsis into the Nyabarongo River to "send them back to the Nile."
The same dynamic of genocide inversion now targets Israel, Louis-Klein argues. In 2025, legal expert Avraham Russell Shalev argued that the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas meets the Genocide Convention's rigorous standard — requiring intent to annihilate a protected group and acts, including murder of civilians, undertaken to achieve it. That Israel's military repelled Hamas's intended genocide doesn't alter the classification, Shalev argued.
Alison Des Forges, then a senior adviser to Human Rights Watch, pointed to genocide inversion as a central means of justifying the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis. False accusations targeting a population with collective guilt came to be recognized in later court cases as key indicators of incitement to genocide.
International courts have rarely pursued incitement cases, yet countless instances of genocide inversion against Israel have flooded the public sphere since Oct. 7. Portraying a people as foreign usurpers and inherent perpetrators "isn't neutral," Louis-Klein writes. "It is a well-recognized prelude to violence."
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