Critics accused of quietly rewriting meaning of genocide to fling charges at Israel

"This week, the International Association of Genocide Scholars announced that it had passed a resolution determining that Israel was guilty of genocide in Gaza, according to international law. As part of its evidence, the association cited a slew of human rights groups that had come to the same conclusion — that the Jewish state had perpetrated the crime of crimes.

The statement did not note, however, that some of those conclusions were based on reinterpretations of the legal definition of genocide, and not the established reading of the law cited in the association’s resolution.

By including the findings of the outside groups in its attention-grabbing resolution, the association played into what critics say is a longstanding pattern of international groups reinterpreting international legal definitions in accusations leveled against Israel, including charges of alleged apartheid, and claims related to Palestinian statehood and the status of refugees.

According to supporters of Israel, these reinterpretations are biased attacks against the Jewish state that chip away at international norms. Those in favor of the changes, meanwhile, describe them as an acceptable and necessary update to laws formulated in the ashes of World War II.

‘It’s completely eroding international law and standards. Words no longer matter, laws no longer matter. What’s the point of having laws on the books and definitions that you can change whenever you want?’ said Mark Goldfeder of the National Jewish Advocacy Center legal group. ‘From a more sinister perspective, if you apply the law everywhere in one way, but differently when it comes to the Jewish state, there’s a word for that.’

Orde Kittrie, a former attorney at the US State Department who now teaches law at Arizona State University, said the effort to change definitions to fit Palestinians’ claims had long been promoted by Ramallah before the issue became supercharged by the Gaza war...

‘Part of that is, if there’s a crime that you want to accuse Israel of and Israel doesn’t fit the definition, ‘I’ll change the definition,'‘ said Kittrie, who is also a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies...

‘The Nazis began by changing the law to make antisemitism lawful and corrupting the judiciary to apply those discriminatory laws. History is repeating itself. UN ‘investigations’ are defined to find the Jewish state guilty,’ said Anne Bayefsky, president of the Human Rights Voices nonprofit and director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. ‘All of it does enormous lasting damage to the rule of law for everyone.’..."