An Abuse of History, Law and Truth

Greg Bouwer
IINZ

On July 16, Stuff published an op-ed by former Foreign Minister Phil Goff accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. Goff’s column is not only factually flawed and legally baseless – it is ethically reckless. It diminishes the very concept of genocide, legitimises Hamas propaganda, and turns Israel’s right to self-defence into a war crime.

The Israel Institute of New Zealand condemns Goff’s assertions in the strongest possible terms and offers this point-by-point rebuttal.

1. Weaponising “Genocide” by Abandoning Its Legal Definition

Goff claims Israel’s actions “clearly meet the definition of genocide” under Article II of the Genocide Convention. This is demonstrably false.

• The convention requires intent to destroy a people “as such” – not harm incidental to war, not high civilian casualties, and not forced displacement during combat.
• No Israeli leader has called for the destruction of the Palestinian people. On the contrary, Israel’s stated and practiced war aim is the destruction of Hamas – a terrorist group responsible for mass murder, hostage-taking, and systemic war crimes.
• The ICJ itself has not found Israel guilty of genocide. In its July 2024 ruling, it declined to halt Israel’s military operations, implicitly acknowledging Israel’s right to self-defence and the absence of genocidal intent.

By blurring the line between lawful military action and genocide, Goff drains the term of meaning – desecrating the memory of real genocides, including the Holocaust he claims to revere.

2. Misrepresenting the Rafah Relocation as a “Concentration Camp”

Goff’s most inflammatory claim is that Israel plans to forcibly transfer all Gazans to a “concentration camp” at the Rafah border, using the words of Amos Goldberg, a fringe Israeli academic hostile to his own state.

• The relocation proposal aimed to evacuate civilians from active combat zones – a policy consistent with the laws of armed conflict and morally driven by the imperative to minimise civilian casualties.
• The term “concentration camp” is an obscene analogy. These humanitarian zones provide shelter, food, medical care, and protection from Hamas. They are not detention facilities, and people are not herded into them for extermination.
• Hamas, not Israel, has turned Gaza into a death trap. It prevents civilians from fleeing, fires on humanitarian corridors, and steals aid. The Rafah plan is an imperfect but necessary attempt to protect civilians in a war Hamas started and sustains.

3. Cherry-Picked Quotes to Imply State Policy

Goff strings together statements from Israeli politicians like Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and Dichter, claiming they prove genocidal intent.

• This is a blatant fallacy. Individual politicians’ rhetoric – however extreme – does not constitute government policy. Israel is a vibrant democracy with fierce political pluralism. The official war policy, supported by the IDF, courts, and cabinet, is to dismantle Hamas, not to destroy Palestinians.
• Goff, as a former cabinet minister, should know better than to equate inflammatory soundbites with state conduct. By that logic, every Western democracy would be guilty of mass crimes due to the words of its fringe politicians.

4. UNRWA, Aid, and the Reality of Humanitarian Obstruction

Goff accuses Israel of “banning” UNRWA and “starving Palestinians”.

• UNRWA was not banned arbitrarily. It was exposed for employing over 450 Hamas operatives, including participants in the October 7 massacre. No responsible state would continue funding or cooperating with such an agency.
• Israel has facilitated more than 25,000 aid trucks into Gaza since January 2024. Food, water, medicine, and fuel continue to flow – when Hamas does not loot, obstruct, or hijack it.
• Goff’s suggestion that Israel is systematically starving civilians is not only untrue: it echoes Hamas disinformation and undermines the reality that Israel faces the impossible task of waging a just war against an unjust enemy in one of the world’s most densely populated warzones.

5. The Casualty Numbers Game

Goff relies uncritically on Gaza Health Ministry statistics, claiming 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, “nearly a third children”.

• The Gaza Health Ministry is run by Hamas. Its figures are unverified, unverifiable, and statistically dubious. Analysis by international scholars and media outlets (including The Economist, AP, and BBC Verify) has shown how Hamas inflates and manipulates data for propaganda.
• Moreover, the term “children” in Hamas statistics includes combatants aged 16–17 – many of whom have been documented as active fighters.
• Civilian casualties in war, especially urban warfare, are tragic. But they are not evidence of genocide – particularly when the opposing force deliberately embeds itself among civilians and turns hospitals, schools, and mosques into command centres.

6. Hospitals and “Doctors Under Attack”

Goff cites a Channel 4 documentary as evidence that Israel deliberately targets doctors and hospitals.

• He fails to mention that virtually every major hospital in northern Gaza has been used by Hamas for military purposes. This includes storing weapons, launching rockets, and hiding hostages.
• Under international law, civilian infrastructure used for military ends loses protected status. The IDF, in each instance, has issued warnings, evacuations, and taken extensive measures to mitigate harm – even at cost to operational success.
• Goff’s narrative omits any mention of doctors held hostage by Hamas, medical facilities commandeered as terror hubs, or the fact that the IDF has evacuated and treated Palestinian civilians in its own field hospitals.

7. Journalist Access and the Gaza Fog of War

Goff repeats the tired accusation that Israel “bans foreign journalists from Gaza”.

• This is false. Numerous journalists have embedded with the IDF, and others have reported from Gaza via Egyptian access. What Israel does not allow is unaccompanied access in an active warzone – especially when such access would risk the lives of both soldiers and journalists.
• Meanwhile, journalists inside Gaza face threats, censorship, and manipulation by Hamas, a point that even the New York Times and Reuters have admitted. That’s the real media blackout Goff should be worried about.

8. A Final Inversion of Morality

Goff ends with a lament that democratic governments are silent in the face of Israel’s alleged crimes. In fact, the moral inversion is his.

• The silence that should haunt us is that which greeted Hamas’s rape, mutilation, and murder of civilians on October 7.
• The silence is toward Hamas’s sexual enslavement of Israeli women, their use of children as human shields, and their theft of humanitarian aid.
• The silence is over the hostages still held underground, the desecration of bodies, and the open declarations by Hamas leaders of their intent to repeat October 7 “again and again”.

It is not democratic governments who should hang their heads. It is those, like Phil Goff, who lend rhetorical cover to Hamas by criminalising Israel’s defence.

Conclusion

Phil Goff has chosen to side with a genocidal terrorist regime by accusing the Jewish state of the very crime that Hamas has pledged to commit. He does so by twisting international law, whitewashing Hamas atrocities, and invoking the Holocaust to smear Israel.

His position is not only historically and legally illiterate – it is morally indefensible.

This article was originally published by the Israel Institute of New Zealand.