If you’re going to light the torches, at least pretend you’ve read the manual. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry drops a 72-page thunderclap proclaiming Israel guilty of genocide; the BBC sprints to the microphone like it’s Eurovision and they’re about to announce the votes from Geneva. “Reasonable grounds,” “only reasonable inference,” “strongest finding to date”—all the dramatic beats are there, performed with the sort of hushed urgency usually reserved for an asteroid hurtling toward Croydon. Then, in the quiet bit between drumrolls, the line nobody seems keen to linger on: this commission “does not officially speak for the UN,” and it is not a court. Translation: it’s theatre, not a verdict; mood music, not jurisprudence.
That is not a trivial footnote. Genocide is the most serious crime in international law. It requires a very specific legal state of mind—dolus specialis, intent to destroy a protected group as such. Not intent to win a war, not intent to destroy an enemy’s capacity to fight, not even reckless indifference to civilian harm. The bar is not melodrama; the bar is intent to destroy. And intent is proved in a court—where witnesses are cross-examined, evidence is tested, translations are challenged, and quotes are read in full sentences, not clipped into tweet-sized grenades.
But we no longer live in an age of long attention spans and careful process. We live in the era of genocide by press release, adjudication by headline, and the moral satisfaction of a pushed notification. Enter the BBC’s international editor, sermonising about a “blunt indictment” and “man-made famine,” delivered in that confident tone that implies the score has been agreed and anyone asking about key signatures is being tedious. The formula is familiar. Quote the commission as scripture. Reduce the Israeli position to a flat denial in a single paragraph after a page of rubble and calamity. Nudge the audience toward the idea that “growing international condemnation” is the same thing as proof. Counting retweets becomes a form of law.
The UN system is perfectly built for this kind of performance. It is a club in which many members are not liberal democracies, yet they queue up to lecture one. The Human Rights Council keeps a permanent agenda item for Israel as if it were God’s favourite bingo ball. Countries that jail poets, hang protesters, and make journalists disappear glide through the chamber to the sound of spa music. But when Israel is on the docket, the orchestra swells, the lights dim, and everyone remembers their lines. If obsession were a metric, Israel would be the only country on earth; everyone else would be a rounding error. It’s not that Israel is above criticism—heaven forbid—but that the choreography is impossible to miss: a micrometer for Israel, a blindfold and a yardstick for tyrannies.
And the symbolism. A minute of silence for Tehran’s butcher. Red carpets rolled out for clerical bullies. Smiling photo-ops with strongmen who treat human rights as a novelty item, brought out for guests and then shoved back in the drawer. Yet the pantomime villain is always Israel, the inconvenient democracy fighting a terrorist army that embeds itself under hospitals and schools and then begs the world to mistake civilians for camouflage. “Human shields” is not a phrase dreamed up by spin doctors. It is the explicit, documented tactic of the enemy Israel is fighting. Every serious soldier, lawyer and analyst knows what that does to proportionality assessments, targeting decisions, and casualty counts. But that doesn’t look as good in a caption as a black-and-white photo of a collapsed tower at magic hour.
Which brings us to how the commission treats “intent.” Wartime rhetoric, blood-hot and ugly in every conflict, is served up as the decisive proof of genocidal purpose. A handful of quotes, shorn of the circumstances in which they were uttered and the paragraphs that followed, are treated as the Rosetta Stone of Israeli policy. Meanwhile, the conduct that undermines the genocide story—evacuation corridors, text alerts, phone calls, leaflet drops, mapped safe routes, pauses for aid convoys—gets folded into the haze of “they say they tried.” You’d never guess from the headlines that the very same UN system has repeatedly acknowledged that only courts determine whether genocide is happening. That rather important principle gets the footnote treatment, because it slows the rhythm and dulls the dagger.
Even where the narrative tries to look empirical, it often rests on trembling foundations. The pre-war “500 trucks a day” mantra—so beloved in commentary—was not the real baseline; 2022 data put the daily average closer to 291 total trucks, of which roughly 73 carried food. During substantial periods of the war, daily food-truck averages rose above that pre-war food level. A serious, data-driven estimate has shown that about 82 food trucks a day would match pre-war caloric supply; for long stretches, the flow met or exceeded that. That doesn’t mean distribution was smooth or theft non-existent—Hamas diverted aid and fought over it, and war shatters logistics. It does mean that the automatic equation “x fewer trucks, therefore deliberate starvation policy aimed at physical destruction of the group” is not a syllogism; it’s a slogan. It is also striking that the most catastrophic famine projections did not materialise in the mortality data the way modellers insisted they would. You’d expect the keepers of “only reasonable inference” to be a touch more cautious with their inferences.
The forensic record matters too. Allegation by allegation, incident by incident, the pattern does not show systematic, close-range executions of civilians or a policy of massacre by Israeli forces. There are disturbing cases that demand robust criminal investigation—no serious person denies that. Accountability is not a dirty word. But the plural of allegation is not genocide, and the patterns you would expect to see if the policy were extermination are simply not in the verified forensic record. To say this out loud is not to demand a gold star for Israel; it is to insist that the charge of charges be anchored in evidence that can survive an adversarial test. That used to be called justice.
Meanwhile, casualty figures and famine declarations are leaned on as if they were delivered on tablets from Sinai. The Gaza Health Ministry is not a neutral statistics bureau; it is embedded in a regime that has a vested interest in the optics of suffering. International agencies rely on it because it is often the only available pipeline—but reliance is not canonisation. Distinguishing combatants from civilians in a war where one side refuses uniforms and sets up shop in apartment blocks is not straightforward; classifying the dead is not a matter of counting heads and adding emotion. The point is not to deny tragedy; it is to deny that tragedy equals genocidal intent. That leap is political, not legal.
None of this complexity slows the BBC, which has developed a kind of house style for this conflict: a sanctified voiceover, a procession of ruins, a cameo from an “independent expert” who has never met an Israeli security dilemma they couldn’t dismiss, and then a brisk declaration that “Israel denies it.” Denial, you see, is something criminals do. Making a case is something journalists are supposed to do. The difference is not subtle.
Now, watch how the double standards glow in the dark. When Israel fights an enemy that openly refuses the laws of war and makes its own people into blast vests, the phrase of the hour is “collective punishment.” When that same enemy slaughters families in their homes and kidnaps the elderly and the disabled, the mood shifts to “context.” When an Israeli president says civilians bear responsibility for not overturning their rulers, it is “incitement.” When the rulers are the state, the party and the militia rolled into one—as in the theocracies and police states that lounge about the UN chamber—it becomes “regional nuance.” Israel’s security services are expected to be surgeons during a knife fight in a blackout; the people who brought the blackout are invited to the microphone to discuss the ethics of lighting.
This would be farce if the consequences weren’t so grave. Words like genocide are not confetti to be tossed at your political enemies. They are the last stop on a very long legal road. Inflate the currency and you don’t merely smear a democracy engaged in an urban war with a terror army. You cheapen the word for the next Rwanda, the next Yazidi mountain, the next mass grave that actually is what the Convention was written for. And you teach the world a very dark lesson: that the fastest way to win a narrative war is to scream “genocide” first and dare your opponents to prove the negative while you mint hashtags.
There is also the cultural contagion to consider. As the sociologist David Hirsh has observed in other contexts, declaring Israel a pariah has become a social ritual in polite society, and disputing the ritual invites ostracism. Careers falter, grants evaporate, accusations stick like glue. In such a climate, what editorial meeting at a mainstream broadcaster is going to risk saying, “Hang on—are we absolutely certain this meets the legal bar?” Much safer to ride the wave, write the obituary for nuance, and let the audience mistake volume for virtue.
Underneath the fog of headlines lies an awkward truth about the institution making so much of the noise. The UN is a flawed necessity in theory and a disastrous performer in practice. It is not a parliament of free nations; it is a stage where the free and the unfree are handed the same script and the unfree are given more speaking roles. Its Human Rights Council is a case study in capture: abusers policing the abused. Its commissions of inquiry are born with their conclusions pencilled in the margins; their footnotes may be careful, but their press releases rarely are. Even the UN’s own officials are moved to say, when cornered by a microphone, that it’s “for the court to decide.” But those sound bites, the ones that would sober the room, come after the crescendo, by which time nobody is listening.
The minute of silence for Tehran’s butcher was not an administrative hiccup; it was a tell. The red-carpet treatment for the bearded satraps who run Iran was not a scheduling accident; it was a worldview. Israel is an eccentric planet in this system: too democratic to bully, too stubborn to join the ritual self-abasement, and too frank about the failure of international structures to deter those who want the Jewish state dead. That frankness is interpreted as insolence, and insolence must be punished. The punishment is narrative—endless, lugubrious, accusatory narrative, in which a nation that fights under the same laws the UN claims to revere is recast as the world’s monster.
So what would a grown-up approach look like? First, an end to the obsession. Scrap the permanent agenda item and replace it with universal standards. If you can’t do that because too many members would find themselves in the dock, say so plainly and stop pretending you’re a court with a choir. Second, stop the farce of letting serial abusers chair human-rights talking shops. It is not “inclusive” to put the arsonist on the fire brigade; it is grotesque. Third, separate law from loudness. If you have evidence, bring it to a court—where the standards are high and the stakes are honest. If you are not a court, say so in a banner large enough that even a newsroom in a hurry can’t trim it to fit the mood. Fourth, decouple data from polemic. Publish baselines, methods and error bars with the same gusto you publish adjectives. If your famine models miss reality by a mile, tell the world how and why, and stop laundering forecasts into “facts.”
Finally, accept that Israel does not owe the UN a performance; it owes its citizens security within the law. When Israel errs—and it does—investigate and punish, as the law requires. When its enemies use civilians as tactical assets and then parade the corpses for cameras, refuse the choreography. And when journalists mistake sorrow for proof and moral certainty for evidence, call them on it. No democracy ever won respect by playing along with a fixed game.
The BBC could help here, if it wanted to. The corporation still commands a level of trust that most outlets would sell their mastheads for. All it has to do is be what it tells the world it is: curious, careful, sceptical of power, including the power of a UN commission that knows, whether it admits it or not, how irresistible the word genocide is to a newsroom. Instead, we get the same humid prose, the same careful avoidance of the “not a court” admission, the same pious cadence. “Israel denies it.” Of course Israel denies it. Innocent people deny things all the time. The job is not to say they deny; the job is to show what you know, how you know it, and what you don’t know yet. That used to be called reporting.
If the UN wants authority, it should earn it. If the BBC wants trust, it should defend it. At present, both look like they’ve settled for applause. The commission performs justice without a bench; the broadcaster performs balance without a scale. And the public, who deserve better than political theatre and moral cosplay, are left with a chorus and a curtain call.
Reform the institution or retire the costume. If the Human Rights Council can’t let go of its pet obsession, if commissions can’t resist the seductions of the headline, if the choreography demands perpetual denunciation of one state while dictators waltz past the cameras, then perhaps the honest thing is to admit the show has run its course. Turn off the lights. Lock the door on your way out. The world needs an international system that protects the vulnerable and deters the violent. What it doesn’t need is an embarrassment with stationery calling itself justice.