It’s not much consolation that so many of the people accusing Israel of “genocide” don’t actually believe the accusation. But it is worth drawing attention to their fundamental cynicism and dishonesty.

The recent National Book Awards ceremony is a case in point. It’s not surprising that faddish politics were atop the list of criteria for the awards—that has become almost universally true across the arts. But for once, an awardee’s acceptance speech strikes me as genuinely important, even if not for reasons the awardee’s fans would share.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha was, by her own account, born in Seattle and raised in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. But she has some Palestinian “heritage” and therefore for media purposes she is Palestinian. Tuffaha received the National Book Award for poetry on Nov. 20, and began her acceptance speech with the following line:

“Good evening everyone, and good morning to beloved Gaza, where it is the 411th day of the genocide.”

You probably didn’t even need to do the calculations to understand that 411 days before her speech was… October 7, 2023.

I don’t think this can be emphasized enough: the appropriation of Jewish pain by those who cheer on or participate in causing that pain is a timeless and repugnant tradition—and that is exactly what is happening with the accusations that Israel is committing genocide.

As with the Nakba, which was the name Arab intellectuals gave to the failure to defeat the nascent state of Israel in 1948, there is no greater source of collective humiliation to anti-Semites than a foiled attempt to kill all the Jews.

Indeed, it is how best to understand the sign carried by a pro-Hamas protester in London over the weekend:

“1st Holocaust: The Germans humiliated, mistreated and murdered vast numbers of Jews. 2nd Holocaust: The Zionists have mistreated, injured and killed countless Palestinians. The abused have become the abusers.”

Countless! Why not give a figure? Because it would reveal the inanity of the comparison. The best estimates of Palestinian civilian fatalities during the current war, after factoring in the casualty ratios and public lists by Palestinian officials, is under 25,000. That’s not nothing—every single one of those lives lost is a tragedy—but imagine making a sign that equates it with the openly stated and planned mass execution of 6 million Jews, especially when considering those Gazan civilians weren’t individually targeted.

So that’s one way to interpret the “countless” sign: as a description of the sign-holder’s deliberate refusal to count.

But here’s another way to understand it. To the anti-Semite, the number of Palestinians killed is irrelevant. The Palestinian deaths, to these activists, are notable not for their number but for the reason they were caused: the failure to kill all the Jews.

It’s not about how many Palestinians died but how many Jews lived.

And look at them all there, by the millions. That’s the atrocity. That’s the war crime.

And so in some respects, it’s actually true that the Nakba continues to this day. The attempt to destroy Israel hasn’t stopped and hasn’t succeeded. The Gaza war is indeed a continuation of this phenomenon, of the original intent and meaning of the Nakba.

In 1921, one of the era’s prominent as-a-Jews, Ralph Philip Boas, wrote an article in the Atlantic called “Jew-Baiting in America.” The conceit was one of Boas’s obsessions—that social discrimination is all that’s left of anti-Jewish bigotry in America and therefore not worth complaining about. (Carey McWilliams dismantled this idea in a 1947 essay for COMMENTARY, found here.)

Boas’s essay makes for some amusing reading a century later; he is wrong about everything.

Well, except one thing. He’s at least partially correct when he writes: “At the root of European anti-Semitism undoubtedly lies the shuddering hatred that men always feel for that which they cannot kill. The amazing vitality of the Jew is sufficient reason for believing any tale that is whispered of him; his survival smells of the devil.”

Those who claim a “genocide of the Palestinians” began on October 7, 2023, show that this mindset is found outside of Europe as well. This includes not just the poets who use their award speeches to reveal something foul about their own character, or the protest groups on campus who seek to appropriate October 7 as a day for them to wail publicly and don sackcloth and ashes.

The expounders of the genocide libel are all over the place, everywhere. Do they actually believe it? In many cases, no. What they believe is that the Jew’s survival smells of the devil. And we should freely remind the public that that is what’s actually bothering them.