J’accuse

A cri de cœur against the modern blood libel.

This Article by Dinah Bucholz is reprinted from Tangle with permission.

Dinah Bucholz is a bestselling cookbook author, food writer, freelance reporter/writer, and author of the Substack newsletter Jews’ Views.

I am publishing this article as a complement to my last commentary.

Tangle Staff note: Over the course of the war in Gaza, we’ve sought to deliver a diversity of thought about the conflict to complement the viewpoint from Isaac and the rest of our staff. However, our stances have tended towards critical of Israeli actions (including a reader essay last week that mirrored many of the thoughts expressed in Tangle). To balance that out, today we are featuring a piece from Tangle reader Dinah Bucholz arguing that Israel has behaved morally throughout the war and that deeply biased narratives have taken hold in the media (including Tangle). Dinah has remained a Tangle reader and a thoughtful discussant throughout this conflict, even though she disagrees deeply with much of our coverage of the conflict, as have many other pro-Israeli subscribers. Turning the tables feels fair; today, we offer Dinah’s piece in full, and we hope readers will engage with it inquisitively and thoroughly.

About Me.

Growing up in the Orthodox Jewish enclave of Monsey, NY, I spent my childhood in the shadow of the Holocaust. Don’t get me wrong: My childhood was happy and trauma free. But Holocaust survivors back then came a dime a dozen. Every elderly person I knew, including my own grandparents and many of my friends’ as well, spoke English with thick European accents. I remember sitting at the knee of my maternal grandmother, imbibing war stories of hair’s-breadth escapes (my grandfather jumped off a train heading to Auschwitz), as well as hearing stories on my father’s side of last-minute decisions that resulted in his family leaving Hungary before the Holocaust reached his birthplace.

So the idea of Jew hatred was sort of ever-present, in a quiet way, percolating on the back burner. As an adult, I read books on the history of Jew hatred and noticed a pattern familiar to students of Jewish history: that our history alternates between periods of peace and persecution like clockwork. So I always feared that the Golden Age of American Jewry would soon end, perhaps even in my lifetime, if history is to be any guide. Rising Jew hatred for a decade preceding October 7 presaged this ominous but hopefully never-to-happen fate.

All this is to say that the giant wave of Jew hatred unleashed after October 7, 2023, did not surprise me. Plus ça change! That doesn’t mean I accept it. No, I rage against it. I hate that the whole world has once again turned on the Jews. And following another horrifying historical pattern, a minority of Jews along with them. I hate that they believe that Jews are committing genocide, doing to others what was done to them, as they gleefully point out; that Jews are intentionally starving the population of Gaza; that Jews are indiscriminately mowing down desperately hungry civilians at aid sites — and that at last they can hate Jews openly yet virtuously (taking care to call them Zionists, of course).

I want the world to understand that it’s been propagandized against Israel and the Jewish people, that news outlets have been laundering Hamas’s narrative and reselling it as news. But how can I possibly do that on my own? It took people much smarter than me over 300 pages to do all that. It’s like paddling a paper boat into a tsunami: hopeless.

But nevertheless, I must try.

Criticism of Israel.

To start, I want to address something that annoys a lot of people: that criticism of Israel invites accusations of antisemitism. The fact is, though, critics do often cross the line. Why is that? And why is that the case regarding only Israel? It’s strange, especially when you consider the following:

• No one worries about accusations of anti-black racism if they criticize Kenya, or anti-Asian racism if they criticize China, or Islamophobia if they criticize Syria.

• Israel is the only country for which the term anti-“name of country” exists. No one says, “I don’t hate Black people, I’m just anti-Kenya”; “I don’t hate Chinese people, I’m just anti-China”; “I don’t hate Muslims, I’m just anti-Syria.”

• The world expects the government of Israel to conform to a certain standard of behavior to keep diaspora Jews safe and to adjust their policies when violence breaks out. But they do not apply this standard to any other government — not to China, not to Russia, not to anyone.

• No one questions the right of any country to exist, except Israel’s.

To plainly state the case, the normalization of everything on this list stems from old-fashioned Jew hatred. Thus, this normalization makes it all too easy to cross the line, even unwittingly, when criticizing Israel.

How can you avoid this problem, though?

Natan Sharansky, former Soviet dissident, current chairman for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, and Jewish hero, devised a set of criteria called the Three Ds. If you display any one of these in your criticism, then you need to do some soul searching.

• Demonization: This may seem self-explanatory, but it’s actually broader than it seems. Here are some common words used to demonize Israel that you may recognize: genocide, ethnic cleansing, famine, mass starvation. If you think these words are justified against Israel, then please read on.

• Delegitimization: questioning Israel’s right to exist.

• Double standards: judging Israel by a unique standard. If Israel’s conflicts elicit more fury than other conflicts, if the deaths of Arabs by the IDF enrage you but not when Arabs kill other Arabs, if starvation in Gaza horrifies you more than Sudan’s worse crisis, if you scrutinize the actions of Israelis more than other countries, then you have engaged in double standards.

Yet not all are motivated by malice. Some well intended people sincerely believe the charges against Israel. They watch in horror and even heartbreak as most Jews circle the wagons, blinded, they believe, by tribalism to the awful reality that they are doing to others what was done to them, or supporting it. They’re not gleeful. They can’t believe it has come to this

If you’re one of those people, I’m asking you to open your mind to what I have to say. You will read claims you’ve possibly never seen, that you might think are insane. But please hear me out. Everything is backed by hard data, using quantitative analysis and cross referencing where possible from the study linked above, by researchers and academics at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University (the BESA study), as well as other sources.

I’m going to debunk the accusations of genocide and intentional starvation.

Genocide.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the legal definition of genocide is intention (dolus specialis), which must be proved to convict a state actor of genocide. If we examine the statistics of the Israel–Hamas war, we find that the opposite has occurred: Israel has taken excruciating care to minimize harm to civilians.

• Ratio of munitions to casualties. Israel has dropped hundreds of thousands of munitions on Gaza, resulting in a small fraction of people killed per strike (no matter what death toll number you trust), even though each bomb can kill hundreds of people. This result is only possible with the purposeful, intentional care to preserve life.

• Ratio of destroyed homes to casualties. According to the UN and Doctors Without Borders, the IDF has destroyed 70% of all structures and 92% of all residential buildings. Thus, Israel has flattened nearly all the homes in Gaza; but at the same time, it has kept nearly the whole population alive. This result is only possible with the purposeful, intentional care to preserve life.

• Ratio of tons of aid to civilians. According to the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Israel has facilitated 2,135,672 tons of total aid (food, medical supplies, shelter equipment, etc.) as of this writing since the beginning of the war. That’s one ton of aid per person, unprecedented in all of war history. This result is only possible with the purposeful, intentional care to preserve life.

Here are more actions taken that prove the opposite of genocidal intent

• After a polio outbreak in Gaza, Israel vaccinated the child population for polio during wartime.

• Israel has evacuated areas before strikes with millions of leaflets, phone calls, and text messages.

• Israel has sacrificed the military advantage of the element of surprise by broadcasting maps of its movements so civilians will know where to go.

• The total number of Palestinians killed in alleged war crimes, both verified and unverified, is 51.

• Israel has made it crystal clear that Hamas can end the war at any moment by giving up their arms and the hostages.

• Israeli leaders and spokespeople keep repeating the mantra, “For Israel, every civilian death is a tragedy; for Hamas, it is a strategy.”

These are strange actions indeed for a government with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Let me just say this: I have not ever heard any genocide accusers confront these facts and statistics head on, grappling with them in a real and honest way.

What’s more, deliberate massacres generate a lot of forensic evidence, as happened in the Iraq War and in Israel on October 7. There is no forensic evidence of massacres of Palestinians by the IDF.

One more accusation needs to be addressed: that Israel herds people into safe zones only to strike them there. This argument suffers from two flaws. The first is the premise that Israel declared any safe zones. Israel did not, because it cannot. A safe zone can only be designated by both parties, and Hamas has refused to designate any area free from fighting. Instead, Israel has advised evacuating to safer zones (Hamas fighters have evacuated along with civilians; indeed, Hamas commander Mohammed Deif was killed while hiding in a humanitarian zone). However, estimates of fatalities in the safer zones is 2.1–3.5% of all fatalities between May 2024 and March 2025 (according to the limited quantitative data available). This shows that the safer zones are in fact safer.

I want to be very clear: Nothing I write here is intended to deny, dismiss, or downplay the suffering of the Gazan civilian population, God forbid. They are living in a war zone, and war is hell. It may seem churlish and petty, and perhaps even monstrous, to focus on cold, hard statistics when people are suffering so much. But you ought not to assess an accusation, especially a charge as serious as genocide, without assessing these dispassionate facts.

Starvation.

The charge of intentional starvation is based on several flawed assumptions:

• Comparing the amount of aid before the war to wartime. First, the UN and the media have compared the 500 trucks entering Gaza per working day pre-escalation to the number of trucks entering per calendar day during the conflict. Second, the number pre-escalation comprised 50% cement trucks (which were used to build Hamas’s tunnel network). The actual total number of daily food trucks entering Gaza prewar was 73. The UN quietly updated this number, but the claim still circulates, leaving the impression that the number of trucks delivering aid even at the height of the aid surge was woefully inadequate.

• Undercounting the trucks. The UN counted trucks entering only through two crossings, and then only when UN workers were present, resulting in a huge discrepancy between the UN’s numbers and COGAT’s. These numbers were trumpeted all over the place, although the UN quietly corrected their numbers.

• The humanitarian situation in Gaza was already precarious before the war. Whatever restrictions the blockade caused, infant mortality nevertheless steadily dropped while life expectancy steadily increased up until and including 2022 (sharp dips in life expectancy coincide with violent conflict with Israel, especially of course 2023; in previous conflicts recovery was swift).

Here’s the shocker: More aid has been entering Gaza since the war began than before. For example, the average number of daily food trucks in January 2024 was 109; in February, 77; and in March, 119, compared to 73 daily food trucks before the war. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that every projection of mass starvation and mass death from starvation has failed to materialize.

But what about the sieges? It turns out that siege warfare is a permitted tactic in the laws of war under certain conditions. This is a complicated discussion that takes more space than I have here, so I refer you again to the BESA study; but suffice it to say that Israel fulfilled those conditions. In the first two-week siege in October 2023, Israel cut off supply only to Gaza City. Hamas had destroyed the crossings in their attack on Israel, including the pipes that pumped water into Gaza. Israel repaired the pipes in the first weeks of the war and began pumping water into Gaza again. They also repaired the crossings so aid shipments could resume.

Before the second siege from March 2025 to May 2025, Israel calculated that the stockpile of aid in Gaza would last until late July/early August, so they cut off supply to pressure Hamas. The calculation was correct, but they did not foresee a “run on the banks” effect by Hamas and armed gangs, causing a food shortage. The UN insisted this didn’t happen, but strangely their stockpiled supplies were depleted within one month, by April 2025. Although this was a catastrophic mistake on Israel’s part, the fact that they made this calculation proves the opposite of intentional starvation.

UN Bias

How did the UN and the media get so many facts wrong? Several factors are at play. The UN is treated as a credible, respectable institution, but its record on human rights in general and Israel in particular is abysmal.

• Two out of the five permanent countries presiding over the United Nations General Assembly are Russia and China.

• The Human Rights Council (HRC) is made up mostly of outrageous human-rights abusers, including the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (which includes the 22-member Arab League of Nations), with just two full democracies among them.

• From 2006 to 2024, the HRC passed a total of 108 resolutions against Israel and a combined total of 74 against Syria, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela (and zero against China). In 2024 alone, it passed 18 resolutions against Israel versus a total of seven for the rest of the world.

• Israel is the only country in the world with their own exclusive, permanent agenda item at each HRC session.

• In 2021, the HRC set up the Commission of Inquiry into Israel in perpetuity, the only country singled out for perpetual investigation.

• The commissioners appointed by the HRC boast a public record of anti-Israelstatements and/or activism, which violates the UN’s own standards of avoiding even the appearance of partiality. These are the investigators who recently released the UN report on genocide.

• Most egregiously, the UN has still not passed a binding resolution condemning the Hamas attack against Israel; but in 2023, they passed 14 resolutions against Israel, and in 2024, eighteen.

Media Bias

The media is subject to its own deep flaws. The first three in this list are explored at length in the BESA study.

• The inverted information funnel. A wide variety of sources serving the information network actually relies on a narrow core of data, and when you trace the sources back, you get…Hamas or Hamas-affiliated organizations.

• The certainty mirage. When there is only one source of information, we tend to impute credibility to that source; for example, the certainty with which the Gaza Ministry of Health (GMOH) death toll numbers are cited (see note).

• The burden of proof fallacy. This is the phenomenon of accepting uncritically the statements from the GMOH and Palestinian activists, journalists and witnesses, while dismissing the testimony of the IDF, COGAT, and ordinary Israelis (including former hostages). In other words, on the side of Gaza, it’s true until proven false, and on the side of Israel, it’s false until proven true.

• Bias. Everyone is biased; it’s part of the human condition. Bias doesn’t only show in the way journalists present their findings or in what stories they choose to pursue. It also shows up when a story so neatly confirms their priors that they run with it before verifying the facts.

Bias exerts the strongest influence on reporters; the first three problems in the above list flow from bias. This caused false reports, as seen in the infamous Al Ahli hospital strike; the Palestinian Medical Association (PAMA) doctors’ report about children and toddlers deliberately shot by Israeli snipers (more on that soon); the shooting of civilians trying to evacuate and trying to obtain aid; and the photos of emaciated, starving children plastered all over the world’s media.

Note: The Hamas death toll is plagued with problems. It does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. It includes at least some non-violent mortality (for example, the increasing mortality as women age follows the natural pattern). It includes deaths of people executed by Hamas, people killed by Hamas for trying to evacuate and/or obtain aid, and people killed by misfired Hamas rockets. A study by the highly respected polling group Spagat and Shikaki, that perhaps represents the best-faith effort to calculate the death toll of civilians, puts the number at 100,000. However, this study is rife with its own problems, which illustrates the enormous difficulty of obtaining accurate numbers in an active war zone. For example, the study found that Israel is holding over 9,000 Palestinians as prisoners, when the actual number is closer to 2,000. This information can be found in the BESA study.

The Israeli Sniper Allegation

I can’t debunk all of the above in the space allotted, so I will focus on just one, and then I will show how bias influenced the reporting on Israel in these very pages.

The New York Times published an opinion piece by Feroze Sidhwa, a PAMA-associated doctor, alleging that he and his fellow medics treated dozens of preteen children and babies injured or killed with a single shot to the head or chest, proving that IDF soldiers were conducting a systematic massacre of children. Dr. Mark Perlmutter claimed that up to 75% of the surgeries were conducted on school-age children. Others reported treating children with gunshot wounds to the head and chest daily. According to the BESA study, doctors further reported that they did not see a single Hamas fighter in the hospitals. They also described the distinctive sound of the sniper drones (which is how they alleged these children were killed). Finally, many claimed that over 62,000 children had died of malnutrition (this was over a year ago). Sidhwa himself made the case for this in a YouTube interview (timestamp 1:57:03).

Now for the problems in this narrative.

• According to the BESA study, during the time and at the hospital that Mark Perlmutter volunteered, even the GMOH’s numbers show that children made up 16% of all injuries, and most of the patients recorded were adult males. In the European Hospital, where most of the doctors volunteered, during their stay 70% of surgeries were performed on men. The numbers just don’t add up.

• The claim that they saw not a single armed fighter is contradicted by a variety of eyewitnesses, some of them during the same times and places, which makes it impossible to believe that these doctors somehow missed what was in plain sight. See here, here, here (especially egregious, because the AP, Reuters, and the The New York Times deliberately covered up Hamas presence at hospitals), here, and here.

• The IDF does not employ sniper drones.

• A year ago, there were no 62,000 deaths from starvation.

Some of this information, specifically the percentages of people treated for gunshot wounds, was publicly available at the time The New York Times published their story.

Occam’s razor suggests that these doctors were either giving false testimony or at least wildly exaggerating.

Bias at Tangle

How did bias affect Tangle’s coverage of the Israel–Gaza war? (If Tangle publishes this, I will forever be in awe).

Tangle published a link to a video of a crowd of Israelis chanting “Death to the Arabs,” which came from the website of a white supremacist. Tangle apologized for this error. In a newsletter on the Gaza war, Tangle reported that the Bibas mother and babies were killed in an Israeli airstrike, according to Hamas. Although by that point Israeli forensics experts determined that the mother and children were brutally murdered by their captors’ bare hands, this was not reported by Tangle. I did not receive a response to an email message I sent on the matter, and to my knowledge, the information about Israel’s evidence was not included in a later update.

Tangle also included a link to a New York Times photo of an emaciated baby in Gaza. This may well be a verified photo, and if so, apologies. But given the New York Times’ track recordon this, I’m skeptical. (To be clear: I’m not saying there’s no hunger in Gaza; just that it’s been exaggerated out of all proportion, that it wasn’t intentional on Israel’s part, and that UN incompetence and Hamas criminality are to blame.)

Finally, in Isaac’s take on the execution-style killings of children and toddlers, Isaac defends suspending his journalistic skepticism, arguing that if anyone is to be trusted it’s these moral giants, these heroic doctors who risked their lives to enter war zones to treat the sick and wounded. This mistake led him to accept a problematic aspect of the story: How did the doctors know who killed the children? They didn’t witness the killings. Since Hamas shoots their own people, the assumption that Israeli snipers were responsible makes no sense.

Believing that doctors aren’t biased was also mistaken. The organization Feroze Sidhwa belonged to, PAMA, obviously has activist leanings. Sidhwa revealed his own bias in the previously linked interview. Although he strenuously denies any anti-Israel bias, he also says, “Israel has a long history of killing kids” (timestamp 20:09:35).

But the most obvious problem is that in hindsight, the story is impossible.

We should be generous with mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Even in the absence of acknowledgment of error, let’s be charitable. But it must be noted that when your mistakes run in the same direction, that’s a clear indication of bias.

Blood Libel

I have clearly shown that the accusation of genocide against the Jewish state is not only unfounded, but that the IDF takes exceedingly great care to minimize harm to civilian life. Indeed, military analysts have raised the concern that the IDF’s standard will make it harder for other militaries to conduct warfare. This is why I believe that calling the charge of genocide a blood libel is fair. When Israel goes above and beyond what other militaries have ever done in world history to keep civilian casualties low, and the world still screams about the deliberate slaughter of children, then j’accuse the world of blood libel.

The ancient blood libel accused Jews of killing children and babies. This gave Christians the excuse they craved to commit monstrous crimes against the Jewish people. So too, the modern blood libel, which predates October 7, accuses Jews of killing babies, allowing others, when Jews are attacked, to at least partly excuse the violence by blaming the Israeli government. The idea of bloodthirsty Jews slaughtering innocents, but especially children, is an idea that is hard to shake.

I predict that we will find yet another similarity between the ancient libel and the new. When this chapter in history is written, it will be shown that the modern blood libel was just as primitive, crude, and easy to debunk as the ancient blood libel, for anyone who would have been interested to try. And those who engaged in the modern blood libel against Israel will be proved wrong, once again.