From the International Court of Justice to the Venice Film Festival, allegations against Israel are shaping public judgement before the evidence has been fully tested. Christians must resist both indifference to suffering and the ancient habit of condemning the Jewish people through claims they cannot meaningfully answer.
The technology changes. The institutions change. The mechanism of accusation does not.
When Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem’s walls, Sanballat did not challenge the project honestly. He circulated an open letter accusing Nehemiah of plotting rebellion, hoping that an allegation would reach someone powerful enough to act before the truth caught up with it.
Haman employed the same method on a more terrible scale. He told the Persian king that the Jews were a people set apart, with different laws, whose continued existence was not in the king’s interest. The charge was sweeping enough to justify almost anything and vague enough to resist meaningful scrutiny.
In both cases, the accusation did not need to be true. It only needed to be believed by someone with power.
That pattern should be kept in mind as two very different institutions, the International Court of Justice in The Hague and the Venice Film Festival, help shape the world’s judgement of Israel.
The anatomy of a blood libel
The medieval blood libel was the monstrous claim that Jews murdered non-Jewish children for ritual purposes. First recorded in the 12th century, it recurred across Europe for generations.
Its durability depended not only on hatred, but on the way the accusation was constructed. Hidden intent was alleged on the basis of testimony that could not be independently tested. Confessions were extracted under torture. Witnesses were anonymous or compromised. Physical evidence was absent or inaccessible.
Most disturbingly, denial became confirmation. Because Jews were assumed to be capable of concealing their crimes, the absence of evidence was treated as evidence of a cover-up. Nothing the accused could say or do would count as disproof.
A modern blood libel need not repeat the medieval story word for word. It can reproduce its moral structure: an accusation of secret murderous intent, evidence interpreted through a presumption of guilt, and a public verdict reached before the accused has any realistic opportunity to answer.
That does not mean every criticism of Israel is antisemitic. Israel’s conduct, including the conduct of its armed forces, is properly subject to moral and legal scrutiny. Palestinian civilian suffering must never be minimised or treated as an inconvenience. Every human life bears the dignity given by God.
But scrutiny must still be scrutiny. It must test evidence, weigh context and distinguish terrible consequences from deliberate intent.
A consequential case in The Hague
The International Court of Justice is preparing to rule in The Gambia v Myanmar, a case alleging genocide against the Rohingya people. Although the dispute does not concern Israel, the Court’s treatment of genocidal intent may influence South Africa’s pending genocide case against Israel.
Genocide is not established merely by showing that large numbers of civilians have died. The Genocide Convention requires proof of a specific intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
The ICJ has previously held that, when genocidal intent is inferred from a pattern of conduct, it must be “the only reasonable inference” available from the evidence.
In 2023, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom jointly intervened in the Myanmar proceedings. Their submission urged the Court to consider evidence of intent holistically and warned against making the threshold so demanding that genocide becomes practically impossible to prove. The intervention and its reasoning are matters of public record.
The concern is what may follow if “holistic” reasoning weakens the requirement to exclude other reasonable explanations.
The Hague Initiative for International Cooperation argues that such a change could make civilian deaths, displacement and destruction in war sufficient to support an inference of genocidal intent, even where legitimate military explanations remain plausible. It warns that the consequences would extend beyond Israel to Western states fighting terrorist organisations embedded within civilian populations.
Legal scholars Orde Kittrie and Andrés Muñoz-Mosquera have made a similar argument, claiming that some advocates expressly regard a lower threshold in the Myanmar case as a way to prepare the ground for a genocide finding against Israel.
That alleged strategy has not been established as fact. Nor has the Court delivered its decision. The six intervening governments would argue that they are seeking a more realistic way to identify a crime often committed behind official denials and incomplete records.
Nevertheless, the concern deserves serious attention. A legal standard must not be adjusted to secure a desired result in one politically charged case. Once altered, it will govern cases involving other nations, other wars and other defendants.
The question is not whether Israel should be beyond judgement. It is whether the evidence permits genocidal intent to be distinguished from the brutal consequences of warfare against Hamas. If plausible alternative explanations are discarded in advance, the proceeding risks becoming a mechanism for confirming a conclusion already reached.
A verdict delivered in Venice
A related problem appeared in a very different setting at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival.
NAZA, directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, received a reported 25-minute standing ovation and won the Special Jury Prize. The 80-minute documentary draws on interviews with 24 anonymous Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel. Its official synopsis claims to expose systems behind Israel’s “calculated mass killing” of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
These are allegations of the utmost seriousness. They should be heard, investigated and tested.
Anonymity does not automatically make testimony false. Confidential sources are a legitimate part of journalism, particularly when speakers may face professional or personal consequences. Abraham has said the attacks directed at the film help explain why participants feared being identified. The producers maintain that the testimonies were verified, and several of the film’s broader claims had previously appeared in investigative reporting. (Associated Press)
Yet anonymity also limits what viewers can independently assess. They cannot examine the witnesses’ identities, service histories, units, access to relevant decisions or possible motives. Edited testimony is not cross-examination, and a film festival is not a court.
Operational context matters as well. Hamas has fought from a densely populated civilian environment and used tunnels and civilian infrastructure. Commanders are required to consider anticipated civilian harm against concrete military advantage. That calculation can be disputed, and particular strikes may prove unlawful, but its existence is not by itself evidence of a policy to murder civilians.
The danger, then, is not that the witnesses have been allowed to speak. They should be heard. The danger is that artistic acclaim may turn grave allegations into an accepted verdict before the underlying evidence can be adequately examined.
A standing ovation proves that a film has moved its audience. It does not prove the film’s case.
Truth demands more than taking sides
Christians must be careful here.
We need not collapse biblical Israel, the Jewish people and the modern State of Israel into a single theological category to recognise the persistence of anti-Jewish falsehood. Nor should solidarity with Israel become an excuse to disregard Palestinian suffering or dismiss credible evidence of wrongdoing.
Our responsibility is harder and holier: to refuse both partiality and slander.
Scripture repeatedly condemns false witness, corrupt judgement and the shedding of innocent blood. Those commands apply whether the accused is popular or despised, and whether the victim is Israeli or Palestinian. Justice cannot be built by hiding inconvenient facts, but neither can it be built by declaring hidden murderous intent wherever war produces horrific loss.
Nehemiah answered Sanballat plainly: “There are no such things done as thou sayest, but thou feignest them out of thine own heart.”
That was not panic. It was not silence. It was a direct refusal to permit accusation to masquerade as evidence.
Christians should pray for that same discernment: for judges who will resist political pressure, journalists and filmmakers who will test even the stories they find morally compelling, and leaders who will pursue justice without turning suffering into propaganda.
We should pray, too, for every innocent person caught in war, for the exposure of genuine wrongdoing and for the defeat of every lie. Our hope is not finally in courts, governments or festivals, but in the Messiah whose kingdom will bring hidden things to light and judge the nations in righteousness.
Until that day, we must be courageous enough to speak and humble enough to test what we hear. Truth does not fear investigation. It fears only the verdict delivered before the evidence arrives.