Humanitarian giants under fire for misusing “genocide” against Israel: Marika Sboros

Key topics:

• Humanitarian NGOs face criticism for politicising the term “genocide.”

• Oxfam, MSF, and Gift of the Givers accused of bias against Israel.

• Misuse of “genocide” risks undermining trust and historical truth.

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By Marika Sboros

There was a time when the word, genocide, travelled slowly, truthfully across the globe. It carried weight and gravitas. 

It moved with the solemn pace of courts, bewigged judges, lawyers, historians and survivors of true genocide.

Genocide drew its meaning from the ashes of the crematoria of the Holocaust by Nazi Germany during World War II. It was meant to be a rare word. Almost sacred.  Precise in depicting the “Crime of Crimes” that forced invention of the word, genocide, in the first place. 

Today genocide flies across continents like stars on steroids. Its casual misuse and abuse by some of the most recognisable names in global humanitarianism tells us something about the moral moment we inhabit. 

Among the latest custodians of this linguistic debasement are Oxfam GB, Médecins Sans Frontières (French for Doctors Without Borders) and South Africa’s proudly home-grown Gift of the Givers.

All do vital, sometimes heroic work. They deliver food, medicine, shelter and logistics where governments fail and disasters strike.

All have something else in common: a creeping sameness in gratuitous use of genocide against Israel and Jews who support it. They’ve made genocide a linguistic weapon in the Gaza war and a wider struggle over law, language and the moral credibility of the global humanitarian mission.

In Britain, Oxfam GB – the original affiliate of the Oxfam confederation – provides a revealing case study as a “storied institution”. Founded in 1942 as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, hence the acronym, its mission was to persuade the British government to allow food relief to starving Greek civilians under Nazi occupation.

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Fast forward more than eight decades and Oxfam has evolved into a global confederation of 21 affiliates with a dual mission: disaster relief and campaigning against global inequality.

Oxfam GB drifted into a different line of work after the terror attack by Hamas against civilians in Israel on October 7, 2023: highly combustible political activism against Israel.

Enter Dr Halima Begum, the British-Bangladeshi academic and development expert who became Oxfam GB’s first woman-of-colour chief executive in December 2024. 

Begum was brought in to “decolonise” the institution.

Her academic pedigree is impeccable. She has a BSc in Government and History and an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics (LSE). Her PhD is in Political and Human Geography from Queen Mary University of London. In 2024, she received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the university.

Her tenure at Oxfam GB ended abruptly in late 2025 after a leadership review, which she describes as an orchestrated “witch-hunt”. 

Begum did not go quietly. She set off a whistleblowing flare on her way out, the fallout of which sent shockwaves through Oxfam’s global confederation and the NGO world.  She has launched a scathing, legal offensive against her former employer. 

In her Employment Tribunal filing and a high-profile Channel 4 interview in February 2026, Begum claims that an "institutional whiteness" and "toxic antisemitic culture" infects Oxfam GB’s very heart. 

Her core allegation revolves around the “Gaza exception”. She accuses Oxfam GB of prematurely and ideologically promoting the "genocide" label against Israel in Gaza to appease its activist wing. 

She claims "toxic" internal pressure specifically targeting Israel while ignoring horrors in other areas, such as El-Fasher in Sudan – despite UN investigators finding clear "hallmarks of genocide" in the Sudanese sand. 

Begum also claims that Oxfam GB created a hostile environment for Jewish staff. Its “sidelining of nuanced perspectives” in favour of a singular, politicised, anti-Israel narrative left Jews feeling “unsafe”. 

Oxfam rejects Begum’s allegations and says its use of the term, genocide, followed formal, legal “review”.

The dispute triggered an inquiry by the UK Charity Commission. The regulator is examining whether Oxfam GB’s advocacy crossed the legal boundary separating charitable work from political campaigning.

Under British law, charities’ activities must align with stated humanitarian purposes, not partisan or ideological agendas. Whether Oxfam GB crossed that line remains for regulators to determine. 

The controversy raises broader questions about the humanitarian sector’s relationship with political advocacy and truth-telling. 

Critics argue that similar scrutiny easily extends to MSF and Gift of the Givers. 

For decades, MSF cultivated a powerful reputation based on “témoignage” – the moral duty to bear witness and alert the world to suffering and atrocities in war zones.  In the Gaza war, MSF’s reputation has come under intense pressure. 

The charity has repeatedly accused Israel of deliberately targeting medical facilities and humanitarian workers. Israeli officials, in turn, have argued that armed groups, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), deliberately embed military infrastructure inside hospitals and clinics and use “human shields” to increase civilians deaths and garner sympathy on a world stage. 

Recent incidents support that claim. One widely interrogated case involved Fadi al-Wadiya, an MSF physiotherapist killed by an Israeli strike in June 2024. MSF initially condemned the killing as an attack on a humanitarian worker. 

That narrative imploded after PIJ publicly honoured al-Wadiya as a senior member of its military wing. It raised questions about MSF staff vetting procedures (or lack thereof) and broader challenges facing humanitarian organisations in highly militarised environments.

Al-Wadiya proved no exception. Further cases linked MSF medical personnel to Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza. These do not necessarily prove institutional complicity by MSF. They do highlight the risks of operating in territories where armed groups control civilian infrastructure.

The deeper concern is whether MSF’s increasingly strident rhetoric against Israel compromises the neutrality that once defined it.

South Africa’s Gift of the Givers presents a different, no less compelling case.

Founded in 1992 by medical doctor Imtiaz Sooliman, the charity has an impressive reputation as one of the African continent’s most effective disaster-response organisations.

Gift of the Givers has delivered billions of rands of aid in more than 47 countries, including Bosnia, Somalia, Syria, Haiti, Yemen and Gaza. It is widely admired for rapid deployment, low administrative overheads and ability to operate in difficult conflict zones.

Its longstanding presence in Gaza since 2009 has drawn criticism and claims (hotly denied by Sooliman) that donations for humanitarian aid found their way, by default or design, into Hamas’s pockets. 

Critics argue that public statements by Gift of the Givers leadership blur the line between humanitarian work and political advocacy. Sooliman hasn’t helped with his language invoking antisemitic tropes and genocide references against Israel and “Zionists” (the anti-Israel lobby’s code word for Jews).  

To the casual reader the implication is unmistakable: Israel is committing the “Crime of Crimes”. That’s a grave, highest-order legal accusation, which none of these organisations has the legal, moral authority to make.

Doing so before an unequivocal court ruling is not rhetorical flourish. It is moral inversion and historical revision. Genocide, after all, is not a slogan and the legal threshold for a legal finding is deliberately high.

Under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, it requires proof of specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

Determining such intent is not the purview of activists, charities or social-media campaigns. It belongs to courts, such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

These institutions were created to examine evidence, test witnesses and weigh competing legal arguments. They are not meant to operate on miasma, rhetoric and press releases.

Still, some humanitarian charities use the accusation of genocide as advocacy to mobilise outrage, donations and political pressure. That’s the moral equivalent of shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre. The alarm spreads before anyone bothers to check whether there’s smoke, much less fire.

The scaffold buttressing the absurdity behind genocide claims remains: 

Jews were the primary victims of the crime that inspired the word, genocide. The Nazis murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust. The modern State of Israel emerged partly from the world’s recognition that Jews needed a place where such annihilation could never happen again. 

The October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas against Israeli civilians had all the hallmarks of genocidal intent. Hamas, PIJ and other terror groups have “the same genocidal message baked into their charters – the extermination of the Jews”, as a critic noted.

That history should impose a degree of humility on those accusing Israel of genocide while giving Hamas a free pass for boasting of its genuinely genocidal intent on October 7 – and promising to repeat it “over and over until Israel is annihilated”. 

The genocide claims continue unabated, likely because of a unique existential burden Jews face as the target of the “world’s oldest hatred”, as Jew hatred is well-known. 

British author, humourist and Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson identified it 12 years ago in an article posing the rhetorical question: “Will Jews ever be forgiven for The Holocaust?” 

His correct answer: “Never.”

Jacobson wrote a flurry of columns for The Observer in the UK after October 7. In them, he vents his fury at “progressives” (who proliferate in humanitarian and human rights charities) who downplayed the barbaric mass murder and rape Hamas perpetrated on the day. 

He argues that those same people exaggerated Israel’s response to the massacre. 

He points out that “genocides don’t leaflet the populations they want to destroy with warnings to stay out of harm’s way”.

That essentially leaves Israel looking very good at war and very bad at genocide. 

Jacobson’s latest book, Howl (Jonathan Cape, 2026) is a novel based on the reality of October 7 atrocities and hysterically funny with it.  

Only he could get the delicate balance of humour and horror just right. His book is respite for all who would weep even more were they not able occasionally to laugh after October 7.  

One might expect humanitarian organisations to exercise particular caution in invoking genocide under such circumstances. 

They present themselves as guardians of moral clarity and defenders of international law. But law and morality still depend primarily on truth and truth requires restraint. 

In an increasingly competitive marketplace of attention, outrage travels faster than sober legal analysis and truth, helped by the word, genocide, as the nuclear weapon of political language. 

It guarantees headlines. It allows “falsehood to fly and the truth to come limping after.”

The credibility of humanitarian organisations continues to rest firmly on public trust. And when they stretch the truth, they diminish trust. Misusing genocide erodes its meaning and cheapens the suffering of those who experienced the real thing. If everything is genocide, then nothing is genocide.

Truth-telling in humanitarian work is a foundation, not a luxury. 

Without it, even the most well-intentioned humanitarian charity becomes something else entirely: a storyteller. And not always a truthful one.