Leading genocide scholars see a genocide happening in Gaza
Israeli officials and politicians have rejected the accusation, insisting upon Israel’s right to self-defense in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
This week, two prominent Israeli human rights organizations joined a growing chorus: B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel released separate reports laying out the case that Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip amounted to genocide. Their assessments dovetailed with the conclusions already made by a number of leading international rights groups, foreign governments and scholars of genocide studies in the 21 months since the militant group Hamas provoked Israel’s military campaign in Gaza with its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel.
The Israeli military has since damaged or destroyed most of Gaza’s buildings, flattened the majority of its neighborhoods and repeatedly displaced the territory’s Palestinian population through evacuation orders and relentless bombardments. More than 60,000 people have been killed, according to local health authorities, and famine is “playing out” among the surviving population, per U.N. monitors, as it is experiencing “widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease.” That is driving a rise in hunger-related deaths after months of Israeli blockade and restrictions on humanitarian assistance.
The two Israeli rights groups said both Israel’s conduct during the war and the rhetoric of numerous Israeli political and military leaders demonstrated “deliberate intent by Israeli decision-makers to target the whole population of Gaza rather than strictly combatants and to destroy life for the Palestinian people,” as my colleagues reported. Those Israeli leaders have called for, among other things, the denial of food and water to Gaza’s civilians and the ethnic cleansing of the territory.
“Every genocide in history has had a justification, at least in the eyes of those who committed it: of self-defense in the face of existential danger, of a war of no choice, of victims who had ‘brought it upon themselves,’” said Yuli Novak, B’Tselem’s director.
The charge of “genocide” is loaded and fraught, not least when invoked against a country born out of the experience of the Holocaust. The term was coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to detail the Nazis’ systematic project of murdering Jews and codified by the U.N.’s 1948 convention on genocide as a crime carrying the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Israeli officials and politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have angrily rejected the allegation as “blood libel” and insist upon Israel’s right to self-defense in the wake of Hamas’s atrocities and abduction of hostages. Those remonstrations have not deterred Israel’s fiercest critics from using the word, a growing camp that includes leftist activists, Middle Eastern potentates and a cadre of U.S. lawmakers.
The governments that have accused Israel at the International Court of Justice of carrying out genocide believe sufficient evidence exists to show that Israel intends to make Palestinian life impossible in Gaza. In this view, they are backed by an emerging number of genocide scholars. As early as December 2023, the institute on genocide prevention that bears Lemkin’s name put out a statement warning about “the clearly genocidal language being used at virtually all levels of Israeli society,” while also condemning Hamas’s actions on Oct. 7.
Martin Shaw — the leading sociological expert on genocide and author of the 2007 book, “What Is Genocide?” — wrote last week that many Western leaders and journalists have been determined “to avoid, at all costs, the ‘G-word’ in evaluating Israel’s actions,” partially given the sensitivities around the word, but also because they accepted Israel’s argument of self-defense against Hamas and the insistence of Israeli officials that they were trying to alleviate civilian harm.
But, Shaw argued, the accumulation of misery and suffering in Gaza over the past 21 months and the shambolic efforts by an Israeli-backed initiative to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza since the March collapse of a short-lived ceasefire means “the dam of interpretive genocide denial has well and truly broken.”
Omer Bartov, a prominent Holocaust historian at Brown University, generated headlines a couple of weeks ago with a New York Times op-ed arguing that genocide was happening in Gaza. In a later CNN interview, Bartov explained that he initially believed Israel was possibly committing war crimes but not genocide. But the implementation of policies to punish the entire population of Gaza “has become much worse” in the ensuing months, he said, and Israel’s destruction of civilian infrastructure, hospitals, museums, universities and “anything that would make it possible for a population after a war to try to reconstitute itself” in Gaza also bolsters the genocide charge.
Bartov is far from alone. In June, Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an association of over 700 scholars, said in an interview that “what is happening in Gaza constitutes genocide” and fits within legal definitions of the crime outlined by the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Taner Akcam, Marianne Hirsch and Michael Rothberg, academics who helped found the Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network, which saw more than 400 scholars join after its April launch, wrote in a Guardian op-ed this week that Israeli officials and their allies have “justified genocidal violence against Palestinians by equating Hamas with Nazism, instrumentalizing the memory of the Holocaust to advance, rather than prevent, mass violence.”
In May, the Dutch newspaper NRC surveyed seven prominent genocide scholars who unanimously concurred that genocide in Gaza was taking place. Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and director of the program of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, was one of the earliest researchers in the field to point to genocide, warning just a week after the Oct. 7 attack that a “textbook case of genocide” was unfurling in Gaza. He scoffed to NRC that no important figure in his field now doubted the claim. “Can I name someone whose work I respect who does not think it is genocide? No, there is no counterargument that takes into account all the evidence,” he said.
Some historians disagree. Norman Goda and Jeffrey Herf, historians of the Holocaust and Europe, wrote in The Washington Post’s opinion pages earlier this year that the genocide charge against Israel smacked of antisemitism and “draws on deep wells of fear and hatred” toward Jews prevalent in both Christianity and Islam.
Still, Daniel Blatman and Amos Goldberg, historians of the Holocaust and genocide studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, argued earlier this year that, for Israel, the reckoning would reach far beyond the academy.
“Once the war ends, we Israelis will have to look at ourselves in the mirror, in which we will see the reflection of a society that not [only] did not protect its citizens from Hamas’ murderous attack, and neglected its kidnapped sons and daughters, but also committed this act in Gaza — this genocide that will stain Jewish history from now on and forever,” they wrote in Haaretz in January. “We will need to face the reality and understand the depth of the horror we have inflicted.”