Genocide defined: the deliberate
killing
of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with
the aim of destroying
that
nation or group.
"a campaign of genocide"
On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 4:04 PM Martin Wasserman wrote:
> It appears that "genocide" can be defined in several different ways.
> Perhaps we should stop using that term altogether and stick to words that
> have clear and unambiguous meanings.
>
>
> On Jul 18, 2025, at 12:25 PM, Aram James wrote:
>
>
> *I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It”: Prof. Omer Bartov on
> the Growing Consensus on Gaza*
>
>
> *My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide
> against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived
> the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and
> officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes
> and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I
> resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide
> for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one*
>
>
>
> A month after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, I believed there
> was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and
> potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But
> contrary to the cries of Israel’s fiercest critics, the evidence did not
> seem to me to rise to the crime of genocide.
> By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million
> Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining
> relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of
> the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded
> to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August
>
> .
> At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of
> I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal
> intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime
> Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a “huge
> price
> ”
> for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas
> was operating, “into rubble
> ,” and
> he called
> on
> “the residents of Gaza” to “leave now because we will operate forcefully
> everywhere.”
> Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember “what Amalek did to you,
> ” a
> quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage
> calling for the Israelites to “kill alike men and women, infants and
> sucklings” of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said
> they were fighting “human animals”
> and,
> later, called for “total annihilation
> .”
> Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on X
> that Israel’s task must
> be “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” Israel’s actions
> could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to
> make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe
> the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the
> Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate
> the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water,
> sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for
> Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.
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> My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide
> against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived
> the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and
> officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes
> and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I
> resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide
> for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.
> This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide
> studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza
> can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese
> ,
> the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty
> International.
> South
> Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International
> Court of Justice.
> Image
> [image: People inspecting a huge pile of rubble.]
> Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press
> The continued denial of this designation by states, international
> organizations and legal and scholarly experts will cause unmitigated damage
> not just to the people of Gaza and Israel but also to the system of
> international law established in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust,
> designed to prevent such atrocities from happening ever again. It is a
> threat to the very foundations of the moral order on which we all depend.
> ***
> The crime of genocide was defined
> in 1948 by the
> United Nations as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
> ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” In determining what
> constitutes genocide, therefore, we must both establish intent and show
> that it is being carried out. In Israel’s case, that intent has been
> publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. But intent can also
> be derived from a pattern of operations on the ground, and this pattern
> became clear by May 2024 — and has since become ever clearer — as the
> I.D.F. has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip.
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> Most genocide scholars are cautious about applying this term to
> contemporary events, precisely because of the tendency, since it was coined
> by the Jewish-Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, to attribute it to any
> case of massacre or inhumanity. Indeed, some argue that the categorization
> should be entirely discarded, because it often serves more to express
> outrage than to identify a particular crime.
> Yet as Mr. Lemkin recognized, and as the United Nations later agreed, it
> is crucial to be able to distinguish the attempt to destroy a particular
> group of people from other crimes under international law, such as war
> crimes and crimes against humanity. This is because, while other crimes
> entail indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians as individuals,
> genocide denotes the killing of people as members of a group, geared at
> irreparably destroying the group itself so that it would never be able to
> reconstitute itself as a political, social or cultural entity. And, as the
> international community signaled by adopting the convention, it is
> incumbent upon all signatory states to prevent such an attempt, to do all
> they can to stop it while it is occurring and to subsequently punish those
> who were engaged in this crime of crimes — even if it occurred within the
> borders of a sovereign state.
> The designation has major political, legal and moral ramifications.
> Nations, politicians and military personnel suspected of, indicted on a
> charge of or found guilty of genocide are seen as beyond the pale of
> humanity and may compromise or lose their right to remain members of the
> international community. A finding by the International Court of Justice
> that a particular state is engaged in genocide, especially if enforced by
> the U.N. Security Council, can lead to severe sanctions.
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> Politicians or generals indicted on a charge of or found guilty of
> genocide or other breaches of international humanitarian law by the
> International Criminal Court can face arrest outside of their country. And
> a society that condones and is complicit in genocide, whatever the stand of
> its individual citizens may be, will carry this mark of Cain long after the
> fires of hatred and violence are put out.
> ***
> Israel has denied all allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity
> and genocide. The I.D.F. says it investigates reports of crimes, although
> it has rarely made its findings public, and when breaches of discipline or
> protocol are acknowledged, it has generally meted out light reprimands to
> its personnel. Israeli military and political leaders repeatedly describe
> the I.D.F. as acting lawfully, say they issue warnings to civilian
> populations to evacuate sites about to be attacked and blame Hamas for
> using civilians as human shields.
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> In fact, the systematic
> destruction
> in Gaza not only of housing but also of other infrastructure — government
> buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage
> sites, water treatment plants, agriculture areas, and parks — reflects a
> policy aimed at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory
> highly unlikely.
> According to a recent investigation by Haaretz, an estimated
> 174,000
> buildings have been destroyed or damaged, accounting for up to 70 percent
> of all structures in the Strip. So far, more than 58,000 people
> have
> been killed, according to Gazan health authorities, including
> more
> than 17,000 children, who make up nearly a third of the total fatality
> count. More than 870 of
> those children were less than a year old.
> More than 2,000 families
> have
> been wiped out, the health authorities said. In addition, 5,600 families
> now count only one survivor. At least 10,000 people are believed
> to still be buried under
> the ruins of their homes. More than 138,000 have been wounded and maimed.
> Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number
> of
> amputee children per capita
> in
> the world. An entire generation of children subjected to ongoing military
> attacks, loss of parents and long-term malnutrition will suffer severe
> physical and mental repercussions for the rest of their lives. Untold
> additional thousands of chronically ill persons have had little access to
> hospital care
>
> .
> The horror of what has been happening in Gaza is still described by most
> observers as war. But this is a misnomer. For the last year, the I.D.F. has
> not been fighting an organized military body. The version of Hamas that
> planned and carried out the attacks on Oct. 7 has been destroyed, though
> the weakened group continues to fight Israeli forces and retains control
> over the population in areas not held by the Israeli Army.
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> Today the I.D.F. is primarily engaged in an operation of demolition and
> ethnic cleansing. That’s how Mr. Netanyahu’s own former chief of staff and
> minister of defense, the hard-liner Moshe Yaalon, in November described
> on
> Israel’s Democrat TV and in subsequent articles
>
> and interviews
> the
> attempt to clear northern Gaza of its population.
> Image
> [image: A man in shadow sorts through the rubble of a home.]
> Credit...Mahmoud Issa/Reuters
> On Jan. 19, under pressure from Donald Trump, who was a day away from
> resuming the presidency, a cease-fire went into effect, facilitating the
> exchange of hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. But after
> Israel’s breaking of the cease-fire on March 18, the I.D.F. has been
> executing a well-publicized plan to concentrate
> the
> entire Gazan population in a quarter
> of
> the territory in three zones
> :
> Gaza City, the central refugee camps and the Mawasi coastline in the
> Strip’s southwestern edge.
> Using large numbers of bulldozers and huge aerial bombs supplied by the
> United States, the military appears to be trying to demolish every
> remaining structure and establish control over the other three-quarters
> of
> the territory.
> This is also being facilitated by a plan
> that provides —
> intermittently — limited aid supplies at a few distribution points guarded
> by the Israeli military, drawing people to the south. Many Gazans are
> killed
> in
> a desperate attempt to obtain food, and the starvation crisis deepens
> . On July 7, Defense
> Minister Israel Katz said
> the
> I.D.F. would build a “humanitarian city” over the ruins of Rafah to
> initially accommodate 600,000 Palestinians from the Mawasi area, who would
> be provisioned by international bodies and not allowed to leave.
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> ***
> Some might describe this campaign as ethnic cleansing, not genocide. But
> there is a link between the crimes. When an ethnic group has nowhere to go
> and is constantly displaced from one so-called safe zone to another,
> relentlessly bombed and starved, ethnic cleansing can morph into genocide.
> This was the case in several well-known genocides of the 20th century,
> such as that of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, now
> Namibia, that began in 1904; the Armenians in World War I; and, indeed,
> even in the Holocaust, which began with the German attempt to expel the
> Jews and ended up with their murder.
> To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust
> —
> and no institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating it — have
> issued warnings that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes,
> crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This silence has
> made a mockery of the slogan “Never again,” transforming its meaning from
> an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an
> excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by
> invoking one’s own past victimhood.
> This is another of the many incalculable costs of the current catastrophe.
> As Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza and
> is exercising increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank,
> the moral and historical credit that the Jewish state has drawn on until
> now is running out.
> Israel, created in the wake of the Holocaust as the answer to the Nazi
> genocide of the Jews, has always insisted that any threat to its security
> must be seen as potentially leading to another Auschwitz. This provides
> Israel with license to portray those it perceives as its enemies as Nazis —
> a term used
> repeatedly
> by Israeli media figures to depict
> Hamas
> and, by extension, all
> Gazans, based on the popular assertion that none of them are “uninvolved,”
> not even the infants, who would grow up to be militants.
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> This is not a new phenomenon. As early as Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in
> 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasir Arafat, then hunkered
> down in Beirut, to Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker. This time, the
> analogy is being used in connection with a policy aimed at uprooting and
> removing the entire population of Gaza.
> The daily scenes of horror in Gaza, from which the Israeli public is
> shielded by its own media’s self-censorship, expose the lies of Israeli
> propaganda that this is a war of defense against a Nazi-like enemy. One
> shudders when Israeli spokespeople shamelessly utter the hollow slogan of
> the I.D.F. being the “most moral army in the world.”
> Some European nations, such as France, Britain and Germany, as well as
> Canada, have feebly protested Israeli actions, especially since it breached
> the cease-fire in March. But they have neither suspended arms shipments nor
> taken many concrete and meaningful economic or political steps
> that
> might deter Mr. Netanyahu’s government.
> For a while, the United States government seemed to have lost interest in
> Gaza, with President Trump initially announcing
> in
> February that the United States would take over Gaza, promising to turn it
> into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” and then letting Israel get on with
> the Strip’s destruction and turning his attention to Iran. At the moment,
> one can only hope that Mr. Trump will again pressure a reluctant Mr.
> Netanyahu to at least reach a new cease-fire and put an end to the
> relentless killing.
> ***
> How will Israel’s future be affected by the inevitable demolition of its
> incontestable morality, derived from its birth in the ashes of the
> Holocaust?
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> Israel’s political leadership and its citizenry will have to decide. There
> seems to be little domestic pressure for the urgently needed change of
> paradigm: the recognition that there is no solution to this conflict other
> than an Israeli-Palestinian agreement to share the land under whatever
> parameters the two sides agree on, be it two states, one state or a
> confederation. Robust external pressure from the country’s allies also
> appears unlikely. I am deeply worried that Israel will persist on its
> disastrous course, remaking itself, perhaps irreversibly, into a full-blown
> authoritarian apartheid state. Such states, as history has taught us, do
> not last.
> Another question arises: What consequences will Israel’s moral reversal
> have for the culture of Holocaust commemoration, and the politics of
> memory, education and scholarship, when so many of its intellectual and
> administrative leaders have up to now refused to face up to their
> responsibility to denounce inhumanity and genocide wherever they occur?
> Those engaged in the worldwide culture of commemoration and remembrance
> built around the Holocaust will have to confront a moral reckoning. The
> wider community of genocide scholars — those engaged in the study of
> comparative genocide or of any one of the many other genocides that have
> marred human history — is now edging ever closer toward a consensus over
> describing events in Gaza as a genocide.
> In November, a little more than a year into the war, the Israeli genocide
> scholar Shmuel Lederman joined
> the growing chorus of
> opinion that Israel was engaged in genocidal actions. The Canadian
> international lawyer William Schabas came to the same conclusion last year
> and has recently described Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as
> “absolutely” a genocide.
> Other genocide experts, such as Melanie O’Brien
> ,
> president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the
> British specialist Martin Shaw (who has also said that the Hamas attack
> was genocidal),
> have
> reached the same conclusion, while the Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses
> of the City
> University of New York described
> these
> events in the Dutch publication NRC as a “mix of genocidal and military
> logic.” In the same article, Uğur Ümit Üngör, a professor at the
> Amsterdam-based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies,
> said there are probably scholars who still do not think it’s genocide, but
> “I don’t know them.”
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> Most Holocaust scholars I know don’t hold, or at least publicly express,
> this view. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Israeli Raz Segal
> , program
> director of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New
> Jersey, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem historians Amos Goldberg
> and Daniel Blatman,
> the
> majority of academics engaged with the history of the Nazi genocide of the
> Jews have stayed remarkably silent, while some have openly denied Israel’s
> crimes in Gaza, or accused their more critical colleagues of incendiary
> speech, wild exaggeration, well poisoning and antisemitism.
> In December the Holocaust scholar Norman J.W. Goda opined
> that
> “genocide charges like this have long been used as a fig leaf for broader
> challenges to Israel’s legitimacy,” expressing his worry that “they have
> cheapened the gravity of the word genocide itself.” This “genocide libel,”
> as Dr. Goda referred to it in an essay
> ,
> “deploys a range of antisemitic tropes,” including “the coupling of the
> genocide charge with the deliberate killing of children, images of whom are
> ubiquitous on NGO, social media, and other platforms that charge Israel
> with genocide.”
> In other words, showing images of Palestinian children ripped apart by
> U.S.-made bombs launched by Israeli pilots is, in this view, an antisemitic
> act.
> Most recently, Dr. Goda and a respected historian of Europe, Jeffrey Herf,
> wrote
> in
> The Washington Post that “the genocide accusation hurled against Israel
> draws on deep wells of fear and hatred” found in “radical interpretations
> of both Christianity and Islam.” It “has shifted opprobrium from Jews as a
> religious/ethnic group to the state of Israel, which it depicts as
> inherently evil.”
> ***
> What are the ramifications of this rift between genocide scholars and
> Holocaust historians? This is not merely a squabble within academe. The
> memory culture created in recent decades around the Holocaust encompasses
> much more than the genocide of the Jews. It has come to play a crucial role
> in politics, education and identity.
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> Museums dedicated to the Holocaust have served as models for
> representations of other genocides around the world. Insistence that the
> lessons of the Holocaust demand the promotion of tolerance, diversity,
> antiracism and support for migrants and refugees, not to mention human
> rights and international humanitarian law, is rooted in an understanding of
> the universal implications of this crime in the heart of Western
> civilization at the peak of modernity.
> Discrediting genocide scholars who call out Israel’s genocide in Gaza as
> antisemitic threatens to erode the foundation of genocide studies: the
> ongoing need to define, prevent, punish and reconstruct the history of
> genocide. Suggesting that this endeavor is motivated instead by malign
> interests and sentiments — that it is driven by the very hatred and
> prejudice that was at the root of the Holocaust — is not only morally
> scandalous, it provides an opening for a politics of denialism and impunity
> as well.
> By the same token, when those who have dedicated their careers to teaching
> and commemorating the Holocaust insist on ignoring or denying Israel’s
> genocidal actions in Gaza, they threaten to undermine everything that
> Holocaust scholarship and commemoration have stood for in the past several
> decades. That is, the dignity of every human being, respect for the rule of
> law and the urgent need never to let inhumanity take over the hearts of
> people and steer the actions of nations in the name of security, national
> interest and sheer vengeance.
> Image
> [image: People at a beach and in the water as the sun sets.]
> Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
> What I fear is that in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide, it will no
> longer be possible to continue teaching and researching the Holocaust in
> the same manner we did before. Because the Holocaust has been so
> relentlessly invoked by the state of Israel and its defenders as a cover-up
> for the crimes of the I.D.F., the study and remembrance of the Holocaust
> could lose its claim to be concerned with universal justice and retreat
> into the same ethnic ghetto in which it began its life at the end of World
> War II — as a marginalized preoccupation by the remnants of a marginalized
> people, an ethnically specific event, before it succeeded, decades later,
> to find its rightful place as a lesson and a warning for humanity as a
> whole.
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>
> Just as worrisome is the prospect that the study of genocide as a whole
> will not survive the accusations of antisemitism, leaving us without the
> crucial community of scholars and international jurists to stand in the
> breach at a time when the rise of intolerance, racial hatred, populism and
> authoritarianism is threatening the values that were at the core of these
> scholarly, cultural and political endeavors of the 20th century.
> Perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the
> possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future
> without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have
> to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name. Israel
> will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as
> justification for inhumanity. That, despite all the horrific suffering we
> are currently watching, is a valuable thing, and may, in the long run, help
> Israel face the future in a healthier, more rational and less fearful and
> violent manner.
>
> This will do nothing to compensate for the staggering amount of death and
> suffering of Palestinians. But an Israel liberated from the overwhelming
> burden of the Holocaust may finally come to terms with the inescapable need
> for its seven million Jewish citizens to share the land with the seven
> million Palestinians living in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in peace,
> equality and dignity. That will be the only just reckoning.
>
>