Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.

In a commentary published on July 22 in the leading US newspaper, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens stated: “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza.” Six weeks earlier, Holocaust and anti-Semitism researchers Norman J.W. Goda and Jeffrey Herf had already stated in an opinion piece in the Washington Post: “Why it’s wrong to call Israel’s war in Gaza ‘genocide.’”

“I Know One When I See One.”

The articles are reactions to a growing circle of experts, institutions, and organizations that describe Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip as genocide. These include various UN agencies, an investigation by the Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.

In a guest article in the New York Times on July 15, one of the leading genocide researchers, Omer Bartov – an Israeli Jew who grew up in a Zionist family and is a former IDF soldier – explained in detail why the Israeli war in Gaza is a genocide: “Never Again. I’m a Genocide Scholar. I know It When I See It” is the title of his essay.

In the Washington Post, columnist Shadi Hamid also argued at length at the end of May: “A genocide is happening in Gaza. We should say so.” However, the two newspaper articles by Bartov and Hamid are extreme exceptions in the American media landscape.

Self-Defense Instead of Crime

There has been no genocide debate in the US mainstream press over nearly two years of devastation in the Gaza Strip, with accusations of genocide mostly dismissed reflexively as anti-Israel, activist, and anti-Semitic. Israel’s war on Gaza is consistently framed as self-defense, while war crimes, if criticized at all, are portrayed as excesses.

The fact that the two “newspapers of record” in the US now felt compelled to publish articles referring to genocide has to do with the changed situation. After a year and a half of war against Gaza, the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unilaterally terminated the temporary ceasefire in March and imposed another total humanitarian blockade on Gaza, which was later eased somewhat, triggering an artificially created famine for the more than two million Palestinians living there.

In addition, there are the drastically deteriorating living conditions, the continuing rise in the number of victims of bombings and Israeli troops, mainly children and women, multiple expulsions, ethnic cleansing, and the de facto complete destruction of the enclave, including its medical infrastructure.

No Change of Course

This openly documented reality, live-streamed every day, including images of the continuing escalation of the Gaza catastrophe, the Netanyahu government’s ongoing willingness to wage war with no endgame beyond the “disappearance of the Palestinians” from Gaza – either through physical destruction or expulsion or a mixture of both, openly stated by Israeli officials – and the unconditional support of the US government, with President Donald Trump declaring to the world that he wants to turn Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East” without Palestinians: all this has caused sympathy for Israel and its war to plummet among the US population, with even staunch supporters of Israel criticizing the Netanyahu government’s actions.

Only 32 percent of Americans now approve of Israel’s military actions (only eight percent of Democratic voters). The liberal mainstream media responded to this mood with two critical articles on Israel’s war in Gaza.

But it would be wrong to see these publications as a sign of a change of course in the media. They remain the exception that proves the rule. This is made clear by the promptly published “counter-opinions” that “neutralized” the genocide articles and stifled the debate.

Only 60,000 Dead

The authors who responded to Bartov and Hamid’s statements and portrayed the term “genocide” as nonsensical and dangerous made little effort to engage with the arguments, evidence, and investigations of experts and international organizations. NYT columnist Stephens, for example, writes the following objection to the use of the term genocide:

“If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal – if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans – why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly?”

Why only 60,000 deaths and not hundreds of thousands, asks Stephens?

Apart from the cynical nature of the question and the fact that a Lancet study published a year ago already put the total number of deaths, including indirect deaths, at around 200,000, this argument can of course also be used against other genocides that are officially recognized in the West.

In Srebrenica, “only” 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed. Why not many more? The number of deaths is therefore not decisive for the UN Convention’s definition of genocide.

Hamas Massacre as Genocide

In their counterstatement, Goda and Herf content themselves with repeating the talking points of the Israeli government that the Israeli government is fighting Hamas and that civilian casualties are collateral damage, without addressing the flood of evidence that shows the opposite. At the same time, as usual, the subject is changed and the accusations are dismissed as “anti-Semitic.”

“The genocide accusation hurled against Israel draws on deep wells of fear and hatred, both conscious and unconscious, that lurk in radical interpretations of both Christianity and Islam. These currents view Jews as uniquely evil and murderous. The Gaza genocide accusation has shifted opprobrium from Jews as a religious/ethnic group to the state of Israel, which it depicts as inherently evil.”

Here, too, the question arises: What about Serbs, Sudanese, Burmese, Cambodians, or even Chinese, who are accused of genocide in the West?

While the accusation of genocide is labeled anti-Semitic, the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, is classified as genocide in the same breath. Here, too, Goda and Herf argue without evidence or arguments, without pointing out that this repeatedly made accusation has been rejected as false by genocide researchers and is not shared by expert organizations.

Please Do Not Use the Word “Genocide”

The isolated genocide articles in the two leading US media outlets had no effect on the general reporting on the Gaza war. The Israeli action continues to be described by the American mainstream media as military self-defense and a fight against Hamas, not as genocide.

Media and journalists do not use the term, even though, as we shall see, there is a growing consensus among genocide researchers and observers on the ground, UN agencies, and leading human rights organizations that Israel’s war on Gaza is genocidal.

This is certainly perceived as a threat by the press. For example, The Intercept revealed how the New York Times “instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to ‘avoid’ using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.”

The German Debate

In Europe, especially in Germany, there is also no serious debate about the term genocide to describe what is happening in Gaza. In the general reporting on Gaza the term is absent, too.

There are only a few exceptions. For example, in a commentary for the left daily newspaper Taz on July 25, Pauline Jäckels, in the face of growing criticism of the German government and referring to Omer Bartov’s essay in the NYT, said that the government was not exerting enough pressure on Israel to “prevent genocide.” To be precise, Bartov considers it proven that it is already taking place. Otherwise, the accusation of genocide is virtually never used in reports.

When it does appear in the German mainstream media, it is almost always rejected or the evidence is deemed “inconclusive.” In addition, anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli motives are implied.

The Loss of Humanity

One of the few journalists who puts the finger on the sore spot is Stephan Detjen. In a commentary on the public radio station Deutschlandfunk, he rightly states: “The reactions in this country, however, are either embarrassed silence or angry accusations of anti-Semitism.”

In contrast, the leading newspapers Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt and Süddeutsche Zeitung condemn the Hamas attack not only as a massacre, but as a genocidal crime. The genocide in Srebrenica and that committed by Hamas are on the same level, they say. Those who do not make this an issue, according to Detlef Esslinger in his SZ commentary of October 23, 2023, but instead focus on the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ultimately give up part of their humanity.”

When Genocide Is Just a Superfluous Term

Even critics of Israel who do speak of Israeli war crimes avoid using the term. For example, when asked in an interview whether he would describe what Israel is doing in Gaza as genocide, Jan von Aken, party leader of Die Linke (“The Left”), replied that this was not “our choice of words as a party.”

He considers it wrong to use “legal terms” such as genocide or apartheid because then “you quickly stop talking about what is happening there” and “start arguing about terminology.” Leaving aside the question of whether this is true – whereby the objection would have to be raised equally against other accusations of genocide – the strategic argument is not credible.

Von Aken and Die Linke are well aware that such terms carry weight and serve to generate political pressure and force governments to act. Take, for example, the anti-apartheid movement against South Africa. The Left Party also condemned the crimes against the Yazidis in Iraq by the Islamic State as genocide and worked to have the Bundestag recognize the acts as genocide, which it did unanimously on January 19, 2023.

Yazidis and Palestinians

Die Linke called the classification as genocide in the subsequent parliamentary debate

“historic” and the decision “long overdue.” At the same time, it criticized that there were “blanks” in the motion, e.g., a reference to “Germany’s shared responsibility for the rise of IS.” For context: Researchers estimate that around 3,100 Yazidis were killed by ISIS in 2014, half of them executed and the other half dying indirectly as a result of the siege.

In the case of Israel’s actions in Gaza, different standards apply – despite the far greater scale of the crimes, the number of deaths and injuries; the systematic and almost complete destruction of infrastructure, including medical care for the wounded, over a period of almost two years; mass killings and various war crimes; the use of hunger as a weapon of war; multiple expulsions; and the genocidal language of those responsible.

Sanctions Logic Ukraine vs. Gaza

And when von Aken says that he does not want to argue about words when it comes to Israeli crimes, but rather focus on ending the actions, this also is not convincing. The party Die Linke rejects sanctions against Israel, while supporting the EU’s enormous sanctions regime against Russia in the wake of the Ukraine war in order to end the war.

If you look at mainstream reporting on the Gaza war in the US, Germany, and Europe, you will find no significant debate about the accusation of genocide against Israel. Admittedly, the media can no longer ignore it completely, as more and more international organizations and renowned researchers are going public. But such news items are usually dismissed as side notes with skeptical to dismissive framing and escorted by voices that reject the accusation.

The UN Convention

There are certainly good reasons to be cautious in using the term genocide. The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide contains two strict criteria that must be met.

According to these criteria, the acts must be aimed to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” And these acts must be carried out intentionally.

A number of institutions and experts believe that these criteria are met in Gaza. In November 2024, UN Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices stated in its report that “Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza” are “consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war.”

“Anatomy of a Genocide”

The statement followed a report by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, entitled “Anatomy of a Genocide.” In early July 2024, after analyzing the acts of violence and Israeli policy measures, the report stated that the “threshold indicating that Israel has committed genocide has been met.“

“It is important to call genocide a genocide,” various UN experts finally declared on October 31, 2024, before a United Nations committee, calling on all states to review their relations with Israel and not to be complicit in the crime Israel is committing against the Palestinian population in Gaza.

Another UN report in March this year concluded that Israel was committing “genocidal acts” through the systematic destruction of health facilities for women. “One cannot escape the conclusion that Israel has used sexualized and gender-based violence against Palestinians in order to terrorize them and to maintain a system of oppression that undermines their right to self-determination,” said Navi Pillay, Chair of the Commission, in Geneva.

Shortly thereafter, UN Secretary-General António Guterres stressed that “the floodgates of horror have re-opened”: “Gaza is a killing field, and civilians are in an endless death loop.” In May, a group of UN experts once again appealed to the international community: “End unfolding genocide or watch it end life in Gaza.”

ICJ: Israel Is Committing “Plausible” Genocide

On December 29, 2023, South Africa had already filed a lawsuit before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging that Israel was committing genocide in the Gaza Strip and violating the UN Convention. Nearly two dozen countries, including Spain, Turkey, the Republic of Ireland, and Brazil, joined the lawsuit, and many alliances of states, such as the African Union (55 countries), the Arab League (22 countries), and the Non-Aligned Movement (121 countries), support it. France, Germany, Great Britain, and the US, among others, sided with Israel against the lawsuit.

The then German Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck (Green Party) said: “You can criticize the Israeli army for acting too harshly in the Gaza Strip, but that is not genocide.” Former Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Green Party) stated that “Israel’s self-defense” against the “terrorist organization Hamas” could not be considered genocide.

However, in its historic order of January 26, 2024, the ICJ considered it plausible that Israel’s actions constitute genocide and issued six provisional measures – the final ruling is not expected before the end of 2027.

Ignored Measures

Israel was ordered by the International Court of Justice to take all measures to prevent genocide. Among other things, it must prohibit and punish incitement to genocide, allow aid and services to reach Palestinians in Gaza, and secure evidence of crimes committed in Gaza.

In March 2024, the court added further measures demanding that humanitarian aid be allowed in. In May, it ordered the cessation of the Israeli offensive against the southern city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip and the re-opening of the Rafah border crossing from Egypt for aid deliveries. Israel almost completely ignored the measures demanded by the ICJ and rejected the accusation of genocide as “outrageous and false.”

Amnesty: Palestinians as “Subhumans”

Leading human rights organizations are also speaking of genocide. After Amnesty International’s (AI) published its 300-page report “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,” Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International concluded on December 5, 2024, that …

“Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them.”

The report examines in detail Israel’s violations in Gaza during the nine months between October 7, 2023, and early July 2024. It interviewed 212 people, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, and medical personnel.

Over 100 Genocidal Statements

In addition, field research was conducted and extensive visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery, was analyzed. The report evaluated 102 statements by senior Israeli government and military officials and official Israeli bodies in which Palestinians are dehumanized, genocide or other crimes against them are called for or justified.

This language was also frequently repeated, including by Israeli soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by audiovisual content reviewed by Amnesty International showing soldiers calling for Gaza to be “wiped out” or made uninhabitable and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools, and universities.

Finally, the report documents a series of genocidal killings in which entire families were wiped out in attacks without any reference to military targets. The total blockade (electricity, water, fuel) since October 7, 2023, the multiple evacuation orders to unsafe areas, the waves of expulsions, the destruction of vital infrastructure, and the prevention of minimum humanitarian standards are clear indicators that living conditions are being deliberately created that will lead to the destruction of the Palestinians in Gaza over time, concluded AI.

“Our Genocide”

Human Rights Watch (HRW) also states in its 179-page investigation “Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water“ of December 2024 of ”Israel’s crimes of extermination“ and ”acts of genocide in Gaza.” By deliberately withholding drinking water, Israel is creating a situation in which parts of the Gaza population are being deliberately destroyed. Coupled with statements by Israeli officials who want to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza, the Israeli authorities are responsible for acts of genocide, according to HRW.

The international organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) also state in a report at the end of 2024 that the reality in Gaza corresponds to what legal experts and organizations describe as genocide. They made clear that they not use the term “lightly”, but after “nearly two years of extensive, firsthand information from our teams” MSF concludes:

“Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams are witnessing a genocide in Gaza committed by Israeli forces. We see the impacts of mass killings; forced displacement; destruction of vital civilian infrastructure; and a punishing siege cutting off access to food, water, medicines, and other humanitarian supplies. Israeli authorities are systematically destroying the conditions necessary for Palestinian life in Gaza. No one is spared.”

On July 28, the two leading Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, also went public and described Israel’s Gaza offensive as genocide. The report, titled “Our Genocide,” states: “Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” B’Tselem’s outreach director, Sarit Michaeli, regards Israels campaign in Gaza as a “textbook definition of genocide.”

The “Textbook Case”

Shortly after the start of the Gaza war, renowned Israeli historian, Holocaust and genocide researcher Raz Segal already had spoken of a “textbook case of genocide” in an article for the magazine Jewish Currents. According to Segal, the intentions of the Israeli governments and authorities are explicitly genocidal and are being carried out accordingly through their actions against the population in the enclave. After the article was published, Segal lost a job offer from the University of Minnesota in the wake of a smear campaign by a pro-Israel group.

“Human Animals” and “Total Annihilation”

The genocidal statements made by officials in Israel have been extensively documented in various studies and in South Africa’s lawsuit. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, declared that the Israeli armed forces would reduce parts of Gaza “into rubble” and called on “the residents of Gaza: Leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere.”

He also reminded Israelis of “what Amalek did to you,” a quote referring to a genocidal passage in the Bible in which the Israelites are called upon to “kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings” of their ancient enemy. There is a long list of similar expressions by Israeli government and military representatives in which they demand “total annihilation”. In numerous cases officials have dehumanized Palestinians while saying that Israel was “fighting Nazis” and “human animals,” and that there were “no innocents” in Gaza.

Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said Israel’s task must be “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” The Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu even raised the possibility of dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza and referred to the call later when asked.

The Growing Consensus

A number of genocide researchers were initially hesitant to speak of genocide in Gaza. Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University in the US, did not speak of genocide until May 2024, when the Israeli military (IDF) ordered one million Palestinians in Rafah to relocate to the Mawasi area on the coast, where there were no supplies for them. Rafah was then destroyed.

Since then, according to Bartov, the actions have been consistent with the genocidal intentions expressed, so that his “inescapable conclusion” has become that Israel is committing genocide. “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 his conclusion, either. Bartov stresses, that there is a growing consensus among genocide researchers that the events in Gaza should be described as genocide.

Far from Divided

Following a survey of genocide experts, the leading Dutch daily newspaper, NRC, concluded in May this year that, contrary to media reports about polarization and division, the majority of academics in the field of genocide studies speak of genocide or genocidal violence in Gaza. The researchers point to an astonishing consensus on Gaza.

The growing chorus was joined by internationally respected genocide researchers, including many of Jewish-Israeli origin, such as genocide expert Shmuel Lederman, leading Canadian international law expert and genocide scholar William Schabas, who grew up in a family of Holocaust survivors (“absolutely” a genocide), Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses of the City University of New York, and British specialist Martin Shaw.

Uğur Ümit Üngör, professor at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, stated that there are probably scholars who still do not consider Israel’s offensive in Gaza to be genocide, but “I don’t know them.”

Beyond the Western Mainstream

A number of experts on the Israel-Palestine conflict, intellectuals, and media outlets outside the Western mainstream have also been talking about genocide for a long time. These include Israeli writer David Grossman, award-winning Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and former UN special rapporteur for Palestine, Richard Falk (“the most transparent genocide in all of human history. It is the first time that the daily atrocities were broadcast and seen by the peoples of the world in real time.“) and fascism expert and son of Holocaust survivors, Jason Stanley.

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