Genocide Experts Warn of Ongoing Crisis in Gaza

Rising Concerns Over Alleged Genocide in Gaza

This week, two prominent Israeli human rights organizations joined a growing number of voices condemning Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip. B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel released separate reports asserting that Israel’s conduct in the region amounts to genocide. These assessments align with conclusions made by various international rights groups, foreign governments, and scholars of genocide studies over the past 21 months since Hamas launched its attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

The Israeli military has caused extensive damage to Gaza, destroying most of its buildings and flattening the majority of its neighborhoods. The territory’s Palestinian population has been repeatedly displaced through evacuation orders and relentless bombardments. According to local health authorities, more than 60,000 people have been killed, and famine is unfolding among the surviving population, as reported by U.N. monitors. The situation includes widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease, leading to an increase in hunger-related deaths after months of Israeli blockade and restrictions on humanitarian aid.

Both Israeli rights groups argue that Israel’s conduct during the war and the rhetoric of numerous political and military leaders demonstrate a deliberate intent to target the entire population of Gaza rather than just combatants, aiming to destroy life for the Palestinian people. Some Israeli leaders have called for the denial of food and water to Gaza’s civilians and the ethnic cleansing of the territory.

Yuli Novak, director of B’Tselem, noted that every genocide in history has had a justification in the eyes of those who committed it, such as self-defense or a war of no choice. However, the term "genocide" is highly charged, especially when applied to a country born from the experience of the Holocaust. The term was coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to describe the Nazis' systematic murder of Jews and was later codified by the U.N.’s 1948 convention on genocide as a crime involving the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have rejected the allegation as a "blood libel" and emphasized Israel’s right to self-defense following Hamas’s atrocities and the abduction of hostages. Despite these denials, many critics continue to use the term, including leftist activists, Middle Eastern leaders, and a growing number of U.S. lawmakers.

Governments that have accused Israel at the International Court of Justice of carrying out genocide believe there is sufficient evidence to show that Israel intends to make Palestinian life impossible in Gaza. This view is supported by an increasing number of genocide scholars. As early as December 2023, the institute on genocide prevention named after Lemkin issued 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, a leading sociological expert on genocide, wrote that many Western leaders and journalists have avoided using the term "genocide" when evaluating Israel’s actions, partly due to sensitivities around the word and partly because they accepted Israel’s argument of self-defense against Hamas. However, Shaw argued that 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 since the March collapse of a short-lived ceasefire indicate that the "dam of interpretive genocide denial has well and truly broken."

Omer Bartov, a prominent Holocaust historian at Brown University, recently argued in a New York Times op-ed that genocide was happening in Gaza. In a later CNN interview, he explained that he initially believed Israel was committing war crimes but not genocide. However, the implementation of policies punishing the entire population of Gaza has worsened, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure, hospitals, museums, universities, and other essential facilities supports the genocide charge.

Bartov is not alone. In June, Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, stated that what is happening in Gaza constitutes genocide and fits within legal definitions outlined by the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Academics like Taner Akcam, Marianne Hirsch, and Michael Rothberg, who helped found the Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network, wrote in a Guardian op-ed that Israeli officials have justified genocidal violence by equating Hamas with Nazism and 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 agreed 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 to point to genocide, warning just a week after the Oct. 7 attack that a "textbook case of genocide" was unfolding in Gaza. He scoffed to NRC that no important figure in his field now doubted the claim.

Some historians disagree. Norman Goda and Jeffrey Herf, historians of the Holocaust and Europe, wrote in The Washington Post’s opinion pages that the genocide charge against Israel smacks of antisemitism and draws on deep wells of fear and hatred toward Jews. However, Daniel Blatman and Amos Goldberg, historians of the Holocaust and genocide studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, argued earlier this year that the reckoning for Israel would reach far beyond the academy.

“Once the war ends, we Israelis will have to look at ourselves in the mirror,” they wrote in Haaretz in January. “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.”