The Forbidden Word: Is Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza?

LondonThe title's question seems little less than rhetorical. At least, if one considers the endless images and dramatic witnesses that, from October 7, 2023, They are coming from Gaza. Limitless destruction, indiscriminate bombing of the civilian population resulting in the murder of children, women, men, and the elderly; humiliation of non-combatant Hamas prisoners—there have also been scenes of humiliation of the freed Israeli hostages—who are being used as human shields, a weapon of war… Incalculable devastation; more than 53,000 Gazans have officially died, and in all likelihood thousands more. The population of the Strip will take decades to recover, if it survives at all.

The systematic repression against the Palestinians of the West Bank and the policy of expulsion from their lands and employment with new settler settlements adds even more rhetoric to the question. What is it all, if not? The right to self-defense? Can it be called genocide?

The word has enormous connotations. The Convention on the Prevention of Genocide approved by the UN General Assembly in 1948 defines it as "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group," Henning Melber, a professor of political science at the University of Pretoria, reminds ARA. "Since then, genocide became a crime punishable under international law," whether committed in times of war or peace. It came into force in 1951. The concept was coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Rafhael Lemkin to describe the Nazi policies of systematic murder perpetrated against European Jews.

Genocide is associated with the Holocaust, although before the six million deaths there were others. It is worth remembering the annihilation of one and a half million Armenians (1915-1918) by the government of the so-called Young Turks. As was the genocide committed by Germany in Namibia at the beginning of the 20th century (1904-1908). And after the Holocaust there have been others: Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia…There's more. Many more. World history is full of infamy.

"This is not that," and "that" is the Holocaust.

Why is it so difficult to say this in relation to the suffering and extermination of Palestinians? Sociologist, writer, and feminist activist Elana Sztokman, born in the United States but living in Israel for three decades, reflected on this. On May 19, at the your blog, wondered aloud about Israeli arguments for denying genocide. "That [the Holocaust] was it. This isn't it," he noted, as his compatriots call themselves. Sztokman replied: "What are we Israelis doing in Gaza that makes it seem like it can't be compared to the Holocaust? Because what we're doing in Gaza is also intentional. Our government has strategized how to do it. Years and years of planning, funding, and budgeting. And now it's here." Deliberate pressure. Die or leave. That's the strategy.

Some argue the difference in scale. Six million versus 50,000-something lives? He said: "The ladder is relative. It's still happening. It's not over yet. Every door is a target. Besides, 92% of homes have already been destroyed. And as for the numbers, we won't know the final figures for a long time, because there are so many bodies trapped under the rubble. There's no time and no safe place to do so." It's worth remembering that the concept genocide It refers to an intention and that international law provides for measures to prevent it from being perpetrated.

"The Jews did nothing to deserve the Holocaust. Those in Gaza had October 7th," writes Elana Sztokman, another of the Israelis' recurring ideas. But it comes back: "The 2.2 million Palestinians are simply people. Like you and me. October 7th was visited by, say, some 5,000 terrorists. Yes, terrible, monstrous terrorists. But this is not the population of Gaza that Israel is starving, bombing, displacing, and murdering. 2. It has nothing to do with October 7th."

Leading organizations in human rights and international law as Amnesty International either Human Rights Watch They openly speak of genocide. HRW states that "the Israeli authorities are responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide." Amnesty, in turn, asserts that there is "sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and continues to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip." Both organizations made their conclusions public in December of last year. Since then, the situation has only worsened.

ARA has also spoken with historians, legal scholars, and sociologists. But not all those consulted share the idea that genocide exists, at least from a legal perspective. Some vehemently deny it; others are cautious for legal reasons, although emphatically so for moral reasons. Still others have no doubts.

In the first case, Jonathan R. Beloff, a researcher at King's College London and affiliated with the Department of War Studies, highlights. Beloff sees in the use of the word a "new wave of hatred against Israel" that ignores that "Hamas's 1988 founding charter calls for the genocide of the Jews, in Israel and around the world." And he accuses "many Western post-structuralist and Marxist academics" of ignoring this and also ignoring "the deaths of more than 1,200 Israelis, the capture of hundreds of hostages, the mass rape of Jewish women" on October 7. This issue has been widely aired by Israeli propaganda, but not a single case has been credited to official Israeli agencies.

Look the other way, like Albert Speer

The brutality of that terrorist assault is undeniable. But so is what the world is seeing live in Gaza and the West Bank—and it's been going on for 80 years now—even though Benjamin Netanyahu's government has banned independent foreign journalists from the Strip. What no one can say is what Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, argued at the Nuremberg Trials, refusing to accept the responsibility he had for both the war effort, as Minister of Armaments, and the Final Solution, as an accomplice to the Third Reich's industrial and war machine.

Speer explains in his memoirs (p. 676) that in the summer of 1944, after Karl Hanke, regional chief of Lower Silesia, advised him never to visit a concentration camp in Upper Silesia, he listened and preferred to look at a figure from the film The area of interest: "I didn't ask him any questions," he writes. "Nor Himmler, nor Hitler, nor did I speak about it with my friends. I didn't do any research. I didn't want to know what was going on there. It must have been Auschwitz..." Not looking and not asking questions, according to a story that is hardly credible, does not exonerate him. The same is true in Gaza in relation to the Israelis. Ignoring and not wanting to know what is happening is no excuse either. Even if you don't want to pay attention, it is impossible not to see the thousands and thousands of dead.

Tamir Sorek, professor of Near Eastern history at Pennsylvania State University (United States), tells this correspondent a very relevant fact that helps to understand the current state of affairs. "In Israel, calls for genocide [of the Palestinians] have moved from the periphery [of politics] to the mainstream; 30 years ago in Israel, defending genocide could land you in jail." Now it lands you in the government. Former Maccabi Tel Aviv football player Danny Newman, a television sports commentator, advocated for Palestinian extermination in December 2023. Fifteen months later, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir are not hiding their views. Sociologist Elana Sztokman also recalled this.

The Hamas attack and Netanyahu's response have only legitimized the most extremist views of both sides, pushing back the possibility of peace and two-state solutions. In 2014, Ayelet Shaked, then a member of Knesset and later Minister of Justice and Interior, shared an article on social media stating: "The Palestinian people have declared war on us, and we must fight back. And in wars, the enemy is usually an entire people, with its elders and villages."

Meanwhile, the dean of Quranic studies at the Islamic University of Gaza, Dr. Subhi Al Yaziji, declared: in a television interview in 2015: "Every Jew who exists in Palestine today is a legitimate target—even the women." From this, as Sorek says, it follows that "annihilation was beginning to look like a reasonable solution." Israeli historian Yoav Di-Capua of the University of Texas has called this process a "genocidal mirror."

But now, a decade later, is what is happening genocide of some against others or not? Sorek doesn't comment from a legal perspective. "I'm not an expert in international law, I can't comment on that." Morally, he has no doubts: "Genocide is a form of politically motivated violence that attacks and kills a substantial part of a population. It's a sociological definition, not a legal one, but it's the one I find most useful. Based on this understanding, I have no doubt that the attack on the population of Gaza was genocidal and justified."

Professor Henning Melber states, however, that "the International Court of Justice (ICC) has given "credible reason" to investigate further South Africa's accusation of genocide against Israel. But despite all the Israeli acts he lists—"denying the civilian population [of Palestine] a sufficient supply of water and food," or using "death by starvation as a war crime"—he only dares to say that "all this amounts to a form of extinction [of a people] bordering on genocide."

Evidence is needed, but what evidence?

Legal scholars are at pains. Sometimes. James A. Sweeney, professor of international law at Lancaster University Law School, answers a question from ARA that "to prove that genocide is taking place, you need to prove two things: either that members of a protected group are being killed, or that conditions of life are being inflicted on the group so as to bring about the total or partial destruction of that group." According to his judgment, "[in Gaza] there is strong evidence of prohibited acts against the resident Palestinian national group." The hardest part, he says, is "to prove intent in the absence of a confession or a set of incriminating documents."

Would the Minister Smotrich's statements from early May, or others, according to which Gaza would be "totally destroyed" in six months"? Another jurist, also a specialist in international law, Professor Kerstin Carlson, of the Danish University of Roskilde, declares that the fact that there is a genocide "is not a controversial legal issue, in my opinion", because the destruction imposed on the Palestinians has been due to the "fact of being Palestinians". Ergo, what they want to destroy is happening in Gaza as a genocide."

Genocide, the crime of crimes, threatens the entire existence of peoples. The aforementioned UN Convention provides a legal definition, but "also serves to conceptualize a moral and political position on the need to stop a group," Carlson emphasizes. "For the moment, it doesn't stop. And those who do nothing or look the other way are complicit. "There comes a point, in these long processes of starvation, when the perpetrators can no longer deny that they know and understand the consequences of their actions, [that they have] created conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the group, in whole or in part." For this reason, Prime Minister Galant has an arrest warrant for war crimes issued by the International Criminal Court. There are many more candidates to join the list. But the impunity they enjoy, for the moment, is total. And there is a risk, as Professor Henning Melber adds: "The defense of Israel's strategy of extermination can no longer be tolerated, even by Israel's closest supporters, if it does not want to lose the last veil of moral credibility and abandon the foundations of all post-World War II normative frameworks."