By Amos Goldberg / Swiss Policy Research
Yes, it is genocide. Although it is so difficult and painful to admit this and despite all efforts to think otherwise, at the end of six months of a brutal war it is no longer possible to escape this conclusion. Jewish history will henceforth be stained with the mark of Cain of the “crime of crimes,” which cannot be erased from its forehead. As such, it will stand trial for generations.
From a legal point of view, it is not yet known what the International Court of Justice in The Hague will decide, although in light of its temporary rulings so far and in light of increasing reports from jurists, international organizations, and investigative journalists, the direction seems quite clear.
Already on January 26, the court ruled overwhelmingly (14 to 2) that Israel may be committing genocide in Gaza. On March 28, following the deliberate starvation that Israel imposed on Gaza, the court issued additional orders (and this time by a majority of 15 to 1, Justice Aharon Barak) calling on Israel not to deny the Palestinians their rights protected under the Genocide Convention.
The detailed and reasoned report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, reached a slightly more decisive conclusion and is another step in establishing the understanding that Israel is indeed committing genocide. The detailed and updated report by Dr. Lee Mordechai, which gathers information on the level of Israeli violence in Gaza, reaches the same conclusion.
Very senior academics such as Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University (and a Jew with a warm attitude towards traditional Zionism), with whom heads of state all over the world regularly consult on international issues, speak of the Israeli genocide as a matter of course.
Excellent investigations such as those by Yuval Avraham, and especially his recent investigation on the artificial intelligence systems used by the military in selecting and hitting those designated for elimination, further deepen this accusation. The fact that the military allowed, for example, the killing of 300 innocent people and the destruction of an entire residential district in order to hit one Hamas brigade commander, shows that military targets are almost incidental targets for killing civilians and that every Palestinian in Gaza is in fact doomed. This is the logic of genocide.
Yes, I know, they are all antisemitic or self-hating Jews. Only we, the Israelis, who feed on the messages of the IDF and are only exposed to the images that the Israeli media filters for us, see reality as it is. As if endless literature has not been written about the social and cultural denial mechanisms of societies that commit serious war crimes. Israel is really a paradigmatic case of such societies, a case that will be studied in every university seminar in the world dealing with the subject.
It will be a few years before the court in The Hague gives its verdict, but we should not look at the catastrophic reality only through legal glasses. What is happening in Gaza is genocide because the level and pace of the indiscriminate killing, the destruction, the mass deportations, the displacement, the starvation, the executions, the elimination of cultural and religious institutions, the crushing of the elites (including the killing of journalists), and the sweeping dehumanization of the Palestinians – create an overall picture of genocide, of intentional and conscious crushing of the Palestinian existence in Gaza.
In many ways, Palestinian Gaza as a geographical-political-cultural-human complex no longer exists. Genocide is the deliberate destruction of a collective or part of it – not all of its individuals. And this is what is happening in Gaza. The result is undoubtedly genocidal. The numerous declarations of extermination by senior officials in the Israeli government, and the general destructive public atmosphere, as rightly pointed out by Carolina Landsman, show that this was also the intention.
Israelis are wrong to think that genocide should look like the Holocaust. They imagine trains, gas chambers, incinerators, killing pits, concentration and extermination camps, and a systematic persecution of all members of the victim group until the last one. An event of this kind does not take place in Gaza. Similar to what happened in the Holocaust, most Israelis also imagine that the group of victims is not involved in violent activity or in an actual conflict, and the killers exterminate them because of a crazy and irrational ideology. This is not the case with Gaza either.
The brutal Hamas attack of October 7 was a heinous and terrible crime. During it, about 1,200 people were killed or murdered, of which more than 850 were Israeli civilians (and foreigners), including many children and elderly, about 240 Israelis were kidnapped to Gaza, and atrocities such as rape were committed. This is an event with catastrophic, deep and lasting traumatic effects, for many years, certainly for the direct victims and their immediate circle, but also for Israeli society as a whole. The attack forced Israel to respond in self-defense.
However, although each case of genocide has a different character in terms of the scope of the murder and its characteristics, the common denominator of most of them is that they were committed out of an authentic sense of self-defense. From a legal point of view, an event cannot be both an event of self-defense and an event of genocide. These two legal categories are mutually exclusive. But historically, self-defense is not at odds with genocide, but is usually one of its central factors, if not the main one.
[Detailed discussion of the cases of Bosnia, Rwanda and Myanmar omitted.]
The case of the Rohingya people in Myanmar reminds us of something that many genocide scholars have established in their research, and which is very relevant to the case of Gaza: a link between ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The connection between the two phenomena is twofold, and both are relevant to Gaza, where the vast majority of the population was expelled from their places of residence, and only Egypt’s refusal to accept masses of Palestinians in its territory prevented their departure from the Strip. On the one hand, ethnic cleansing signifies the willingness to eliminate the enemy group at any cost and without compromise, and for that reason it easily slips into genocide or is part of it. On the other hand, ethnic cleansing usually creates conditions – such as diseases and hunger – that allow or cause the partial or complete destruction of the victim group.
In the case of Gaza, “safe zones” have often turned into death traps and deliberate extermination zones, and in these refuge areas Israel is deliberately starving the population. For this reason, there are quite a few commentators who estimate that ethnic cleansing is the goal of the war in Gaza.
[Detailed discussion of the cases of Armenia and Namibia omitted.]
In all these cases, the perpetrators of the genocide felt an existential threat, more or less justified, and genocide came as a response. The collective destruction of the victims was not at odds with an act of self-defense, but had an authentic motive of self-defense.
In 2011, I published a short article in Haaretz about the genocide in Southwest Africa, and concluded with the following words: “From the Herero and Nama genocide we can learn how colonial domination, based on a sense of cultural and racial superiority, can spill over, in the face of local rebellion, into horrific crimes like mass deportation, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The case of the Herero rebellion should serve as a horrifying warning sign for us here in Israel, which has already known one Nakba in its history.”
The above text is an unauthorized and shortened machine translation of the original article in Hebrew.
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