As the civilian death toll continues to rise from Israel’s war in Gaza in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack, more and more voices have warned of genocide.
On November 2, United Nations experts said in a joint statement that Palestinians in Gaza were at “grave risk of genocide.” And on October 28, the director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stepped down because, as he wrote in his resignation letter, “we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes [in Gaza] and the Organization that we serve appears powerless to stop it.”
More than 800 scholars have also recently signed on to a letter aiming to “sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide.” And US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the only Palestinian American in Congress, accused President Joe Biden of supporting “the genocide of the Palestinian people,” in a video on November 3.
These warnings have pointed to the sheer number of civilian casualties from Israel’s bombardment, the effects of the siege, and rhetoric from Israeli officials that demonizes and calls for the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza, among other things, as indicators that Israel’s offensive against Hamas could cross the line into genocide. That is an explosive charge, and one that Israel, a nation whose existence is inextricably linked to the genocide of Jews in the Holocaust, has rejected by arguing that the killing of innocents is unavoidable in pursuit of its war aims.
As bloody as the war in Gaza has been so far, it may not fit the popular conception many have of genocide from the 20th century, when the death tolls were far larger and, in retrospect, the intent by perpetrators to wipe out an entire people was undeniable. But there are different ways to define genocide — from the colloquial to the scholarly and political to the strict legal sense. And it is the legal definition, which includes a narrow set of criteria, that ultimately determines…
Read the full article here