What is Genocide?
Many scholars and progressives are reluctant to call Israel’s actions in Gaza genocide. They will agree that Israel’s behavior is abominable and atrocious but nevertheless falls below the threshold of a genocide. Their reasoning may step from partiality toward Israel no matter what it does, from the belief that Hamas’ brutal October 2023 attack must also count as genocide, or from a conception of genocide that must match the numbers of dead in the Holocaust gas chambers. But while the 1948 Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide resulted directly from the Holocaust, genocide in international law is defined by several other acts besides the extinction of an entire population. Here is how Article II of the Convention defines “genocide”:
“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Conspiracy, incitement, attempts to commit, and complicity in genocide all constitute crimes under the Convention.
Intent is the key motivation that distinguishes genocide from war crimes. Omar Bartov is a prominent Israeli historian and genocide specialist who has changed his mind and now calls out Israel for intent to commit genocide. In a New York Times op-ed July 15, he wrote:
“Israel’s actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group. My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”
Bartov is not alone anymore. Francesca Albanese (the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza), Amnesty International, and two Israeli human rights groups are among those that have also accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. (Albanese, by the way, has been sanctioned for her decision by the Trump administration and cannot enter the US, presumably even to do her job at the UN.)
Israel’s Weaponization of Food Aid
About 60,000 Palestinians, overwhelmingly innocent civilians, have now been killed in the Gaza fighting, according to Gaza health officials. The killing of people as a group is genocide under Article II(a) of the Geneva Convention. Two recent developments strengthen the case for genocide. One is Israel’s weaponization of food assistance; the other is Israeli annexation plans. Minimal food distribution is causing hundreds of deaths in what can only be considered a deliberate effort to starve the population. (This action violates Article II(b) and (c) of the Convention.) Feeding the Gaza population would have been possible if the method of food distribution had changed to allow for regular and abundant deliveries without a major Israeli military presence. But Israel failed to take full responsibility, putting food aid in the hands of a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and its mainly American contractors. That arrangement led to numerous deaths and injuries as crowds surged to get food, only to be shot by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers, who were supposed to be there for crowd control. Food aid organizations called for the GHF to be shut down. After many deaths, the GHF announced that it will start handing out food aid directly via community leaders. It is hard to imagine that this change, while welcome, will alleviate starvation conditions as people in Gaza struggle to avoid IDF operations and Israeli efforts to remove them out of central Gaza altogether.
A British surgeon who spent three weeks in Gaza helping the wounded says: “We’re in that point where people have been reduced to such a level of deprivation that they’re prepared to die for a bagful of rice and a bit of pasta.”
Forcible Removal of the Gaza Population
The starvation policy may not simply be directed at weakening Hamas. I believe its chief purpose is to force the Palestinian population to submit to Israeli plans for its removal from Gaza altogether, a violation of the Geneva Convention’s Article II(c) and (e). Forcible removal of large segments of the population has occurred several times already. Now there is a plan to establish a “humanitarian city” for Palestinians near the Egyptian border. Israel’s defense secretary Israel Katz has ordered the start of planning on a camp that would house 600,000 Palestinians. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Ohmert denounced the idea, saying the “city” would be a concentration camp and forcing the people into it would be ethnic cleansing.
Another Israeli far-right plan seeks to turn the Gaza Strip into a Riviera. The Guardian reports: “A group of far-right Israeli politicians and settlers met in parliament this week to discuss a plan to displace Palestinians from Gaza, annex the territory and turn it into a hi-tech, luxury resort city for Israelis. The scheme, titled “The master plan for settlement in the Gaza Strip,” envisions construction of 850,000 housing units, hi-tech “smart cities” that trade cryptocurrency, and a metro system. It took its inspiration from—you guessed it—one of Donald Trump’s ideas for turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” The text of the plan, which boasts of the economic benefits to Israel, says: “The right of the people of Israel to settle, develop and preserve this land is not just a historical right—it is a national and security obligation.” Imperialism.
Nor is the Israeli far-right’s strategy of forcible removal limited to the Gaza Strip. In late July, the Knesset, in a nonbinding resolution pushed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, voted to annex the West Bank by a vote of 71-13. Annexation would violate international law, since the West Bank is occupied territory and has a population of around three million Palestinians compared with about 500,000 Israeli settlers.
Still other Israeli plans for the Gaza population that are illegal under international law are reportedly under discussion. They include the imposition of a military government, formal annexation of a portion of Gaza, and a military siege of the Gaza Strip that would terminate all aid, no matter how delivered, to the population.
Genocide
In summary, Israel’s starvation of civilians and their forced deportation go beyond crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. They reach to the level of genocide as defined by the 1948 Convention, which Israel, along with nearly all other nations, has signed and ratified. Israel’s actions in Gaza have their own identity; they need not be compared with the Holocaust or the genocides in Rwanda, Xinjiang, Myanmar, or Cambodia under Pol Pot in order to be condemned as such. The head of a major Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, observes that genocide was always supposed to be about others—“how could they let it happen?”s—but now “that question circles back to us.”
The Netanyahu government has given new meaning to “never again.”
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