Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer, introduced the concept of genocide in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, probably in response to Winston Churchill’s statement in 1941 as the Nazis were embarking on the mass murder of the Jewish population of Europe: “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” Lemkin covered not only the Jewish Holocaust but also past examples of systematic attempts to erase defined groups of people, and there have been clear attempts at genocide in recent times as well.
Lemkin led a successful effort to have genocide recognized as an international crime, and it was so certified under international law in 1946 by the United Nations’ General Assembly and then codified as an international crime in the U.N.’s 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” There is an ambiguity in this definition: What does “in part” mean, exactly? The Israeli military has so far killed over 60,000 Palestinians, about 2.8 percent of the Gaza Strip’s population (although Arab News has reported that the population of Palestinians in Gaza decreased by 6 percent in 2024). If you combine the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, 60,000 people is approximately 1 percent of the total. Can these small percentages establish genocidal intent on the part of the Israeli government?
Of course, the situation in Gaza is dynamic, and due to actions on the part of the Israeli government and its military, much of the population there is now on the verge of mass starvation. At the start of Hitler’s reign, which killed some six million Jews, the Jewish population of Europe was approximately 9.5 million. That was 60 percent of the Jewish population in the world at the time, but percentages do not tell the whole story, which revolves around basic intent and not just how much of a genocidal mission has been accomplished. In an opinion piece in the July 15 New York Times titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,” Omer Bartov, the Brown University professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, who is Jewish, wrote that right at the beginning of its retaliation against Hamas, he thought Israel was committing war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity; but in May 2024, when the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, compelled some one million Palestinians (who had fled south to the city of Rafah, the only part of Gaza left relatively unscathed) to trek to a beach area with virtually no shelter, and proceeded to raze the city almost to the ground, he realized that the pattern of IDF operations was “consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had urged Israeli citizens after October 7 to “remember what Amalek did to you,” a statement many surmised as referring to a passage in the Bible calling for the Israelites to “kill alike men and women, infants, and sucklings” of an ancient enemy group. Government and military officials, Bartov related, said they were fighting “human animals,” and the deputy speaker of Parliament asserted on X that “Israel’s task must be ‘erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.’” Bartov wrote, “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.” Bartov summarized: “My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”
A week after Bartov’s piece appeared, the Times published an article by Opinion columnist Bret Stephens titled “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza.” He offered this riposte to Bartov (without mentioning his name and expertise on the subject): “It may seem harsh to say, but there is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: … if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans—why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly? Why not, say, hundreds of thousands of deaths, as opposed to the nearly 60,000 that Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry … has cited so far in nearly two years of war?” A sensible riposte to that would be: A system of genocide is not built in a day, or two years. Hitler began creating concentration camps in Germany upon taking office in 1933, but it wasn’t until eight years later (the year of Churchill’s statement on the matter) that the systematic mass executions of Jews and other minority outcasts commenced.
Israel was subjected to a savage attack by the Islamist group Hamas, which took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, on October 7, 2023, that caused the slaughter of some 1,200 people and the capture of some 250 hostages. Israel responded with an aerial bombardment of Gaza infrastructure and a major ground invasion designed to neutralize Hamas. American officials and Israel’s negotiators thought a truce with Hamas to end the war and bring the hostages home was feasible, especially in May 2024 when the Saudi crown prince sought to help mediate one, but Netanyahu demurred, as he has whenever a chance for a settlement of the war has emerged. Recently, his government abruptly terminated a ceasefire with Hamas and expelled the U.N. agency providing food for deprived Gazan residents, unleashing a disastrous famine in the territory. The prime minister has said Israel will seize military control of Gaza City, which could exacerbate the food deprivation there and reinforce the accusations of genocide. The Israeli experiment is tottering.
The post Genocide in Gaza? appeared first on New Republic.
