After almost two years of horrendous atrocities in Gaza, Senator Bernie Sanders finally recognised the genocide as a genocide. In an op-ed posted on his United States Senate website, he wrote: “The intent is clear. The conclusion is inescapable: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”
Like with other recent declarations – from the United Nations and the International Association of Genocide Scholars – this one came too late. But worse than that, it came in a highly problematic framework. Sanders chose to start his op-ed by essentially suggesting that “Hamas started it”. This not only amounts to victim-blaming but also erases eight decades of pillage, plunder, and ethnic cleansing.
This framing is more than just morally bankrupt; it is legally irrelevant and sets a dangerous precedent that any occupied or colonised people who resist must lay down their weapons or face the same fate as Gaza. It whispers to every oppressed population that their survival depends not on international law or humanity, but on their perfect submission to those who seek to erase them.
The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. The five prohibited acts stretch across the spectrum of Palestinian experience in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and historic Palestine: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately creating conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent births, and forcibly transferring a population.
The legal framework carves no exceptions, offers no asterisks. There is no clause that reads “unless you think the other side started it”. There is no paragraph about proportional genocide. There is no subsection explaining when genocide may be justifiable or understandable.
Sanders acknowledges Israel’s “right to defend itself”, which it actually does not have in this case. Under international law, a state cannot simultaneously exercise control over a territory and then attack it on the claim that it is “foreign” and poses a national security threat.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) itself confirmed that in its 2004 ruling on the apartheid wall Israel was building in the occupied West Bank. The ICJ held that Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which allows for a state to exercise self-defence, does not apply to Israel in the case of an alleged threat from the Palestinians because it occupies them.
Israel has maintained sole and absolute control over Gaza’s boundaries, airspace, and territorial waters since 1967. For decades, it has controlled what goes in and what comes out, who lives and who dies. It does not have “the right to defend itself” against a people whom it fully occupies.
What Sanders and others also refuse to acknowledge is that international law grants Palestinians the right to resist occupation. UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 affirmed “the legitimacy of the struggle for independence, territorial integrity, national unity, and liberation from foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle”.
This does not justify targeting civilians. Palestinian resistance, like all resistance, must comply with international law and distinguish between combatants and civilians. But it means resistance itself is not inherently illegitimate, and it cannot be used to justify genocide in response.
When Sanders begins his genocide recognition with “But Hamas”, he is not just victim-blaming. He is denying Palestinians the very rights international law grants them while affirming rights for Israel that international law explicitly denies.
So, to preface the genocide in Gaza with “But Hamas” is genocidally dangerous. It suggests that a people’s right to exist free from genocide is conditional on their “perfect behaviour”, their complete pacifism, their acquiescence to their own oppression. This logic would retroactively justify every colonial genocide in history. The Herero and Nama peoples resisted German colonisation in Namibia. Did that justify their genocide? The Native Americans fought white European settlers. Did that legitimise their wholesale extermination? Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Europe took up arms in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and various resistance groups. Would that have justified the concentration camps and gas chambers?
Finally, by getting into the “But Hamas” argument, Sanders is also erasing more than a century of history.
The current genocide did not begin on October 7, 2023. It represents the latest and most extreme escalation of a project that began in the late 19th century with the arrival of Zionist settlers determined to create a Jewish state with as many Jews, and as few Palestinians as possible. The Nakba of 1948 saw Zionist forces expel 750,000 Palestinians, more than 50 percent of the native Palestinian population, from their homes, destroying more than 500 Palestinian villages and towns and capturing 78 percent of historic Palestine. More than 15,000 Palestinians were killed between 1947 and 1949.
Throughout the following seven decades, Israeli governments never stopped making plans to ethnically cleanse the remaining Palestinians and realise the vision of Greater Israel that stretches from the Sinai to the Euphrates River. Israel did not suddenly become genocidal on October 7, 2023; it was a crime long in the making.
And yet, there are still people like Sanders who choose to blame Palestinians for their own extermination.
Genocide is called the “crime of crimes” for a reason. It represents humanity’s recognition that some lines can never be crossed, some acts can never be justified, regardless of context or provocation. The moment we start making exceptions, the moment we say “but they started it”, we have made it so that one group’s lives matter more than another’s.
History will judge us for whether we could see genocide for what it is, without asterisks, without exceptions, without the comfortable lies that let the powerful sleep while children starve to death or get torn to pieces. If we fail to grasp this fundamental truth, we do not just fail Palestinians. We fail every occupied, colonised, and oppressed people who might one day be told their resistance justifies their extermination.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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