A month after Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, I believed there was evidence that the Israeli military had committed war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity in its counterattack on Gaza. But, despite the accusations of Israel's most vocal critics, it seemed to me that the evidence did not point to the crime of genocide.
By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had ordered the approximately one million Palestinians who had taken refuge in Rafah, the southernmost and last relatively unscathed city in the Gaza Strip, to relocate to the coastal area of Mawasi, where there was almost no shelter. The military then proceeded to demolish much of Rafah, which was largely completed by August.
At that point, it was no longer possible to deny that the pattern of IDF operations matched statements by Israeli leaders that indicated genocidal intent. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that the enemy would pay a "huge price" for the attack and that the IDF would reduce the parts of Gaza where Hamas operates "to ruins", and called on "Gaza residents" to "leave immediately because we will act forcefully everywhere".
Netanyahu urged his citizens to remember "what Amalek did to you," which many interpreted as a reference to a biblical verse that calls on Israelis to "slay both men and women, children and infants" of their ancient enemy. Many government and military officials said they were fighting "life in human form," and later called for "total annihilation."
Israel's actions could only be interpreted as the implementation of a stated intention to render the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the aim was, and remains, to force the population to leave the Strip entirely or, given that there is nowhere else to go, to cripple the enclave through constant bombardment and shortages of food, clean water, sanitation and medical care to the point where Palestinians in Gaza cannot survive or rebuild their lives.
My inescapable conclusion is that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. I grew up in a Zionist home, spent the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF as a soldier and officer, and devoted most of my career to researching and writing about war crimes and the Holocaust, and so this was a painful conclusion, one that I refused to accept as much as I could. However, I have been teaching about genocide for a quarter of a century. I know it when I see it.
And I'm not alone. A growing number of experts on genocide and international law have concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International have all agreed. South Africa has filed a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice on the grounds of genocide.
The persistent denial of this qualification by states, international organizations, legal and academic authorities is causing immeasurable harm not only to the people of Gaza and Israel, but also to the entire system of international law, which was established after the horrors of the Holocaust to prevent the repetition of such crimes. It threatens the very foundations of the moral order on which we all rest.
The United Nations defined the crime of genocide in 1948 as “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” So, to determine what constitutes genocide, we must both prove the existence of intent and show that that intent is being carried out. In the case of Israel, that intent has been publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. However, intent can also be inferred from the pattern of operations on the ground that became clear by May 2024, and has become increasingly clear since, as Israeli forces systematically destroyed Gaza.
Most genocide experts are wary of applying the term to contemporary events, because since it was coined by Jewish-Polish lawyer Rafael Lemkin in 1944, it has often been used to describe any massacre or inhumane treatment. In fact, some argue that the category should be discarded altogether, as it often serves more to express outrage than to identify a specific crime.
My inescapable conclusion is that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. I grew up in a Zionist home, spent the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF as a soldier and officer, and devoted most of my career to researching and writing about war crimes and the Holocaust, and so this was a painful conclusion, one that I refused to accept as much as I could. However, I have been teaching about genocide for a quarter of a century. I know it when I see it.
However, as Lemkin recognized, and the UN later accepted, it is crucial to distinguish the attempt to destroy a specific group of people from other crimes under international law, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The other crimes involve the indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians as individuals, while genocide refers to the killing of people as members of a specific group, with the aim of destroying that group irreversibly so that it can never again be restored as a political, social or cultural entity. By adopting the convention, the international community sent a message that all signatory states are obliged to prevent such an attempt, to do everything they can to stop it while it is in progress, and to subsequently punish those who participated in it - even if it occurred within the borders of a sovereign state.
Designating an act as genocide has serious political, legal and moral consequences. If the International Court of Justice finds that a state has engaged in an act of genocide, especially if the decision is supported by the UN Security Council, it can lead to serious sanctions.
Politicians or generals accused of genocide or other violations of international humanitarian law before the International Criminal Court may face arrest outside their own country's borders. And a society that condones and is complicit in genocide, regardless of the views of individual citizens, will bear that "mark of Cain" long after the flames of hatred and violence have died down.
Israel has denied all charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Military and political leaders have repeatedly said the IDF acts within the law, insisting it issues warnings to civilians to evacuate locations that are about to be attacked and accusing Hamas of using civilians as human shields.
However, the systematic destruction in Gaza does not only concern residential buildings, but also other infrastructure, administrative buildings, hospitals, universities, schools, mosques, cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, agricultural areas and parks, indicating an aspiration to make the reconstruction of Palestinian life in the territory almost impossible.
According to a recent survey by Haaretz, an estimated 174.000 buildings have been destroyed or damaged, representing up to 70 percent of the total building structure in Gaza. According to health authorities in the enclave, more than 58.000 people have been killed so far, including more than 17.000 children, who make up almost a third of the total number of deaths. More than 870 of these children were under the age of one.
Health authorities also say that more than 2.000 families have been completely wiped out, while 5.600 families now have only one surviving member. At least 10.000 people are believed to be still buried under the rubble of their homes. More than 138.000 people have been injured and maimed. Gaza now holds the gruesome title of having the highest number of child amputations per capita in the world.
The horror of what is happening in Gaza is still described by most observers as a war. But that is a misnomer. Over the past year, Israeli forces have not faced organized military force. The version of Hamas that planned and carried out the attacks on October 7 has been destroyed, although the weakened group continues to resist in areas not under Israeli military control.
Some might describe the Israeli campaign as ethnic cleansing, not genocide. However, the crimes are linked. When an ethnic group has nowhere to go and is constantly moved from one so-called safe zone to another, while being relentlessly bombed and starved, ethnic cleansing can escalate into genocide.
This happened in several famous cases of genocide in the 20th century, such as the genocide of the Herero and Nama in German South-West Africa, now Namibia, which began in 1904; of the Armenians during World War I; and even during the Holocaust, which began with the German attempt to expel the Jews and ended with their mass murder.
To date, only a handful of Holocaust historians - and no institution dedicated to its study and commemoration - have issued a warning that Israel could be accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, or genocide. This silence has rendered the slogan "never again" meaningless, transforming it from a call to resist inhumanity wherever it occurs into an excuse, justification, and even a blank license to destroy others by invoking its own past victimhood.
This is yet another in a series of unforeseeable consequences of this catastrophe. As Israel literally attempts to erase the Palestinian existence in Gaza and simultaneously applies increasingly brutal violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the moral and historical capital on which the Jewish state has so far rested is rapidly being depleted.
Israel, created in the shadow of the Holocaust in response to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, has always insisted that any threat to its security must be seen as a potential harbinger of a new Auschwitz. This gives Israel the right to portray those it perceives as its enemies as Nazis - a term that Israeli media outlets repeatedly use to describe Hamas and, indirectly, all Gazans, relying on the ingrained claim that there are no innocents among them, not even newborns, because they too will one day become militants.
Perhaps the only bright spot at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will move towards a future without hiding in the shadow of the Holocaust - even if they will have to bear the stigma of the genocide in Gaza committed in their name.
This phenomenon is not new. Back during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasser Arafat, then hiding in Beirut, to Adolf Hitler in a bunker in Berlin. This time, the analogy is being used in the context of a policy aimed at uprooting and eliminating the entire population of Gaza.
The daily scenes of horror in Gaza, from which the Israeli public is protected by the self-censorship of its own media, expose the lies of Israeli propaganda that this is a defensive war against a Nazi-like enemy. One is horrified as Israeli spokespeople shamelessly spout the empty slogan that the IDF is "the most moral army in the world."
Some European countries, such as France, Britain, and Germany, as well as Canada, have lukewarmly protested Israel's actions. However, none of them has stopped arms shipments, nor taken many concrete and substantive economic or political steps that could deter Netanyahu's government.
At one point, the US government seemed to have lost interest in Gaza - President Trump first announced in February that the US would take over Gaza, then allowed Israel to continue its destruction of the Strip and turned its attention to Iran. For now, the only hope is that Trump will once again pressure a reluctant Netanyahu to at least agree to a new ceasefire and stop the merciless killing.
How will the future of Israel be affected by the inevitable collapse of its unquestionable morality, born from its birth in the ashes of the Holocaust?
It is up to Israel’s political leadership and its citizens to decide. However, there appears to be very little domestic pressure for the urgently needed paradigm shift: for acknowledging that there is no other solution to this conflict than an Israeli-Palestinian settlement of the land, on whatever parameters the two sides agree to, whether it be two states, one state, or a confederation. Strong external pressure from Israel’s allies also seems unlikely. I am deeply concerned that Israel will persist on its destructive path, transforming itself, perhaps irreversibly, into a full-blown authoritarian apartheid state. And such states, as history teaches us, do not survive.
Another question arises: what consequences will Israel's moral turn have on the culture of Holocaust remembrance, as well as on the politics of remembrance, education, and scientific research, at a time when so many of its intellectual and administrative authorities have so far refused to face their own responsibility to condemn inhumanity and genocide, regardless of where they occur?
Those engaged in the global culture of Holocaust remembrance and commemoration will face a serious moral test. The broader community of genocide scholars is now moving closer to a consensus to describe the events in Gaza as genocide. Israeli genocide expert Shmuel Lederman joined the growing chorus of those who believe Israel is carrying out genocidal actions in November. Canadian international lawyer William Scheibs reached the same conclusion last year, and recently described Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as “absolutely” genocidal.
Most Holocaust scholars do not hold, or at least do not publicly express, this view. With a few notable exceptions, such as Israeli Raz Segal of Stockton University in New Jersey, and historians Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blattman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, most academics studying the history of the Nazi genocide of the Jews have remained remarkably silent. Some have openly denied Israeli crimes in Gaza or accused their critical colleagues of inflammatory rhetoric, rampant exaggeration, "poisoning the well," and anti-Semitism.
In December, Holocaust historian Norman J. W. Goda said that “genocide accusations like this have long been used as a fig leaf for broader attacks on Israel’s legitimacy,” arguing that this trivializes the concept itself. This “genocide smear,” as Goda called it in an essay, he described as a discourse that “employs a range of anti-Semitic stereotypes,” including “the linking of genocide accusations to the deliberate killing of children, images of which are ubiquitous on NGO platforms, social media, and other channels that accuse Israel of genocide.”
In other words, according to this understanding, showing images of Palestinian children torn apart by American bombs fired by Israeli pilots constitutes anti-Semitism.
Recently, Goda and the esteemed European historian Jeffrey Herf wrote in the Washington Post that "the accusation of genocide against Israel draws on deep sources of fear and hatred" found in "radical interpretations of both Christianity and Islam." It has, they say, "redirected condemnation from Jews as a religious and ethnic group to the state of Israel, portraying it as inherently evil."
What are the consequences of this schism between historians of genocide and historians of the Holocaust? This is not just an academic dispute. The culture of remembrance of the Holocaust has long transcended the genocide of the Jews itself. It has become a key factor in the political, educational, and identity space.
Museums dedicated to the Holocaust have served as models for the portrayal of other genocides around the world. The insistence that the lessons of the Holocaust obligate us to promote tolerance, diversity, the fight against racism, and support for migrants and refugees, not to mention human rights and international humanitarian law, is based on an understanding of the universal implications of that crime, committed in the heart of Western civilization at its modernist peak.
Discrediting genocide historians who point to the Israeli genocide in Gaza as anti-Semitism threatens to undermine the very foundations of genocide studies: the ongoing need to define, prevent, punish, and historically reconstruct genocide. To suggest that this endeavor is motivated by malevolent interests and sentiments—that it is driven by the very hatreds and prejudices that were at the root of the Holocaust—is not only morally scandalous, but it also opens the door to a politics of denial and impunity.
Likewise, when those who have dedicated their careers to teaching and remembering the Holocaust persistently ignore or deny Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza, they do not question everything that Holocaust scholarship and commemoration have stood for over the past decades. These are: the dignity of every human being, respect for the rule of law, and the urgent need to never allow inhumanity to take hold in the hearts of people and guide the actions of states in the name of security, national interest, or mere revenge.
What I fear is that, after the genocide in Gaza, it will no longer be possible to continue teaching and studying the Holocaust in the same way as before. Because the State of Israel, together with its defenders, has relentlessly used the Holocaust as a cover for the crimes of the IDF, there is a danger that the study and remembrance of the Holocaust will lose its claim to be based on universal justice and retreat into the same ethnic ghetto in which it began its life after World War II - as a marginal preoccupation of the remnants of a marginalized people, as an ethnically specific event - before, decades later, finding its rightful place as a warning and lesson for all of humanity.
Equally worrying is the possibility that genocide studies as a whole will not survive accusations of anti-Semitism, leaving us without a crucial community of scholars and international lawyers ready to stand up at a time when the rise of intolerance, racial hatred, populism, and authoritarianism threatens the values that were at the very heart of these 20th-century scientific, cultural, and political endeavors.
Perhaps the only bright spot at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will move forward into the future without the shadow of the Holocaust - even if they will have to bear the stigma of the genocide in Gaza committed in their name. Israel will have to learn how to live without ever invoking the Holocaust as a justification for inhumanity. This, despite all the horror and suffering we witness, is a precious thing, and it may, in the long run, help Israel face the future in a healthier, more rational, and less fearful and violent way.
This will in no way compensate for the staggering level of death and suffering of the Palestinian people. But an Israel freed from the overwhelming burden of the Holocaust may finally be able to face the inevitable need for its seven million Jewish citizens to share the land with the seven million Palestinians who live in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank in peace, equality, and dignity. That will be the only true justice.
The author is a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University.
The essay was published in the New York Times.
Arranged by: A. Š., NB
Bonus video:
