Among Israeli officials, the state they represent is incapable of genocide. Over time, as Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov writes, “ethical concerns and moral qualms were brushed aside as either marginal or distracting in the face of the ultimate cataclysm that is the genocide of the Jews”.
This form of reasoning, known otherwise as “Holocaust-ism” or “Shoah-tiyut”, is a moral conceit left bare by the war of annihilation being waged against Palestinians in Gaza.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has issued a new report, Our Genocide, which made this blunt assessment: “Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads us to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.
“In other words: Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
The infliction of genocide, the organisation acknowledges, is a matter of “multiple and parallel practices” applied over a period of time, with killing being merely one component.
Living conditions are destroyed, concentration camps and zones created, populations expelled and policies to systematically prevent reproduction enacted.
“Accordingly, genocidal acts are various actions intended to bring about the destruction of a distinct group, as part of a deliberate, coordinated effort by a ruling authority.”
Our Genocide suggests that certain conditions often precede the sparking of a genocide. Israel’s relations with Palestinians had been characterised by “broader patterns of settler-colonialism”, with the intention of ensuring “Jewish supremacy over Palestinians — economically, politically, socially, and culturally”.
B’Tselem draws upon three crucial elements centred on ensuring “Jewish supremacy over Palestinians”. They are “life under an apartheid regime that imposes separation, demographic engineering, and ethnic cleansing; systemic and institutionalized use of violence against Palestinians, while the perpetrators enjoy impunity; and institutionalized mechanisms of dehumanization and framing Palestinians as an existential threat”.
The attacks on Israel by Hamas and other militant groups on October 7, 2023, was a violent event that created a “sense of existential threat among the perpetrating group” enabling the “ruling system to carry out genocide”, the report notes.
As B’Tselem executive director Yuli Novak said, this sense of threat was promoted by an “extremist, far-right messianic government” to pursue “an agenda of destruction and expulsion”.
Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip since October 2023 could not be rationalised as a focused, targeted attempt to destroy the rule of Hamas or its military efficacy.
“Statements by senior Israeli decision-makers about the nature and assault in Gaza have expressed genocidal intent throughout.” The same goes for all ranks of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Gaza’s residents had been dehumanised, with many Jewish-Israelis believing “that their lives are of negligible value compared to Israel’s national goals, if not worthless altogether”.
A Pew Research Center poll, conducted last month, found just 16% of Jewish Israelis thought peaceful coexistence with Palestinians was possible.
The report notes the use of certain terminology that haunts the literature of genocidal euphemism: The creation of “humanitarian zones” that would still be bombed despite supposedly providing protection for displaced civilians; the use of “kill zones” by the Israeli military and the absence of any standardised rules of engagement through the Strip, often “determined at the discretion of commanders on the ground or based on arbitrary criteria”.
Wishing to be comprehensive, the authors do not ignore Israel’s actions in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.
Airstrikes have taken place with regularity against refugee camps in the northern part of the territory since October 2023. Even more lethal open-fire policies have been used in the West Bank, with the use of kill zones suggesting “the broader ‘Gazafication’ of Israel’s methods of warfare”.
Physicians for Human Rights — Israel (PHRI) has published a legal-medical appraisal on the intentional destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system. It found that the Israeli campaign in Gaza “constitutes genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention”.
PHRI’s Destruction of Conditions of Life: A Health Analysis of the Gaza Genocide found evidence that “shows a deliberate and systematic dismantling of Gaza’s healthcare system and other vital systems necessary for the population’s survival”.
The evolving nature of the campaign suggested a “deliberate progression” from the initial bombing and forced evacuation of hospitals in the northern part of the Strip to calculated collapse of the healthcare system across the entire enclave.
The dismantling of the health system involved rendering hospitals “non-functional”, the blocking of medical evaluations and the elimination of such vital services as trauma care, surgery, dialysis and maternal health”.
Added to this is Israel’s direct targeting of healthcare workers, involving the death and detention of more than 1800 members, “including many senior specialists” and the deliberate restriction of humanitarian relief through militarised distribution points that pose lethal risks to aid recipients.
“This coordinated assault has produced a cascading failure of health and humanitarian infrastructure, compounded by policies leading to starvation, disease and the breakdown of sanitation, housing, and education systems.”
PHRI contends that, at the very least, three core elements of Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention are met: The killing of members of a group (identified by nationality, ethnicity, race or religion); causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of that group; and deliberately inflicting on the group those conditions of life to bring about its destruction in whole or in part.
In accepting that genocide is being perpetrated against the Palestinians, Our Genocide makes a pertinent point: the dry, legal analysis of genocide tends to be distanced from a historical perspective. “The legal definition is narrow, having been shaped in large part by the political interests of the states whose representatives drafted it.”
The high threshold of identifying genocide, and the international jurisprudence on the subject, had produced a disturbing paradox: genocide tends to be recognised “only after a significant portion of the targeted group has already been destroyed and the group as such has suffered irreparable harm”.
The thrust of these clarion calls from B’Tselem and PHRI is urgently clear: end this state of affairs before the Palestinians become yet another historical victim of such harm.
[Binoy Kampmark lectures at RMIT University.]