I was answering a specific question you had asked and that question was not what evidence do you have to support the claim of genocide.
The reasons which persuaded me were those given by scholars of genocide who were first interviewed a year ago and then again more recently. I’ll post segments below (it is a bit long):
Is Israel committing genocide? Reexamining the question, a year later.
Last October, my Vox colleague Sigal Samuel and I
interviewed scholars about how to think through those allegations of genocide. At that time, some were willing to definitively call what was happening in Gaza a genocide. But most were hesitant, citing the high threshold required to establish genocide under international law. Several said “crimes against humanity” or “war crimes,” which hold equal weight under international law, had likely been committed, but withheld judgment on genocide.
… In light of those developments, I went back to the scholars we cited and spoke to last fall to see if their thinking about allegations of genocide against Israel had changed over the last year. Of the five who responded, most of them were now more confident the legal requirements for genocide had been met. If an official determination of genocide by the ICJ follows, that could have critical legal and political consequences.
First, some background: There are different ways to conceptualize genocide, but the ICJ is concerned only with its legal definition under the
Genocide Convention, the international treaty criminalizing genocide that went into effect in 1951 and has been ratified by 153 countries, including Israel and its closest ally, the US.
… A nation must bring genocide charges against another at the ICJ, providing evidence that the state itself (not just certain individuals) committed genocide.
Under the Genocide Convention, genocide is “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”:
- Killing members of the group
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Those five physical acts can be measured, but it turns out “intent to destroy” is incredibly difficult to prove — and that has been the sticking point in the debate over whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, where the physical component of the crime is already demonstrably satisfied given the overwhelming number of Palestinian civilian casualties.
Intent has been central to nearly every other debate over genocide as well, and the high bar for proving intent has made international court findings of genocide rare.
Only
three genocides have been officially recognized under the definition of the term in the Genocide Convention and led to trials in international criminal tribunals: one against Cham Muslim and ethnic Vietnamese people perpetrated by Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia in the 1970s, the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre in Bosnia. (The Holocaust occurred before the adoption of the 1948 Convention.)
UN investigations found the mass killings of
the Yazidis by ISIS in Iraq and of
the Rohingya in Myanmar constituted genocide. Though the US
called the killing of the Masalit and other ethnic groups in the Sudanese region of Darfur between 2003 and 2005 “genocide,” a UN investigation
ruled it was not. That may have caused the conflict to extend longer than it would have if a finding of genocide had been made, and gave the Sudanese government diplomatic cover to continue its campaign, despite widespread international condemnation.
Is Israel committing genocide:
Raz Segal
One of the first scholars to say Israel was committing genocide was
Raz Segal, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, who called it a “
textbook case” in Jewish Currents just days after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Ahead of the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s attack, he told me he wished he had been wrong.
“I fully stand behind my description of Israel’s attack on Gaza as a ‘textbook case of genocide’ because we’re still actually seeing, nearly a year into this genocidal assault, explicit and unashamed statements of intent to destroy,” he said. “The way that intent is expressed here is absolutely unprecedented.”
…Several other scholars who Vox spoke with last fall, at that point reluctant to say Israel was committing genocide as defined by the Genocide Convention, now appear to agree with Segal.
Adam Jones
“Any early hesitation I had about applying the ‘genocide’ label to the Israeli attack on Gaza has dissipated over the past year of human slaughter and the obliteration of homes, infrastructure, and communities,” said
Adam Jones, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia who has written a textbook on genocide. “There is plenty of this demonization and dehumanization on the other side as well, but whatever peace constituency existed in Israel seems to have vanished, and there is a growing consensus for genocidal war, mass population transfer, and long-term eradication of Palestinian culture and identity.”
Among other things, Jones noted Israeli leadership’s recent
plans to expel the entire remaining civilian population of northern Gaza and turn the territory into a military zone where no aid would be allowed as influencing his thinking on the issue. There is no indication of whether civilians would ever be allowed to return. This could be taken as an example of the kind of “state or organizational plan or policy” necessary to prove genocidal intent, he said. Though the plan, if it has been implemented, has not yet been seen to completion, it can still serve as evidence of intent.
Ernesto Verdeja
…said it could be “called a genocide, even in a narrow legal sense, for several months now” given the accumulation of Israeli attacks clearly and consistently targeting the civilian population in Gaza.
A major tipping point for Verdeja and many other human rights experts was Israel’s
ground offensive in Rafah in May. The Israeli military had been pushing civilians increasingly into the southern city, which connects Gaza and Egypt, telling them it was a safe zone while it pursued Hamas to the north. But by August, an estimated
44 percent of all buildings in Rafah had been damaged or destroyed in heavy bombing. Israeli forces took over and shut down the Rafah border crossing, limiting the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza. They
killed civilians camping in tents in a humanitarian zone. When the ICJ ordered Israel to stop its offensive in Rafah, Israeli officials
condemned the ruling and said
it was open to interpretation, despite the fact that many human rights lawyers argued it was unambiguous. The assault on Rafah
continued.
“I wouldn’t say [Rafah was] necessarily the defining moment, but I think it’s indicative of a broader pattern where we see a genocidal campaign really crystallizing,” Verdeja said.
Scholars that still disagree it is genocide:
Some scholars still disagree.
Dov Waxman, a professor of political science and Israel studies and the director of the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies,
wrote last year in response to Segal’s piece in Jewish Currents that accusing Israel of genocide required “stretching the concept too far, emptying it of any meaning.”
Waxman has since qualified his stance, but still believes “Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip — though too often brutal, inhumane, and indiscriminate — do not meet the international legal criteria of the crime of genocide.” He told me that he “can understand why many regard those actions as genocidal” given the extent of the death and destruction in Gaza and the “bellicose and extreme rhetoric of some Israeli officials, including senior government ministers, can be characterized as potentially genocidal because of the way Palestinians are dehumanized.”
But he still finds evidence of the requisite “intent to destroy” lacking. He said “a few horrendous public statements” made by Israeli politicians serve as only “quite limited and weak” support.
Of the scholars we cited in our previous story, he was the only one who responded to my request for new comment who still did not think Israel’s actions qualify as genocide.
