Why is it so difficult for some to accept that the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza? The case for genocide is compellingbut some governments and members of the public resist acknowledging it. The reason lies in not only Israel’s history as a haven for the Jewish victims of genocide but also an unduly narrow understanding of the meaning of the term, by both the public and the international court of justice (ICJ).
Israel benefits from a halo effect associated with the Holocaust. Because the state of Israel was founded in response to the Nazi genocide, it is harder to accept that the Israeli government in turn would commit genocide. One obviously does not preclude the other, but Israel benefits from the cognitive dissonance.
One would have hoped that a history of genocidal victimhood would yield an appreciation for human rights standards that prohibit oppression, but some leaders seem to have drawn the opposite lesson. They interpret the vow “never again” to mean that anything goes in the name of preventing renewed persecution, even the commission of mass atrocities. Indeed, they weaponize the genocidal past to suppress criticism of their current atrocities.
That was the experience in Rwanda. The genocidal slaughter of some 800,000 Tutsis in 1994 was stopped by the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front, an exile rebel group based in neighboring Uganda. Under the military leadership of Paul Kagame, who went on to become Rwanda’s long-serving president, the RPF executed some 30,000 Rwandans during and immediately after the genocide.
Kagame’s government went on to repeatedly invade neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), ostensibly to chase remnants of the genocidal forces that had fled there but, these days, mainly to capitalize on Congo’s mineral wealth. An estimated 6 million Congolese have died from the violence and resulting humanitarian crises. Meanwhile, the Rwandan government imprisons critics on the spurious grounds that they are promoting a vaguely defined “genocide ideology”.
The Israeli government has followed a similar logic, using increasingly brutal means to crush any perceived threat. Like Kagame, Benjamin Netanyahu and his predecessors have used ostensible self-defense as a pretext for a land grab. Israeli settlements have gradually cannibalized large portions of the occupied West Bank, and the prime minister is now threatening to forcibly deport 2 million Palestinians from Gaza. Meanwhile, the government and its partisans dismiss critics as “antisemitic”.
Israel also benefits from a public misconception of what genocide is. The Genocide Conventionwhich 153 states have embraced, prohibits various acts with the intent to destroy a specified group “in whole or in part” as such. The proscribed acts of greatest relevance to Gaza are “killing” or “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.
Both the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide were examples of genocide targeting a group “in whole”. After a certain point, the Nazis in Germany and the Hutu extremists in Rwanda tried to kill as many Jews or Tutsis as they could get their hands on. Genocide was the primary purpose.
But what does it mean to target a group “in part”? That requirement might be met when the killing is not targeted at every member of a specified group but at enough to accomplish another goal. For example, in 2017 the Myanmar military executed some 10,000 Rohingya to send 730,000 Rohingya fleeing for their lives to Bangladesh. Genocide in that case was a means to the end of ethnic cleansing.
That is a better way to understand what the Israeli government today is doing in Gaza. Although the Netanyahu government has displayed a shocking indifference to Palestinian civilian life there, it has not tried to kill all Palestinians. Rather, it has killed enough of them, and imposed conditions of starvation and deprivation that are sufficiently severe, to force them to flee, if things go according to plan. The far-right Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have openly articulated that goal, as has Netanyahu.
There is little doubt that Israel’s actions are sufficient to meet the requirements for genocidal conduct. More than 57,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Hamas’s attack of 7 October 2023. A November 2024 study found that nearly 70% of those killed at the time had been women and children, and clearly many male victims were not combatants either. The number of civilians killed thus far exceeds the 8,000 killed by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1994, which an international tribunal found to constitute genocide.
Although many of the dead in Gaza were not deliberately killed, their deaths were the product of Israel’s disregard for Palestinian civilian life – for example, by devastating Palestinian neighborhoods with enormous 2,000-lb bombsattacking military targets knowing that the civilian toll would be disproportionately highor repeatedly killing starving Palestinians as they seek food.
Meanwhile, Israel has imposed a punishing siege on civilians in Gaza, blocking access to food and other necessities for lengthy periods. In addition, at least 70% of the buildings have been leveled. It confines surviving Gazans to primitive camps that it regularly moves or attacks. And it has destroyed the civilian institutions needed to sustain life in the territory, including hospitalsschools religious and cultural sitesand entire neighborhoods. These conditions are believed to have contributed to several times the official death toll in indirect deaths.
When the ICJ considers the merits of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, the key contested issue is likely to be whether Israel has taken these steps with the requisite genocidal intent – does it seek to eradicate Palestinian civilians in whole or in part as such? Some genocidal statements by senior Israeli officials have become notorious. Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, said about Hamas’s 7 October 2023, attack that “this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved” is false because civilians “could have risen up” against Hamas (which is a brutal dictatorship). The former defense minister Yoav Gallant spoke of fighting “human animals” – not, as some claim, referring to only Hamas but in discussing the siege, which affects everyone in Gaza. Netanyahu himself invoked the biblical nation of Amalek, in which God is said to have demanded the killing of all “men and women, children and infants”.
Yet other Israeli officials in their public utterances hew more closely to legal requirements to spare civilians. So the ICJ will likely also examine whether genocidal intent can be inferred from Israel’s conduct in Gaza. That is where the court’s conservative jurisprudence introduces a complication.
In its 2015 decision in Croatia v Serbia, the court ruled that genocidal intent could be inferred from conduct if it “is the only inference that can reasonably be drawn from the acts in question”. Because the killing in that case was also committed with the aim of forced displacement, the court ruled it could not give rise to an inference of genocidal intent.
Ignoring the possibility of two parallel intents – one to commit genocide, another to advance ethnic cleansing – the court’s ruling suggests, anomalously, that the war crime of forced displacement could be a defense to a charge of genocide. That makes no sense. The issue should be whether a charge is conclusively proved, not whether it is the only criminal activity under way.
The ICJ will have a chance to correct its jurisprudence in the Gambia v Myanmar case about the Myanmar military’s attacks on the Rohingya, which should be decided before the Israel case. The court would be well advised to find that Myanmar committed genocide against the Rohingya for the purpose of ethnically cleansing them – that forced mass deportation was a motive, not a defense, for genocide. That would lay the groundwork for a similar ruling against Israel.
Why would the ICJ have adopted this rule in the first place? It never explained, so we can only speculate. But its rationale may have rested in part on the view that genocide should be about killing maximally – killing “in whole”, like the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide – rather than killing or creating deadly conditions “in part”, as a means to an end. But that’s not what the Genocide Convention says. And that is not how we should assess Israel’s conduct in Gaza. That there is an illicit purpose to Israel’s unspeakable cruelty should not be a defense to the charge of genocide.
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Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book, Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments, was published by Knopf and Allen Lane in February
