Palestinian genocide accusation

Palestinian genocide accusation
The accusation that Israel has incited or has carried out and/or is carrying out some kind of the crime of genocide against the Palestinian people has been made repeatedly during the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This is sometimes related to the view that Israel is a settler colonial state. This characterization of events has been made in relation to the Nakba, as well as more recent developments in the conflict, including the Blockade of the Gaza Strip, the 2014 Gaza War and the 2023 Israel–Hamas war. In the latter conflict in particular, numerous international law and genocide scholars have raised concerns about the clear incitement to commit genocide and use of dehumanizing language by Israeli officials. The characterization has been largely rejected by Israelis, as well as contested by a number of scholars.
History
Nakba
In 2010, historians Martin Shaw and Omer Bartov carried out a debate regarding whether the 1948 Nakba should be regarded as a genocide, with Shaw arguing that it could and with Bartov disagreeing. The former Deputy Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, Daud Abdullah, has stated that "Given the declared intent of the Zionist leaders, this wholesale destruction and depopulation of Palestinian villages fit[s] easily with the definition of genocide as cited in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide."
Blockade of Gaza
In 2007, Israel imposed a blockade – supported by Egypt – on the movement of goods and people in and out of the Gaza Strip. Israeli New Historian Ilan Pappé has argued that genocide "is the only appropriate way to describe what the Israeli army is doing in the Gaza Strip". In an article written in 2023 in the International Journal of Human Rights, Mohammed Nijim voiced his belief “that Israeli policies that were enacted after the introduction of the Blockade of the Gaza Strip amount[ed] to slow-motion genocide".
2014 Gaza War
The 2014 Gaza War, also referred to as Operation Protective Edge, was a military operation launched by Israel on 8 July 2014 in the Gaza Strip. Al-Haq, a Palestinian Human Rights organization, concluded in a report that serious violations of international law were committed in the course of the 2014 Israeli offensive against Gaza. The organization, along with other Palestinian human rights organizations the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights and Addameer, submitted a legal file to the International Criminal Court encouraging it to begin an investigation and prosecution into the crimes against humanity and war crimes committed during the course of Israel’s 2014 Gaza offensive. The crime of genocide was referenced as an Israeli crime by these groups. Additionally, dozens of Holocaust survivors, along with hundreds of descendants of Holocaust survivors and victims, accused Israel of “genocide” for the deaths of more than 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza during the 2014 Gaza War.
2023 Israel–Hamas war
The 2023 Israel–Hamas war began when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, killing 1,400 Israelis, most of whom were civilians; this led to an Israeli counteroffensive. Israel formally declared war on Hamas a day later. Some Palestinians immediately expressed concern that this violence would be used to justify genocide by Israel against Palestinians. On 15 October, TWAILR published a statement signed by over 800 legal scholars expressing "alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip".
Forcible population transfer
Israel's evacuation order was characterized as a forcible population transfer by Jan Egeland, the Norwegian former diplomat involved with the Oslo Accord. A "forcible transfer" is the forced relocation of a civilian population as part of an organized offense against it and is considered a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Court. In an interview with the BBC, Egeland stated, "There are hundreds of thousands of people fleeing for their life — [that is] not something that should be called an evacuation. It is a forcible transfer of people from all of northern Gaza, which according to the Geneva convention is a war crime." UN Special rapporteur Francesca Albanese warned of a mass ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and director of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies program at Stockton University, termed it a "textbook case of genocide." A leaked policy paper from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence suggested a permanent expulsion of the population of Gaza into Egypt, which has been described as an endorsement of ethnic cleansing.
Legal discourse
There has been a longstanding legal discourse on whether a case can be made that Israel has violated the Genocide Convention, with American human rights lawyer Francis Boyle, the professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, first suggesting that such a case should be brought to bear in 1998.
Concepts of genocide
The term genocide was coined in 1944 by a Jewish Polish legal scholar, Raphael Lemkin, who explained that for him “the term does not necessarily signify mass killings”.
It has been claimed by many analysts that Israel has violated various acts of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, including: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Haifa Rashed and Damien Short have voiced their belief that Lemkin's original concept of genocide can be used to analyze "the historical and continuing, cultural and physical, destructive social and political relations involved in the Israel/Palestine conflict". In a separate publication, Rashed, Short, and John Docker argued that the conflict did not receive enough attention in the field of genocide studies. Historian Lawrence Davidson, in his book about cultural genocide, included a chapter about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
In the context of the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, the Israeli counterattacks, and the imposed complete blockade, which included the denial of water and food to the civilian population, Israeli historian Raz Segal described it as a "textbook case of genocide" and connected it to the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians during the establishment of Israel in 1948.
Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer who argued on behalf of Yesh Din that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid, wrote in 2020 that Israel's policy against the Palestinians "doesn’t even begin to meet the threshold of what genocide is" and that the accusation "cheapens the very important and grave concept of genocide".
British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, arguing that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank was "harsh, unjust, and oppressive", and that over 100 Palestinians were killed by Israeli settlers in both 2022 and 2023, stated that he did not consider it to be a genocide.
Discourse on the 2023 Israel–Hamas war
On 17 October, 10 days after the start of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, 880 scholars of international law and genocide signed a public statement saying: "As scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies, and genocide studies, we are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip."
The statement called on UN bodies, including the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, as well as the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to "immediately intervene, to carry out the necessary investigations, and invoke the necessary warning procedures to protect the Palestinian population from genocide."
On 19 October 2023, amid the 2023 Hamas–Israel war, 100 civil society organizations and six genocide scholars sent a letter to Karim Khan, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, calling on him to issue arrest warrants to Israeli officials for cases already before the prosecutor; to investigate the new crimes committed in the Palestinian territories, including incitement to genocide, since 7 October; to issue a preventative statement against war crimes; and to remind all states of their obligations under international law. The letter noted that Israeli officials, in their statements, had indicated "clear intent to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity and incitement to commit genocide, using dehumanizing language to describe Palestinians." The six specialist genocide scholars that signed the document were Raz Segal, Barry Trachtenberg, Robert McNeil, Damien Short, Taner Akçam and Victoria Sanford.
The same day, lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights stated that Israel's tactics were "calculated to destroy the Palestinian population in Gaza", and warned the Biden administration that “U.S. officials can be held responsible for their failure to prevent Israel’s unfolding genocide, as well as for their complicity, by encouraging it and materially supporting it." On 1 November, the Defence for Children International accused the United States of complicity with Israel's "crime of genocide."
Other discourse
Public discourse
Both Israel and Palestine frequently accuse the other of planning a scheme of genocide. Most Israelis reject the characterization of genocide, and some say that such accusations are antisemitic.
In an opinion survey of American Jews, commissioned by the Jewish Electorate Institute following the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, 22% agreed that "Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians."
Eric Levitz, in a 13 October piece in the The Intelligencer, argued that administrations of the United States, such as the Biden administration, have given tacit approval to Israeli war crimes and genocide in the 2023 Israel–Hamas war.
Ramzy Baroud, in a 23 October piece in Arab News, paralleled the dehumanization and genocidal intent in Israeli-US-Western media with the language used in Rwanda ahead of the Rwandan genocide. He referenced the similarity between the refrain by the Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) in Rwanda that Tutsis “are cockroaches. We will kill you” and a 1983 quote from former Israeli army chief of staff Rafael Eitan that Arabs are like “drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” In the 2023 conflict, he noted the similar sentiment expressed in comments such as that of by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: “We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly,” and Ariel Kallner, a Knesset member for Likud, who said of the 2023 war: “Right now, one goal: Nakba. A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948.” Chris McGreal, a reporter from The Guardian who won an Amnesty International Media Award for his coverage of the Rwandan genocide, also described the rhetoric against Palestinians as being "eerily familiar" to the rhetoric used against Tutsis.
Political discourse
Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian on 13 October labelled the siege and the cutting off of essentials as "seeking a genocide of all people in Gaza". On 15 October, Pakistani foreign minister Jalil Abbas Jilani directly called Israel's airstrikes and blockade on Gaza a genocide. Reuters reported on 28 October that the President of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, described the Gazan conflict as a "war of genocide and massacres committed by the Israeli occupation forces".
Israel's Ambassador to the Philippines, Ilan Fluss, denied that there was a genocide against Palestinians, reported Manila Bulletin on 23 October; according to Fluss, Israel was "taking all measures to avoid having civilians affected", including "informing civilians even before attacks: keep away from Hamas' infrastructure".
Palestinian-American US congresswoman Rashida Tlaib pleaded for a cease-fire at a rally on 18 October, saying: "We are literally still watching people commit genocide and killing a vast majority just like this, and we still stand by and say nothing." Her remarks at the rally led the Republican caucus within congress to draw up a resolution, sponsored by Marjorie Taylor Greene, to censure Tlaib.
Craig Mokhiber, a director in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, resigned over what he called the "text-book case of genocide" in the 2023 Israel–Hamas war. He criticized the OHCHR, the US and Western media for their positions on the conflict and noted: "Once again, we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the Organization that we serve appears powerless to stop it." At the same time his letter did not mention the 7 October attack by Hamas (killing more than 1,400 people and taking 240 hostages), while calling for the "establishment of a single, democratic secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews", which would require "the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project".
See also
Criticism of Israel
Demographics of the State of Palestine
Demographic history of Palestine (region)
Allegations of genocide of Ukrainians in the Russian invasion of Ukraine
References
Works cited
Further reading
Genocides in Asia
Israeli–Palestinian conflict
History of Palestine (region)
Zionist political violence