Israel committing genocide in Gaza, world’s top scholars on the crime say

A separate organisation Scholars for Truth about Genocide call on the IAGS to rescind their statement. www.timesofisrael.com/genocide-experts-demand-scholars-group-rescind-accusation-against-israel/

Text of the letter now signed by 347.

Quout from someone shared by journalist Nicole: Brockman:

Hundreds of scholars from a variety of disciplines—many with world-renowned names—have signed the letter below calling on IAGS to withdraw its resolution accusing Israel of genocide, adopted “amid misapplication of law and history.”

Signatories include such prominent figures as Jan Grabowski, Benny Morris, Alvin Rosenfeld, Jeffrey Herf, and many others.

In a category of their own are two former U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors: Eli M. Rosenbaum, Esq., who over four decades prosecuted Nazi criminals, Rwandan genocidaires, Guatemalan special forces mass-murderers, and, most recently, Russian perpetrators of war crimes in Ukraine; and Jeffrey Mausner, Esq., Former Nazi War Crimes Prosecutor (Retired), Office of Special Investigations.

The letter shows that the IAGS resolution is not only a perversion of truth, history, law, and public trust but an abdication of responsibility. My signature is there as well. If you would like to add yours, the link is in the comments.

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LEGAL, ANTISEMITISM, HISTORY, HOLOCAUST, AND GENOCIDE SCHOLARS, FORMER PROSECUTORS, AND OTHER AUTHORITIES INCLUDING DESCENDANTS OF SURVIVORS CALL ON INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS (IAGS) TO RETRACT RESOLUTION ACCUSING ISRAEL OF GENOCIDE AMID CLEAR MISAPPLICATION OF LAW AND HISTORY

On behalf of the undersigned individuals and organizations who exist to educate about antisemitism, international law, the Holocaust and genocide, and who cumulatively and actively work to enhance the prevention of genocide, we find that the International Association of Genocide Scholars (“IAGS”) resolution fails to accurately apply the law and facts of the war in Gaza.

Moreover, we are alarmed by the process that was taken to pass the resolution with reported promises of town-halls and dissenting opinions to be published, and those promises being broken. The resolution was passed with a total of 129 voting members, and about 107 voting in favor, out of over 500 members. The quieting of dissent is an alarming tactic used on such a controversial matter.

Genocide is the gravest offense known to humankind; to dilute its legal standards for ideological ends is a form of moral violence. It dishonors the memory of past victims, misleads the public about present atrocities, and obstructs efforts to avert future ones.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas invaded Israel and acted with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, Jews and Israelis, as a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such. Further, Hamas and their allied organizations took innocent people hostage and continue to hold hostages.

Thus, Hamas committed the crime of genocide and remains the only party to legally meet the requirements of the elements of the crime of genocide.

It is undoubtedly true that the war in Gaza has harmed a large number of people who would not have been harmed or killed but for this war. It is understood from available information that the death toll includes those who have been killed by both Israel and Hamas. It is further understood that Hamas has utilized the practice of human shielding as a systematic strategy to attempt to immunize itself from harm and to increase the harm of Palestinian civilians. This is a war crime committed by Hamas against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

The IAGS resolution imparts that all of the deaths that have occurred in Gaza are a result of Israel’s conduct, and acts as a means to excuse Hamas from having agency for its own actions.

Further, the IAGS resolution stipulates without any justification that Israel has committed “indiscriminate and deliberate attacks against the civilians and civilian infrastructure (hospitals, homes, commercial buildings, etc.).” However, to make such a conclusion requires the negation of Hamas’ well-documented use of civilian and humanitarian infrastructure for the purpose of waging war. It is well-established that Hamas has weaponized hospitals, mosques, schools, civilian homes, even humanitarian zones. Under various provisions of international law, including but not limited to the Fourth Geneva Convention’s articles 19 & 28, and the Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Convention’s article 51(7), this conduct would cause such places to lose the protections that they would normally benefit from.

Hamas members have openly admitted to this strategy. It has been repeatedly shown that Hamas has warned civilians to not leave Gaza City. Ignoring Hamas’ conduct only causes more harm to Palestinian civilians who are meant to be protected.

The IAGS resolution further states: “Recognising that Israel has killed or injured more than 50,000 children and that this destruction of a substantial part of a group constitutes genocide.” What it misses is that Hamas allegedly utilizes children as combatants, and that children make up about 50% of Gaza’s population, a significantly higher proportion than nearly any other place in the world. This would cause problems in the analysis of “significant portion” when the total number of deaths and injuries in Gaza, as of the writing of this statement, constitute 224,217 total casualties (total deaths reported 63,557 and total injuries reported 160,660 per Palestinian media sources). Resulting in 22% of total casualties being children, well under the proportion of children in the population in Gaza. What’s important to further note about the casualty numbers is that it includes a significant portion of combatant casualties without differentiation between civilians and combatants.

The IAGS resolution further cites the issuance of arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) for Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, while ignoring that the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber I (“PTC I”) expressly rejected the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for the crime against humanity of extermination, a lower threshold crime, saying: “On the basis of material presented by the Prosecution covering the period until 20 May 2024, the Chamber could not determine that all elements of the crime against humanity of extermination were met.”

The authors of the IAGS resolution further state that the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”) determined in the first provisional measures in the South Africa v. Israel case that Israel’s actions were “plausibly genocide.” However, this grossly misrepresents what the ICJ determined and is a misstatement of the plausibility determination. The ICJ correctly found that Palestinians, as a distinct national group, have plausible rights under the Genocide Convention that can plausibly be infringed, not that genocide had been committed. The author of that decision, ex-ICJ president, Joan Donoghue, clarified the matter on the BBC.

Even further, the IAGS resolution cites various organizations that have accused Israel of genocide by, as put by B’Tselem, “adopt[ing] a broader analytical framework.” This “broadening” of the analytical framework exists to stretch the required intent from dolus specialis to a more inclusive intent such as dolus eventualis, where a party knew that their conduct could cause some harm but not necessarily act with the intent to cause that harm.

All of these accusations willfully ignore the established jurisprudence around the Genocide Convention and the commission of the crime of genocide. In Bosnia v. Serbia (2007) para. 373, the ICJ stated: “The dolus specialis, the specific intent to destroy the group in whole or in part, has to be convincingly shown by reference to particular circumstances, unless a general plan to that end can be convincingly demonstrated to exist; and for a pattern of conduct to be accepted as evidence of its existence, it would have to be such that it could only (emphasis added) point to the existence of such intent.”

In Gaza, there are numerous other plausible explanations for the intent of military operations in Gaza. From Hamas’ weaponization of civilian and humanitarian infrastructure, their documented booby-trapping of buildings, the tunnels that are longer than the London Underground, to the continued holding of hostages.

Another critical failure of the IAGS resolution is that it not only fails to establish the elements of genocide, it does not set the legal standard for which genocide must be proven. Genocide at the ICJ must be proven fully conclusively, meaning there can be no other possible explanation. Because other reasonable explanations exist to Israeli conduct in relation to understanding Hamas’ conduct and its legal obligations, it cannot be that the legal standard has been met. Since the legal standard cannot be met, it cannot thus be considered to be genocide under any application of the law until such time that standard is met.

Another fatal error of the IAGS resolution is that it fails to consider the steps that Israel itself has taken to prevent civilian harm. It assumes without justification that Israel’s conduct must be genocidal while ignoring the conduct of Hamas. Numerous non-Israelis have entered Gaza and observed first-hand IDF targeting protocols to determine adherence to the legal standards and have yet to conclude that Israel is engaging in wilful violations of international law. Further, information has been collected that has demonstrated that early in the war Israel tightened its proportionality assessments to reduce civilian harm.

It is critical that we not water down the legal elements of genocide for the purpose of advancing ideological positions and bias. Holocaust and genocide scholars can have legitimate concerns about Israeli conduct in Gaza without working to disparage the very legal standards that exist to protect people from these crimes. The IAGS resolution neglects to impart any culpability for the consequences of Hamas’ own actions, attempting to force such responsibility onto Israel. Without demanding agency for Hamas’ actions, it is difficult to ascertain genocidal conduct.

The genocide allegation has been soundly and persuasively rejected by leading scholars, retired western military authorities, war crimes prosecutors, and other observers.

Finally, the IAGS never mentions that this war could end if Hamas were to release all of the hostages they continue to illegally hold in Gaza and lay down their weapons.

For these reasons, we demand that the IAGS immediately rescind its resolution. To persist in such distortion is to forsake the most elementary standards of law and scholarship. It reduces the Association to farce, erodes the integrity of genocide studies, and undermines the very meaning of the crime itself.

As the United Nations General Assembly affirmed in Resolution 96 of 11 December 1946, genocide “shocks the conscience of mankind, results in great losses to humanity in the form of cultural and other contributions…and is contrary to moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United Nations.”

An institution dedicated to Holocaust remembrance and the prevention of atrocity cannot indulge political bias or bad faith misrepresentation of the law, legal negligence without betraying history, dishonoring the victims, and endangering the very future it professes to safeguard.

He's had some very interesting things to say about trauma, and I admire his work in destigmatising addiction. But he's not a psychiatrist (he was a family medicine physician), and has no qualifications in psychology. He tours the world promoting his Compassionate Inquiry® approach, which has no evidence base but is strongly rooted in the work of the late clinical psychologist, Alan Marlatt. "Professional" online training courses cost $4000/year.

I agree and its a complete misuse of the word. Genonide is a very serious, legally defined concept, with legally set out consequences. Its not a slogan.

Not to derail the conversation, so feel free to ignore this post and we can move on - but for anyone interested in the history of the crime and scholarship of genocide, you can find Lemkin's Axis Rule in Occupied Europe online (in which he lays out his complete formulation of Genocide in either chapter 8 or 9 I forget which). But it is his previous manuscripts and papers which give us the insight into the development of the crime of genocide. These can be found in a few places (and can be accessed online or at request): New York Library, American Jewish Historical Association, and the Jacob Rader Marcus Center.

Also worth reading Totally Unofficial. But yeah, the refocus of genocide research away from Holocaust-centricity and back to its original formulation came at the end of the 20th century. You look at, say, Dan Stone's Historiography of Genocide and you find that the majority of the articles (and the majority of the case studies) are covering colonial genocide, which is better in keeping with Lemkin's original understanding ("colonisation", for Lemkin) than how genocide gets talked about in public commentary, and also in its narrowed definition in the Genocide Convention (the U.S. negotiated colonial genocide out of the GC in exchange for the USSR getting to remove political groups as a protected-identity group).

Very interesting. Thank you for sharing.

For anyone cautious of the Al Jazeera link - Gabor Mate is an incredible psychiatrist when it’s comes to trauma (including generational trauma and childhood trauma). He survived the holocaust as a child, he lost his grandparents to the horrors of Auschwitz, he cares deeply about people and their trauma and his work on childhood trauma is brilliant. I believe he is one of the last people who would go on AJ just to repeat or spread Hamas/Iranian propaganda or be antisemitic. So although AJ is bias, I think Gabor Mate’s opinion is well worth listening to.

Lemkin based the crime of genocide on the Armenian genocide and the colonial genocides of the Americas, not on the Holocaust. His intellectual breakthrough (that the extermination of those peoples could be understood through systematic destruction and perceived membership of a group) came in the 20s and 30s. Indeed, in discursive scholarship generally (more-so contemporary scholarship than, say, latter-half 20th century scholarship), the crime of genocide is not understood in terms of the Holocaust. In his autobiography, Totally Unofficial, Lemkin recalls how he urged his family to flee after the invasion of Poland in 1939 because he could see how the crime that he had spent more than a decade developing a framework for was being perpetrated against the Jewish people of central and eastern Europe.

The Holocaust, the Shoah, is by far and away the best researched genocide, and Shoah scholarship is central to genocide scholarship in general: you can't do a genocide research degree without a focus on Shoah research, for good and obvious reasons. But the crime of genocide, both in its codification in the Genocide Convention, as well as in discursive scholarship isn't purely the codification/scholarship of the crime of the Holocaust. There was a while - and you can see this in the focus of genocide research scholarship in particular from the 1970s through 1990s when Holocaust research was front and centre - when comparative genocide frameworks were popular; understanding different genocides through how they compare with other, as yet better understood genocides. The temptation, then, is obviously to consider the best researched genocide to be paradigmatic. And certainly within public discourse, the Holocaust is considered to be the paradigmatic genocide. But this is to erase both Lemkin's original work, as well as to risk misunderstanding and delegitimising other genocides which don't-look-enough-like-the-Holocaust.

Genocide exists as a distinct crime. In a way, as other posters have touched upon, it can be understood as a systematic web of other crimes, given that those crimes are carried out with the overarching intent to destroy in part/as a whole a distinct (protected-identity) group. To prosecute those responsible for the individual crimes that together constitute genocide is one thing, and is a way of bringing the perpetrators to justice. But to prosecute the genocide as a whole is to do greater justice to the victims of genocide. It is very important that we do not shy away from calling a genocide a genocide. And for this reason, it is vitally important that we call Israel's genocide of Palestinians a genocide.

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. There will be antisemites who relish the opportunity to call Jews genocidaires. There are people filled with racist hatred who will pervert anything to their own hate-filled ends. But it is specious to suggest that their messed up motivations cast doubt on the motivations of nearly every major international humanitarian organisation (who all find that Israel is carrying out a genocide) as well as the general consensus among genocide scholars. Many of the articles on the Journal of Genocide Research are available to read without institutional access/without paying. We don't have to guess at their reasons for calling the Palestinian Genocide a genocide. They tell us their reasons in their work.

The fact that there are antisemites who, through their own commitment to Zionism, want to call Israel genocidal because it means that they feel they get to call Jews genocidal - and, of course, it is deeply antisemitic to conflate Jewishness with Israel - does not mean that we ought to be careful about calling the Palestinian Genocide, perpetrated by the state of Israel, a genocide.

Agreed!

Link I have just posted is on the topic of thread

This is derailing the post. I suggest watching Gabor Mate and his son on the genocide. It’s enlightening as always:

https://aje.io/i62n9g

How? @Everexpanding @Ellen2shoes explain.

Keffiyeh is cultural not religious. YArafat popularised it as a political statement.

You are quite right 🙈🫢😬 I meant that the fact that all this came up first on an eBay search must reflect the popularity of the items.

How is my post "Islamophobia with emojis"? I doubt half the people ordering these are even Muslim!

I was just musing out loud about how "pro-Pal" paraphernalia (not just flags) seems to dominate the UK. I wish the message it conveyed was unambiguously one of peace, but Palestine Action and other groups have given it more sinister undertones (for me).

“Why are all algorithms set to this”
That’s not how algorithms work 😂😂

Also facetiously Islamophobic

This has absolutely nothing to do with the point of the thread.

I searched on my laptop and (forgot to mention this 🫢) narrowed it down to "collectables" ... looking for a vintage scarf just like the gazillions I have thrown away over the past few decades. In the past, I'd expect to see, I don't know, Hermes or Patou or something. Not keffiyahs. Odd.

I promise you I do other things than type about Gaza all day! 😜 although I can see why you might get that impression...

Thank you for explaining. I understand your concern and I’m sure some are definitely guilty of this.

I think it is also valid to read about the ICJ case, hear the genocidal language Israeli politicians have used and to see the scale of the devastation in Gaza and be concerned that it will be confirmed as a legal genocide. I also still believe that some use the word to try and capture the horror of the situation.

Probably just because you have typed Gaza so much or perhaps spoken about it near your phone - I hate it! YOU DON’T KNOW ME (that’s me shouting at tech companies)

Everyone should watch clips of /read anything by Gabor Mate - he is excellent.

I didn’t see the very early days post 7/10 on here but I can see how deeply disturbing that type of discussion would be after such atrocities. I’m sure that sadly you are right - some were very quick to show their antisemitism.

I think there is also an argument that some with a longer connection to Palestinian people (personal or professional so to speak) and their suffering over the past couple of decades were ‘anti-Israel’ for valid reasons (rather than antisemitism) pre 7/10 but I do not know the content of all the comments you are referring to or condone verbally attacking a country that was reeling from such a trauma.

So whilst I can see there being valid anti Israel sentiment long before 7/10 (which can’t just be fobbed off as Hamas propaganda), I think voicing it at that time was deeply inappropriate. Perhaps some will argue that they knew what Israel were going to do in retaliation and were therefore quick to speak up but I don’t believe I would have voiced my own concerns so immediately and, by the sounds of things, inappropriately/aggressively.

I think the issue for people re the IDF is that they have a bad reputation. There are stories from long before 7/10 in Gaza and their supervision of settler violence (terrorism) in the WB. So whilst I do not condone calling for the death of IDF soldiers, I do think they have earned a bad reputation because of their own actions. Again, not all people talking about the IDF will be speaking from this position. Some will sadly be antisemitic and some will sadly be chanting along because everyone else is. I wish they’d done a poll as people left the festival and asked them who/what the IDF is: I’m sure plenty of people had no clue.

So there is a very disturbing rise in antisemitism, I agree. I’m not sure who is driving that or if it’s any sort of coordinated effort. We also have much more emboldened Islamophobia. Politicians here and in the US, for example, are openly and shamelessly anti-Muslim and seemingly make no attempts to hide it. The anti-immigration issues are often conflated (why not join in!) with Islam being an threat to the UK and I really worry that that is a much louder and more mainstream/acceptable stance now which will only lead to more division, violence and hatred.

...Just to add, I had the brainwave this evening of buying a headscarf, having remembered how useful it was for controlling hair in gale-force winds (my efforts with hair slides are pathetic). So I went on eBay and these were the first to come up after searching for a headscarf.

I understand anger and despair at the lives being lost in Gaza. But WTF is going on here???!?!? Why are all the algorithms set to this?

But I do think it’s important to note for people who say it is not a genocide that just because its not a genocide, that doesn’t mean that what is going on is acceptable and is something to support.

This is the thing. Forget the word. Whatever it is, it is not ok.

He helps me try to make sense of the horror and to recognise the ‘moral injury’ we all feel in our helplessness. He also talks about the possibility of healing from it.