In several discussions of the ongoing situation in Gaza I refer to it as a genocidal attack by Israel rather than a “war”. My language reflects some deliberate and technical choices which merit unpacking, not least because I have ambivalences about those choices.
Genocide
As someone with an unwholesome interest in genocide, I consider it vital to recognize violences short of eliminationist mass murder as nonetheless genocidal when they direct harm to a people as a people. This is important in dignifying that range of violences as important, in understanding how genocide works, in preëmpting mass murders before they start.
The 13 October Jewish Currents article A Textbook Case Of Genocide persuaded me early on that Israel’s response to Hamas’ horrifying 7 October attack qualified.
The UN Genocide Convention lists five acts that fall under its definition. Israel is currently perpetrating three of these in Gaza.
And of course Israel has escalated much further in the months since.
We need to register this as a phase transition. Israel had a longstanding program of brutal apartheid military policing of Gaza & the West Bank; wrong, but not genocidal. Deliberately attacking the Gazan people as a people is categorically different.
Confusions
And I feel very uneasy with the term “genocide” allowing — even inviting — bonehead critics misunderstanding what is happening so badly that they manage to overstate wrongs as immense as those Israel is committing.
Yes, there are Kahanist maniacs in the Likud government like Ben-Gvir, eager to purge Gaza of Arab Palestinians even before 10/7, thinking that their moment has come. Their frank admission of that intent are a key part of why we must see Israel’s attack as already genocidal and threatening a spiral into even greater horror. But they are not the mainspring of events; reading the situation as nothing other than them realizing their dreams of genocide is absurd.
Most galling are the inevitable comparisons to Nazi genocide. It should be obvious why it is offensive to compare Jews to Nazis, period, and the comparison is also offensive in its stupidity. The Nazis are a metonym for evil because they ran death factories where they carefully calculated the right rations of stale bread to ensure that people died at precisely the fastest rate at which they could despose of the bodies. Deadly as the attack on Gaza has been, they are not that. Israel obviously could kill far more civilians than they have.
Fantasies that Israel has long plotted this purge of Arab Palestinians from Gaza, even engineered the Hamas attack to justify it, are equally preposterous. Why would the Likudniks withdraw settlers and the IDF from Gaza for twenty years before finally getting around to executing this plan?
Callousness explains more than bloodthirstiness. Netanyahu and his Likudnik political coalition are in a panic to retain power, cynically trying to rally shocked Israelis to them, after 10/7 demonstrated the catastrophic failure of Likudniks’ promises to ensure Israelis’ secruity. Americans who remember the Bush administration’s reaction to 9/11 should recognize the pattern. And many experts foresaw (or even advocated) Israel trying to break Hamas using the bloody military tactics Sri Lanka used to destroy the Tamil Tigers at cost of immense civilian casualties. It is no defense of Israel to register these evils as different evils from pure malice.
I consider it better to correct these misunderstandings of the implications of the word “genocide” by insisting on digging in to how we understand genocide rather than by backing off from the word. We need sophistication about genocide to understand what is happening in Gaza … and, alas, the world.
War?
The IDF attacking Gaza is not a military conflict between national belligerents with clear stakes; though we need to recognize the genocidal escalation it represents, I think we also need to register its continuity with the long process of military policing by Israel which began in the occupation era and has continued through Israel’s efforts to control the quasi-sovereign Palestinian Authority. Calling this a “war” thus has misleading implications, so I refer to it as an “attack”, and refer to “crimes against humanity” rather than “war crimes” on the part of both Israel and Hamas.
And my stubbornness over this language presents problems.
Some refer to the situation not as an “Israel-Gaza war” but an “Israel-Hamas war”, and I envy this naming Israel driven at destroying Hamas specifically.
And there is a rhetorical turn I wish I could make. With Gaza extraordinary in such important ways, there is something deeply strange in horrors which are tragically ordinary in fighting around the world — destroyed buildings, captured fighters on their knees, dead civilians — shared with a note of such intense shock and and fascination that I want to ask, “Why is this so special in Israel’s case? Are you only now noticing that war is bad?”
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