Israel, Gaza, war, and genocide

In several discussions of the ongoing situation in Gaza I refer to it as a genocidal attack by Israel rather than a “war”. Precision is important. My language reflects some deliberate and technical choices which merit unpacking, not least because I have ambivalences about those choices.

It is no defense of Israel to register the differences between evils — and between realworld evils versus pure moustache-twirling malice.

(I have refined this post to make it more clear and explicit a couple of times since originally publishing it; changes should not have altered any of the sense of the original version.)

War

The IDF attacking Gaza is not a military conflict between nation-states. There are no clear stakes; Israel has no demand which Gaza could meet. The attack has continuity with 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.

Thus the word “war” simply does not describe it; calling this a “war” would obscure what is happening. So I refer not to “war crimes” but rather to “crimes against humanity” in describing the atrocities committed by Israel and Hamas.

Frustrations

Refusing use the word “war” makes it trickier to name the problem with many people expressing intense shock at and fascination with wrongs which are tragically ordinary in fighting around the world — destroyed buildings, captured fighters on their knees, dead civilians, and so forth — rather than the exceptional wrongs which make Israel’s attack genocidal.

Indictments of Israel as exceptionally morally bankrupt because of ordinary wrongs shades toward antisemitism. I wish I could ask, “Are you only now noticing that war is bad because you can fault Israel for it?”

I envy how referring to the crisis as an “Israel-Hamas war” surfaces the ways that Israel’s ruthlessness is directed specifically toward Hamas, which is important in understanding what calling it “genocidal” does and does not imply ….

Genocide

Because I have an unwholesome interest in genocide, I consider it vital to recognize organized violence short of eliminationist mass murder as still genocidal if directed against a people as a people. We must dignify a range of violences as related, if we are to understand how genocide works and to preëmpt its escalation toward its worst manifestations.

Seeing the 13 October Jewish Currents article A Textbook Case Of Genocide the day after it was published persuaded me even that early that Israel’s response to Hamas’ horrifying 7 October attack did indeed qualify.

The UN Genocide Convention lists five acts that fall under its definition. Israel is currently perpetrating three of these in Gaza.

Of course Israel has done even more in the months since.

Confusions

Weak understanding of genocides conjours serious misunderstandings of the dynamics shaping the situation. I would rather counter them directly than to back away from using the term “genocide”, which we need in order to respond to both this crisis and others we can sadly expect in the future.

Israel’s Likud leadership includes Kahanist maniacs like Ben-Gvir who were eager to purge Gaza of Arab Palestinians even before 10/7 and now think that their moment has come. Their frank admissions of that hope are part of why we must see Israel’s attack as already genocidal and threatening a spiral into even greater horrors. But these figures and their dreams are not the mainspring driving events. Suggestions I have seen that Israel has long plotted this purge of Arab Palestinians from Gaza, or even engineered the Hamas attack to justify it, are preposterous; why would the Likudniks withdraw settlers and the IDF from Gaza for twenty years before finally getting around to executing their plan?

Callousness explains far more than bloodthirstiness. Netanyahu and his Likudnik political coalition act scramble to retain their power in a panic, cynically trying to rally shocked Israelis to them after 10/7 demonstrated the catastrophic failure of the Likudniks’ promises to ensure Israelis’ secruity. Americans who remember the Bush administration’s reaction to 9/11 should recognize the pattern. Many experts foresaw (or, repulsively, advocated) Israel breaking Hamas by copying the bloody military tactics Sri Lanka used to destroy the Tamil Tigers. That is no excuse for the genocidally devastating impacts on the people of Gaza, but the difference from simply killing Gazans as an end in itself is important in thinking about how to end the fighting and work toward justice. (I have a lengthy post expanding on this thesis about what Israel is and is not doing in Gaza.)

Some cast the current moment as a demonstration that Israel is a genodical project at its root. I respect the draw of that analysis. At the founding of Israel in 1948, the Nakba by Zionist militias (which would evolve into the IDF) drove about half of the Arab Palestinian population out of what is now Israel with threats and deadly violence. Such “ethnic cleansing” is indeed genocidal.

But to imagine Israel’s history as one long process of genocide misrepresents events. Yes, between 1948 and mid-October 2023, Israel committed countless wrongs against Arab Palestinians: injustice within the Green Line borders, and decades decades of military occupation of Gaza & the West Bank followed by decades of brutal military policing. Even if one is so pessimistic that one reads that history — rightly characterized by many as “apartheid” — as demonstrating that Israel’s existence must necessarily produce injustice, even the worst of it during that interval was morally and practically far short of genocidal. (And I for one believe that an just Israel is possible and always was.)

We must make this distinction between wrongs not only on the merits, but to register how this long, terrible moment is a change with frightening implications for the future.

The word “genocide” inspires many to overstate not only Israel’s past wrongs but the wrongs of this extraordinarily bloody moment, a strange and troubling feat given the immensity of the real wrongs. Of these exaggerations, calling Israel equivalent to the Nazis is especially galling.

Naming a resemblance between Jews and Nazis has a obvious special ugliness which should make it off limits. There are plenty of other villains to point to, even if there were merit to a comparison with the Nazis … which there is not.

Deadly as the attack on Gaza has been, the IDF easily could kill many more Gazans than they do. In contrast, one reason why the Nazis became a metonym for evil was how they built death factories, optimizing them by tallying how quickly they could dispose of dead bodies then calculating the minimum ration of stale bread which would prevent people from starving too quickly for the crematoria to keep up. Even the worst plausible future escalation by Israel comes nowhere close to that.