What I think Israel is trying to do

I have called Israel’s attack on Gaza genocidal since just a week after Hamas’ 7 October attack, informed by the article A Textbook Case of Genocide in the leftist Jewish publication Jewish Currents.

Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed. Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly [⋯] Gallant’s orders on October 9^th were [⋯] explicit. Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so.

That said, it amazes me to have a social media feed full of people managing to describe genocide with inventive exaggerations of the horrors, which I would have thought impossible. I have written before about the double-edged sword of needing to call the attack genocidal despite the word inviting 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.

Here I want to unpack what I think Israel is and is not doing, drawing on resources I accumulated in an ongoing Twitter thread.

My analysis in brief

Israel’s ongoing attack on Gaza is not the fulfillment of ambitions prior to 10/7 on the part of Netanyahu, his Likud governing coalition, Israelis in general, or the long Zionist movement. Israel is neither trying to kill off Gazans nor trying to annex Gaza.

Rather, Israel’s attack began as simply a traumatized, bloodthirsty panic response after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack, with Netanyahu desperate to distract Israelis from the catastrophic failure of the security policy which underpins his claim to leadership. Americans who remember 9/11 should understand this well.

Israel’s attack then quickly developed into a poorly-considered attempt to secure Israel, using ruthless military force to destroy Hamas, so that Israel can return to their perpetual brutal military policing of Gaza from the outside, as they did over the prior decade plus. Israel targets neither Gaza’s people nor the Palestinian Authority pseudo-state created after Oslo. The destruction Israel wreaks is “collatoral damage” from Israel’s callous willingness to kill as many civilians as it takes to eradicate Hamas. Enacting & justifying that leads inevitably to genocidal brutality, in violation of international law and basic human decency.

Preëmpting an objection

The state of The Discourse being what it is, some read this as nothing other than pro-Israel apologetics: “Gosh, Israel is technically engaged in a ‘genocide’ but golly, the genocide is Not Really That Bad”.

No. Finding Israel’s attack a few notches short of the worst conceivable horror still recognizes it as horror. Genocide is genocide. It is evil. Netanyahu, the Likudniks, IDF leadership, and far too many IDF soldiers belong in the dock at the Hague for crimes against humanity. All people have an obligation to unequivocally demand the end of these horrors. (Plus justice far beyond returning to the status quo ante.) The US has an obligation to sever all support for Israel until they permanently end this, make amends to the people of Gaza, and deliver Israeli leaders to justice.

Nor am I drawing on denials of Israel’s wrongs. My analysis rests on experts, Palestinians fiercely critical of Israel, … and one Israeli frankly eager to kill Palestinians. This post was born from me forwarding a Twitter thread by Palestinian İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي <@iyad_elbaghdadi> back on 13 November 2023. That whole thread is worth your time. (I have captured it in full at the bottom of this post.) I want to surface a key bit. Emphasis mine:

Right off the bat let’s debunk some common misconceptions about “genocide”: You don’t have to exterminate everyone for it to be genocide. Genocide is not a crime of body count (although body count matters). Genocide is a crime of intent.

I was heartened and honored to see this notification about my Twitter thread which grew from that first RT:

I invite you to examine Hjalti Árna’s <@sjaltiarna> feed to see whether he would share apologetics for Israel. (Spoiler: He would not.)

Filling out my read of events

In the months immediately after 10/7, I saw a lot of conspiracy theories arguing that Netanyahu & his Likudnik coalition cunningly engineered Hamas’ atrocities of 10/7 in order to justify to the world the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza they longed for. This makes no sense.

Bibi cares what the world thinks? Israel lacks the capacity to kill more civilians than they have? Netanyahu’s backdoor support for Hamas as a foil gives him control of Hamas? The Likudniks were in power for two decades and just now got around to their master plan? No.

Though history is rich in horrors and brutality in the name of Israel, neither Zionism nor Israel nor even Likud rule have been driven by a lust to kill Palestinians. The viciousness since 10/7 is a shocking escalation beyond anything Israel has done since the Nakba.

Netanyahu’s policy toward Gaza has long been clear. In 2005, when he became leader of Likud, Israel removed all of their settlements in Gaza. During his tenure as Prime Minister of Israel for 14 of the last 15 years, he has maintained a cordon of military policing outside of Gaza; whenever Palestinians demonstrated the slightest threat, he ordered IDF rifles, artillery, and bombs to Teach The Palestinians A Lesson, with the expectation that Palestians would eventually accept their unjust, impoverished conditions and stop bothering Israelis. Until 7 October 2023, it had been his unmistakable plan to maintain that stupid, lazy, brutal order forever.

It was, of course, absurd to imagine that Palestinians would surrender to their oppression. On 10/7 Israel was blindsided by Hamas’ attack demonstrating that of course Israel’s policy did not even ensure security for Israelis.

Netanyahu could only imagine that this catastrophe resulted from insufficient brutality, and lashed out. Once that started, his nebulous endgame was only to crush Hamas militarily and return to the status quo ante. This was evident in the Council on Foreign Relations’ brief Israel’s War on Hamas: What to Know from just two days after 10/7:

A common argument about counterterrorism is that “there is no military solution,” but that’s not completely true, provided that a country does not care about harming civilians. For instance, the Sri Lankan military’s campaign in 2009 completely crushed the Tamil Tigers. An estimated twenty thousand civilians were killed along with the Tigers’ founder and leader, his entire command staff, and virtually all the organization’s officers and rank-and-file. A terrorist group can be destroyed in this way, but it comes with a tremendous loss of civilian lives.

Everything which has happened since aligns with that prediction.

Netanyahu avoids naming an endgame, so it is tempting to look to the bloodthirsty Kahanists in the Likud coalition like Ben-Gvir who do want to kill every Palestinian in Gaza … and then also in the West Bank … and to annex all of that territory under the flag of Israel. But they do not hold the tiller. We know because Israel’s strategic choices do not align with their aspirations. Bloody as these last several months have been, Israel obviously could have killed many more Palestinians had they chosen to. Even Israel hardliners who would rationalize annexation concur about Israel’s aims:

An impenetrable buffer zone facing Israel, another on the Egyptian Rafah border to control all access, and 2 salients dividing the strip into 3 areas. The northern one is now under construction.

Demilitarised with no way to rearm.

This plan is a fantasy which will not even serve Israel. Israel apologists’ arguments for its necessity are nonsense.

There is close to a consensus among counter-terrorism experts that beating groups like Hamas requires two complementary elements: a sustained campaign to degrade its military capabilities and a political change to undermine its power among the populations that support it.

Israel, then, could have responded to October 7th with a protracted counter-terrorist campaign. Over years (not mere weeks or months), Israel could have built (or re-built, rather) its capacity to collect high-quality intelligence to identify, locate, and target the Hamas operatives in Gaza. Israel could have then targeted high-value Hamas figures with surgical airstrikes and special forces incursions into Gaza. This would include targeting both Hamas leaders and the foot soldiers who perpetrated the October 7th massacres.

Israel used this exact strategy in the wake of the second intifada in the early 2000s. The campaign effectively led to a sharp decrease in Hamas’ ability to kill Israelis. The strategy was so effective that for a while, Hamas hid the name of its leader to prevent him from being targeted.

And in parallel, Israel would have had to open up a viable political alternative to Hamas for Palestinians.

We must recognize Israel’s strategy as genocidal both because of the catastrophic impact it has already had on Gazans and because it lays track for escalation to even worse when it inevitably fails to produce the “peace” and security its architects imagine.

And we must recognize that Israel has not yet committed to even worse horrors. We need to be clear-eyed so that we may best act to prevent things coming to that.

Related commentaries

Foreign Affairs | Israel’s Paradox of Defeat

This article is actually about Israel’s internal dynamics on the first anniversary of the 10/7 attack, but it opens with an overview of events which supports my thesis.

Last October 7, Hamas surprised Israel’s famed military and intelligence agencies. Both had known, for years, about the Palestinian armed group’s preparations to invade Israel and kill and kidnap its soldiers and citizens. But they failed to believe that it would dare or succeed to execute such an unprecedented operation. The Israeli military and intelligence services; Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; and the wider Israeli public all believed that their country’s fortified southern border was so impenetrable, and the balance of power so favorable to Israel, that Hamas would never challenge the status quo.

But Hamas did challenge it. In the days and weeks after it launched its devastating attack, a common refrain among Israelis was that “everything has changed.” And for a time, it appeared that everything had: the assault shattered Israelis’ fundamental self-confidence, upending long-held beliefs about the country’s security, politics, and societal norms. The leadership of the Israel Defense Forces lost its prestige almost overnight as details emerged about how it failed to prevent the attack and then arrived too late to save border communities, military outposts, and defenseless attendees at a music festival.

The political drama that had gripped Israel over the nine months leading up to October 7—Netanyahu’s attempt at a sweeping overhaul of the judiciary, aimed at curbing the independence of state institutions such as the Supreme Court, the office of the attorney general, and the technocratic civil service to direct more power toward his right-wing and religious allies—vanished from view. The overhaul’s main architect, Justice Minister Yariv Levin, all but disappeared, presumably eaten up by remorse for his contribution to Israel’s distraction ahead of Hamas’s assault. Netanyahu assembled a unity war cabinet representing different—and normally bitterly opposed—political factions and, within days, called up about 250,000 reservists to launch a counteroffensive into Gaza.

Overcoming its initial shock, the IDF then fought back with a vengeance. Charged with dismantling Hamas’s military and governance capabilities, it reduced large swaths of Gaza to rubble, made nearly two million Gazans internal refugees, and killed more than 40,000 Palestinians — about a third of them Hamas militants, according to official Israeli assessments. The IDF effectively stopped Hamas’s rocket fire into Israel and dismantled much of its Gazan tunnel system; it says it has shattered the formerly well-organized terror group into scattered guerrilla teams.

But even with the IDF occupying about a third of Gaza’s territory, to many Israelis, the current situation feels like defeat. Despite full mobilization and the near-unwavering support of the U.S. government, the IDF — still under the same command as it was on October 7 — has failed to win. Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, has not surrendered. And around 100 Israeli hostages remain missing in Gaza, about half of them still alive, according to Netanyahu’s public statements.

This calamitous stasis, coupled with Israel’s growing global isolation and increasingly gloomy economic outlook, contribute to a national sense of hopelessness and despair. In fact, paradoxically, important facets of Israeli politics and society have changed surprisingly little since the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attack. Citizens of border communities in the north and the south remain unable to return to their homes. Rather than uniting Jewish Israelis against a common external enemy, Israel’s now multifront fight against its external enemies has only widened preexisting social and political fissures between Netanyahu’s opponents and his supporters. Beating the expectations of his foes and his friends alike, Netanyahu continues to act as the center of gravity in Israeli politics. The right-wing coalition that keeps him in power has amped up its quest to crush the Palestinian statehood movement and “replace the Israeli elite,” a euphemism for demolishing Israel’s democratic and liberal institutions.

“A mass assassination factory”: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza

An examination of how indifference to civilian casualties is entirely sufficient to explain the deadliness of Israel’s attack, from +972 on 30 November 2023:

In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.

“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

IDF measures to “prevent” civilian casualties

An examination of a shallowly mechanistic pseudo-humane effort which only adds insult to injury. More Terry Gilliam’s Brazil than gulags, not that deaths from absurd miscalculations are any less tragic than deaths from deliberate calculation. From James Rosen-Birch <@provisionalidea> on 2 Dec 2023:

Over 1.6M people were told to evacuate from the red zone, south. They have not been allowed to return.

Now, the south has been cut into sectors sequentially subject to, as the IDF says, “crushing military attack”. It has been called “a macabre game of Battleship”.

The IDF’s approach to notifying civilians this time was to publish a digital map and text people the cell numbers to be bombed in the next fifteen minutes. Gazans don’t have electricity and are under a communications blockade. I kid you not, this is “like and subscribe if you don’t want to die” — to people with no power or internet.

Civilian deaths

A tally far too low to reflect an effort to kill civilians, but far too high to believe that Israel has made the necessary efforts to protect civilians, from the UK Guardian on 9 Dec 2023:

In the first three weeks of the current operation, Swords of Iron, the civilian proportion of total deaths rose to 61%, in what Levy described as “unprecedented killing” for Israeli forces in Gaza. The ratio is significantly higher than the average civilian toll in all the conflicts around the world from the second world war to the 1990s, in which civilians accounted for about half the dead, according to Levy.

The hollow endgame

A Twitter thread from Monica Marks <@MonicaLMarks> on 26 June 2024 demonstrating how Israel’s strategy is barely a plan at all.

After nearly 9 months, this paper floating around Israeli leaders’ desks seems the closest Netanyahu has to a “day after” plan. It contains a parade of red flags re:

1. basic respect for post-WWII laws of war
2. Palestinians’ self-determination
3. realistic achievability

The first precondition for Israel’s day after here is “total defeat” of Hamas à la WWII defeat of Germany & Japan. This comparison neglects the fact that total war tactics on the order of Dresden, Hiroshima & Nagasaki are now politically unfeasible & illegal under international law.

The paper’s authors analyzed post-World War II Germany and Japan as successful cases, and Iraq and Afghanistan after the U.S. invasions as unsuccessful cases.

The first precondition is the total defeat of Hamas, the paper states.

”If there is no total defeat, there is no point in starting the attempts at deradicalization, rehabilitating systems, building new governing infrastructure and so on. History teaches us that rehabilitation under fire will fail,” the paper states, citing American nation-building attempts in Iraq and Afghanistan while the wars were still ongoing.

The erasure of Palestinians’ core grievances — about the injustices of occupation & blockade, degrading & dehumanising treatment, and denial of self-determination — and their conflation w/ Nazi & kamikaze extremism ignores the elephant in the room and reads as prejudicial & essentialist.

“From a murderous ideology to a moderate society: transforming and rebuilding Gaza after Hamas” is a 28-page paper, obtained by Jewish Insider, outlining four academics’ recommended dos and don’ts for ensuring Hamas and Gaza are no longer a threat to Israel.

Israeli academics Netta Barak-Corren of Hebrew University, who is currently at Princeton University, Danny Orbach of Hebrew University, Netanel Flamer of Bar-Ilan University and Harel Chorev-Halewa of Tel Aviv University teamed up in November, on a volunteer basis, to combine their expertise in law, military history and the Middle East and compile their recommendations, which they have said all members of Israel’s now-defunct war cabinet read.

According to the document, “Israel’s ability to achieve its goals depends not only on the military and diplomatic campaign taking place these days, but also on its ability to rehabilitate and transform a nation that was led by a murderous ideology, to produce stable institutions and an Arabic culture that does not educate for jihad, a culture that accepts the existence of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.”

[Emphasis hers]

It’s worth noting that, even in Germany & Japan, US occupation “succeeded” by

1. addressing, rather than perpetuating, extremism push factors (eg: Marshall Plan)
2. realising that German & Japanese societies weren’t death cult monoliths + pushing towards democratic elections

Secondly, this plan fundamentally opposes Palestinian self-determination & democracy. It regards “Arab democracy” in general as both threat & cultural oxymoron, and aspires to a Gaza that’s ruled by some combination of Egypt, UAE or Saudi with significant restrictions on speech. Endorsing Israel-approved satrapy & authoritarianism in Palestine renders criticism of both Hamas’s authoritarianism and Abu Mazen’s resistance to elections (both are real problems) hypocritical. Continued repression is a recipe for rebellions and does not address the core drivers.

Lastly, this plan peddles the surprisingly stubborn fiction that Egypt, UAE, or Saudi will step in with a deus ex machina (and antidemocratic version of) the Marshall Plan for Gaza — simultaneously patrolling the rubble on Israel’s behalf and bailing the enclave out Daddy Warbucks-style. The short response here, from those living in the real world, is that they will not. Analysts knowledgeable on the Gulf powers’ Israel-Palestine policies, like Aziz Alghashian <@AzizAlghashian> and Hussein Ibish, have been repeating this since October. The political & security risks are too high, as are the risks that Israel simply destroys the new hospitals or whatever else they’ve built in the next round. The entitlement in assuming the Gulf will magically clean up Israel’s mess & embroil itself in insurgency is profound.

Israel certainly hasn’t spent the past 9 months sweetening any vision of this plan for its Arab partners, either. It’s played fast & loose with the UAE’s marquee efforts to aid Gaza, as shown by its attacks near its field hospital & on the World Central Kitchen convoy it funded.

So it’s exceedingly bleak, though unsurprising, that this paper is “circulating” on Israeli leaders’ desks after 9 months of levelling Gaza into an uninhabitable wasteland that will be far harder for anyone to administer, let alone curb extremism in, even in the best of scenarios. What we see here are tacit justifications for eliminationism / total war, stubborn refusal to address Palestinians’ core grievances, and a managing-the-conflict (versus solving it) approach that kicks the can down the road.

The reliance on magical thinking about the wants & capabilities of Israel’s Arab partners also make this a quixotically aspirational approach — too vague and unrealistic to constitute a viable plan. If this accurately reflects the closest thing Netanyahu has to a day-after plan for Gaza, there’s a high likelihood Israel will tumble into drawn-out military occupation of the strip, which will strain and wither in ebbs & flows of humanitarian crisis for at least a decade hence.

Crucial additional point here from John Lyndon:

Key variable between Palestine and Japan / Germany (there’s lots…):

[Japan & Germany were] sovereign states beforehand, occupied for 7 years afterwards, before sovereignty restored.

57 years of occupation in Israel-Palestine before Oct 7^th — and no sovereignty in past nor on offer for future — limits the comparison’s utility.

An Israel hardliner’s read

Saul Sadka is a cheerleader for Israel’s attack who obviously would applaud the IDF killing as many Gazans as possible. Instead, on 21 August 2024 he described in detail evidence that the IDF are trying to do almost exactly what I have described Israel doing, delighted by evidence that Israel is close to reconstructing Gaza along the lines of the cantonized West Bank Palestinian Authority.

In March, after analysing satelite maps and speaking to friends who had been in Gaza, I predicted the IDF plan, which has finally come to fruition today. Israeli tanks are now busy taking control of the port of Khan Younis (red dot) having vacated and cleared the third corridor at Gaza's narrowest point at Kisufim.

An impenetrable buffer zone facing Isarel, another on the Egyptian Rafah border to control all access, and 2 salients dividing the strip into 3 areas. The northern one is now under construction.

Demilitarised with no way to rearm.

Alongside the ever widening Rafah corridor that hermetically cuts Hamas off from resupply, and the now 6km wide Netzarim corridor with its 5 fortified bases that separates Gaza City from the rest of the Strip, Gaza is now cut into three. The humanitarian zone is now also cut in two by the new corridor.

Expect this new corridor to be fortified with bases. I would not be surprised if the IDF decided to form two additional corridors (yellow lines) to separate Beit Hanoun from Gaza City and to separate Rafah from Khan Younis.

The 1km buffer zone along the border looks to also be almost entirely cleared.

There are also a number of other military roads that have had large areas around the cleared of obstacles meaning that the IDF can sit back in their bases but be at any point in Strip with 5 minutes and via unpredictable routes. The point is to make the Gaza Strip strategically controllable by a minimal IDF force.

The only urban areas that the IDF have yet to enter in force (though they are already starting) are the towns in the central portion, Deir al Balah and Nuseirat. Only there can the Hamas infrastructure still be anything like its pre-war level.

It is almost certain that most of the remaining Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, are hiding out there, as are most of the most remaining hostages. They are now surrounded on four sides, with no hope of resupply, totally enemy surveillance as if they were in a fish tank.

The IDF has played this really well. They played the slow game, perhaps against their will and under US pressure, but managed to reduce Hamas from a dug in mighty army able to fire 1,000 rockets at hour to a insurgent rabble who can only fire a rocket on special occasions.

Hamas are contained and almost totally defeated. Israel did this at a cost of 330 heroes while eliminating 17,000 enemies, taking 5,000 POWs, and taking many 1,000s more out of the fight via injury.

The purple areas are the two central corridors, and they surround a rectangle of land about 3km by 10km where we can expect the final major engagements to be fought:

The towns of Deir al Balah and Nuseirat are the only places where Hamas still might have major infrastructure that hasn’t yet been destoryed of heavily degraded. Anyone who doubts the massive degradation of Hamas consider:

1. Their response to the elimination of their number one leader was to fire two rockets into the sea. They used to fire hundreds each day.
2. Even assuming a minimal 0.5 major injury per fatality rate and taking the maximum figure of 40,000 for Hamas’ initial strength, they are reduced to at most 8,000 men after POWs are acciunted for. It is probably much lower, since both those assumptions are very generous.

Demonstrating genocide

The full Twitter thread from İyad el-Baghdadi from 13 November 2023 about how Israel’s moves, though short of maximal slaughter, still unmistakably qualify as genocide:

How can someone who writes such a wonderful analysis make the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. This is neither backed up by facts nor scientifically tenable by the definition of the word. It is simply wrong. And discredits the very good thread.

Alright, since you decided to ask me, I’ll tell you why the same guy you praise for “wonderful analysis” also concludes, based on the facts & evidence, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza:

There are multiple definitions of genocide, but the most widely cited is the 2002 Rome Statute’s, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC). Around 120 countries are signatories (notably the US and Israel still refuse to sign it):

Article 6
Genocide

For the purpose of this Statute, “genocide” means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Right off the bat let’s debunk some common misconceptions about “genocide”: You don’t have to exterminate everyone for it to be genocide. Genocide is not a crime of body count (although body count matters). Genocide is a crime of intent.

The bar for the crime of genocide is met when there’s intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a people. “destroy” can manifest in many ways — killing is one, but also inflicting upon them unlivable conditions. “Conditions calculated to bring about the group’s destruction”.

Since intent is key, let’s focus on it. Normally^*, whoever commits genocide won’t go out and say “hey we’d like to wipe these people out”. Normally, they hide their intent, and intent is typically the most difficult part to prove. (Hold on to the word “normally” for a sec please)

Since intent is rarely explicit, the law allows it to be inferred from broader context including:

• Scale & systematic nature of the violence
• Chosen methods
• Choices of victims/targets
• Evidence of cover up
• Patterns of narratives / speech used by political / military leaders

Alright, so let’s for a sec follow the “inference” route. It is now very well documented that Israel systematically targeted:

• Hospitals
• Water tanks
• Solar panels
• Journalists
• Bakeries
• Fishing boats
• Schools
• Ambulances
• Residential blocks
• Aid & UN workers

(I don’t have to go point by point because all of the above is very well documented and even captured live). It’s also well documented that Israel’s chosen bombs / methods are indiscriminate (easily proven by the fact that ~70% of the 12k dead are women, children, or elderly).

It is also well documented that Israel:

• Cut off the flow of food, water, & fuel to a civilian population
• Targeted basic telecom infrastructure (internet, phone service)
• Used easy-to-debunk disinfo & lies to pin the blame for every one of its atrocities on the other side

I know the typical US reaction would be “but Hamas!” To them Hamas is hiding in water tanks and solar panels. But if this is about Hamas, someone explain why 150+ Palestinians (incl 40+ children) have been killed in the West Bank, where there’s no Hamas?

Anyway: It’s also well documented that Israeli ministry of intel produced a multi-stage plan for inflicting mass suffering on the population of Gaza to force them off their land and into the Sinai desert. So far Israel is following this plan actually. ([This] is important because while “ethnic cleansing” is not by itself a crime under the Rome Statute, it is widely acknowledged that there’s a continuum between genocide & ethnic cleansing. Genocide is often a way to ethnically cleanse a people or force a population transfer.)

It’s also uncontroversial that Israel’s leaders have repeatedly and systematically used language & references that makes it clear that everyone in Gaza, and not only Hamas, is a target. Israel’s PM even tweeted it, and not just once:

Prime Minister of Israel <@IsraelPM> 10/16/23:
This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.

Netanyahu declaring invasion: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible”

1 Samuel 15:3

“Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”

Okay so now that we get to the speech/rhetoric of Israeli leadership, we can drop the pretense that we have to “infer” genocidal intent. There’s so much documented. Remember I told you to hold on to that “normally” a few tweets ago? Yeah, you can stop holding on to it now.

There are several folks who have been collecting these statements of intent. One of them is br Abu Bakr Hussain who’s updating a list daily and has it available for download as well. Not everything in his list is from politicians / leadership, but a lot is.

You can also look at the replies under this tweet. I believe others including Muhammad Shehada <@muhammadshehad2> and Mohammed El-Kurd <@m7mdkurd> also have been collecting official & unofficial statements under tweets & in threads of their own.

Craig Mokhiber worked at the UN for 30+ years and until recently was director of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ NY office. Listen to him explain how normally intent is the hardest to prove, but in this case, intent “is an easy case to make”:

In his resignation letter dated 28 October, Craig Mokhiber, who served as the director of the New York office of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, labelled Israel’s military operations in Gaza as “textbook genocide”

But now that we’re citing experts, let’s mention how so many actual genocide scholars have assessed that Israel is committing the crime of genocide. Again there’s so much of this that I can’t fit it all in a thread but some are under this tweet:

Is someone collecting all the statements & opinions by actual genocide scholars & researchers whose professional assessment that what is happening in Gaza right now is genocide? If you do please link. If you don’t please retweet.

An important voice has been Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura <@Rrrrnessa>, who is both an academic expert on genocide and a survivor of genocide. But there’s also Luis Moreno Ocampo, ex-ICC prosecutor. And Raz Segal, an Israeli expert on modern genocide:

Democracy Now! — “A Textbook Case of Genocide”: Israeli Holocaust Scholar Raz Segal Decries Israel’s Assault on Gaza

(BTW correct me if I’m wrong but even in the case of the Bosnian genocide & the Iraqi Kurdish genocide, explicit public statements of intent were relatively scarce and intent had to be inferred from chain of command orders & military tactics / context. Here it’s more explicit.)

So yes: I write some decent threads on geopolitical analysis. Yes: I’m a human being who gets exhausted and triggered. But when I say Israel is committing genocide it’s not hyperbole. It’s a conclusion based upon the facts & evidence, and the conclusion of many noted experts. Ultimately whether or not it’s genocide will have to be determined through a thorough international independent investigation, followed by a fair, balanced, public trial. But we know we won’t get that. Israel & the US are not party to the ICC. Israel is above the law.

I can still hear them say “but Hamas!”

• Hamas very likely committed war crimes & crimes against humanity on Oct 7
• Israel’s actions since Oct 7 (fully backed by the West) can credibly be described as genocidal

No contradiction there.

Reminder that I have a team and we have to eat & pay rent so we’d appreciate your support:

• Here (one-time donations)
• Here: (recurring donations)

Thank you all for your solidarity, from this Palestinian heart.

Okay, you could read the entire thread. Or you can just skip here and listen to an actual genocide expert lay it out better than I ever can. Worth the 13 mins of your time. Thank you Owen Jones <@owenjonesjourno>.

This entire post emerges from my own Twitter thread which started from sharing the thread above.

The comment skeptical that Israel’s attack qualfies as genocide, which kicked of Baghdadi’s thread, responded to an earlier, even longer thread of Baghdadi’s addressing an array of dynamics shaping the first few weeks of Israel’s attack on Gaza. It is so instructive that I have captured it as well, in its own post.