We must use the word “genocide”

For a long time, reasonable people of good conscience could refuse to call Israel’s brutality in Gaza “genocide”. That time has now passed.

I have referred to Israel’s attack on Gaza as “genocidal” since November of 2023. At the same time, I have respected those who have rejected the word “genocide”.

First because the term evokes eliminationist violence — wholesale mass expulsion or even mass murder of a people. I think we must register violences short of that as genocide, but other informed people fear that it dilutes the potency of the term “genocide” to apply it to anything less. In 2024 it was wrong to dismiss the brutality of Israel’s attack on Gaza, but that brutality was short of eliminationist.

Second because Palestinian liberation is a noble cause which has long attracted monstrous supporters, for obvious reasons. Since 10/7 we have seen people exercise the term “genocide” in bad faith, to persuade unsophisticated people of good conscience to embrace transparently antisemitic ideas, to implicitly justify the genocide of Israeli Jews. I respect refusing to grant those voices any ammunition.

I disagreed with those who hesitated over the word “genocide” because my unwholesome interests include attention to how genocides happen. I believe that we must recognize genocide as genocide early, because attacks on peoples as peoples modest in comparison to eliminationism — the most damningly faint praise imaginable — tend to escalate to eliminationism. A broad conception of genocide cultivates a frame of mind which moves us to preëmpt escalation from horrors to yet greater horrors.

But my disagreement has been respectful disagreement. All people of conscience have had an obligation to oppose the brutality in Gaza, but there has been room to oppose it using different language.

We have seen the Likudniks in control of Israel’s government escalate step by step since 10/7 in word and deed. One may take that as supporting either the case for using the term “genocide” early … or supporting the case for using it sparingly.

In recent months, Israel’s brutality has crossed the threshold into unmistakably eliminationist violence. One can and must oppose this in terms which avoid antisemitic demonization of Jewish Israelis. One cannot avoid the term “genocide” any longer.

This post was inspired by the Corey Robin Facebook post below, which is sympathetic to the bitterness of the word on many people’s tongues. I know that taste all too well. It is past time to accept it.

This post is not for you. I want to repeat: This post is not for you.

Many of my readers here, Jews and non-Jews, are already clear about the wrongness of what Israel is doing in Gaza. Many of my readers here are already clear that the State of Israel — as it was designed and constructed as an ethnocracy, apartheid state, Jewish supremacist state, what have you — is a historic injustice.

This post is not for you.

This post is for other people, Jews and non-Jews, who read my work, people who are less settled in their position on Israel and Palestine, people who identify with the Zionist project, who have supported the military actions of the Israeli government in Gaza (even if they oppose Netanyahu), people who call for a return of the hostages and a ceasefire and say no more, people who fear that anti-Israel protests on college campuses are a sign of rising antisemitism in the US, people who believe, or hope, that Israel as a Jewish state is a cause worth defending.

This post is for you.

It’s for you because, given the way algorithms go and online communities sort themselves out, you may not have seen some developments in the last few days, among people who hold or once held views similar to yours. I’m posting these statements here (with links), just to give you a sense of how quickly opinion is changing, and that it’s not Israel-haters and antisemites or self-hating Jews who are voicing the alarm.

1. July 15: Omer Bartov, born in Israel in 1954, fought in the Yom Kippur War as a company commander, one of the leading international scholars on Nazism and the Holocaust, writes a piece titled, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” (A side note: According to statements from the governor of New York and chancellor of CUNY, were a faculty member at CUNY to make such a statement, with its invocation and comparison of Bartov’s Holocaust research and his claims about the war on Gaza, they could be disciplined and fired.)
2. July 29: Michael Ben-Yair, former Attorney General of Israel, writes, “Jews, who went through a genocide 80 years ago, are committing genocide in Gaza.” (Side note: were a faculty member at CUNY to make such a statement, with its invocation and comparison to the Holocaust, they could be disciplined and fired.)
3. August 3: Jeremy Ben-Ami, whose father fought in the Irgun, and who is head of J Street, a mainstream pro-Israel organization in the US, writes, “Until now, I have tried to deflect and defend when challenged to call this genocide. I have, however, been persuaded rationally by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel has broken the international genocide convention. Based on the law as I read it, the Prime Minister and others in his government will have to answer for what they have done and will be held accountable … The stain of this abomination will forever be on the Jewish people because we have not stopped this. Far too many have been far too silent.”
4. July 26: Avrum Burg, former Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, former interim President of Israel, former chair of the Jewish Agency, former chair of the World Zionist Organization, writes, “Could it be that the current State of Israel, that its body stronger than ever and its spirit deader than ever, no longer deserves to exist? Not because of what happened on October 7, but because of everything that came before, and everything that has erupted since … The destruction of Gaza is a damning indictment of Israel’s moral bankruptcy. And we must face the truth: Israel without an ethical foundation has no justification to exist.” (Side note: According to statements from the governor of New York and chancellor of CUNY, were a faculty member at CUNY to make such a statement, with its questioning of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, they could be disciplined and fired.)
5. August 2: Lihi Ben Shitrit, Henry and Marilyn Taub Associate Professor of Israel studies at NYU and director of NYU’s Taub Center for Israel Studies: “As an Israeli political scientist researching Israeli and Palestinian politics, I’m regularly invited by different universities to speak about the Middle East. Inevitably, someone in the audience asks what I think about the allegation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. While I have been unequivocal about my opposition to the current war, I tell them that I’m not a lawyer or an expert on international law. Therefore I have no authority with which to judge on the question of genocide. This is a copout …… I think there are several reasons for many liberal Jews’ tremendous difficulty in seriously confronting the question of whether Israel is committing genocide, including a misunderstanding of what genocide can look like. None of these, however, if we are truly honest with ourselves, justify turning away from it … I am familiar with emotions of outrage and revulsion with the conduct of the Israeli government and the dissemination of Jewish supremacy, but the question of genocide, I now understand, provoked new feelings I had not encountered before — shame and guilt. As psychologists note, shame and guilt are similar and often appear together, but there are crucial differences. Feeling shame is associated with embarrassment over the actions of members of our group that we think negatively reflect on our group’s identity. Guilt occurs when we feel collective responsibility for the negative actions of our group members. Shame leads to avoidance — hiding, denying or looking away from such actions. Guilt, on the other hand, motivates reparative or restorative responses. Liberal Jews like myself need to overcome our shame, which pushes some of us to avoid or even deny the reality of Gaza. Instead, we must grapple with guilt; guilt not in the sense of personal culpability, but rather in our collective responsibility.”
6. August 1: Dov Waxman, Gilbert Foundation Chair of Israel Studies, UCLA: “I initially rejected the genocide charge, but I have changed my mind …… It has been a long and emotionally difficult process over the past 22 months of horrific violence and heartbreaking suffering in Gaza for me to conclude that Israel is guilty of genocide. The possibility that Israel, a Jewish state legitimized by the Nazis’ genocide of Jews, could itself carry out a genocide was one that I, probably like most Jewish people, could barely countenance. I also struggled to accept the possibility that Jews, the victims of genocide, could become the perpetrators of one. Because my conception of genocide was based on the Holocaust, it was also hard for me to recognize that genocide does not have to involve the deliberate attempt to exterminate an entire people, nor does it have to be the ultimate goal. The Holocaust was significantly different from the genocide in Gaza today in many ways. However, this fact should not prevent us from recognizing that what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza amounts to the crime of genocide.”

Again, for many of you, this is old news, too little, too late. This post is not for you. It’s for those readers of mine, many of whom I know personally, who are still wrestling with these questions, and who feel that the only people who would say that this is a genocide or that Israel is in a condition of profound moral wrong, are people who are not like them. I’m trying to show that people who are like them, or once were like them, have also come to this position.

For opponents of the State of Israel, many of whom are my readers, this may seem like a fool’s errand. I do not think it is.

In my lifetime, I’ve undergone some profound changes of belief in position. As many friends of mine from graduate school will tell you, when I arrived at Yale, I was staunchly opposed to the effort to unionize graduate students. Staunchly. Spoke against it repeatedly. I wound up leading the union and leading it on strike.

On the question of Israel, I was raised in a very Zionist household. My family and I went to Israel in 1977 on a trip sponsored by our temple. I continued to support the State of Israel through my years in college. But a combination of factors, between the ages of 20 and 26, changed my mind. It took me a long time to come to that position. It was painful. It often has involved bitter, emotional arguments with people I love very much, including my mother. So while I understand that for many readers here I am in one camp, and perhaps can’t even be trusted on this question, I do have a very clear memory and sense of where a lot of people who disagree with me on this issue are coming from. And I understand, I think, how uneasy and uncertain one can be, not knowing whom to trust, fearing that antisemitism underlies or accompanies every criticism. I get it. I’m hoping some of these other voices here can provide a path, I hope closer to my own position, but even if not, at least to some understanding.