Another Day, Another Accusation of Genocide in Gaza

Another Day, Another Accusation of Genocide in Gaza:
A riposte to Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman’s article in Haaretz Newspaper ‘There’s No Auschwitz in Gaza, but it’s still Genocide,’ (Haaretz, January 30th, 2025).

Dr. Ian Jaffe, Ph.D., Holocaust and Genocide Studies, (Research Fellow, Ariel University).
Dr Jack Sigman, Ph.D., Holocaust and Genocide Studies, (Research Fellow, University of Arizona).

In January 2025, Haaretz Newspaper published an op-ed by two scholars, Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman, claiming Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The picture that accompanied the story was of people “running away from the site of Israeli bombardment.” The people were all supposedly children. The strangest thing about the picture is that they were all boys. No girls. No mothers. No fathers. Staged? Why this picture? It is the first clue that what follows in the Haaretz story will be propaganda.

The authors ‘concede’ that while Israel’s military offensive in Gaza is not a repeat of the Holocaust, it is nevertheless genocide. However, they make the absurd claim that this debate over what to call Israel’s “atrocities” is not known by the general Israeli public. Israel is one of the most educated states in the world. Are they unaware of the arguments over labeling Israel’s actions in Gaza? They are unaware of the case before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. As our grandmothers would say, “Pish-tosh.”

Genocide, as Goldberg and Blatman point out, has both a legal and historical context. It also has a “persuasive definition.” “A persuasive definition is a form of stipulative definition which purports to describe the true or commonly accepted meaning of a term, while in reality stipulating an uncommon or altered use, usually to support an argument for some view, or to create or alter rights, duties or crimes.” Goldberg and Blatman seek to persuade their audience with examples of Israel’s “intent” to commit genocide, the crux of the crime. Without explicit intent, it cannot be genocide, the intentional act to wipe out a people, typically by attempting to murder most of them.

One of the examples of such “intent” is a politician’s threat of “another Nakba.” To begin with, this is a false genocide accusation. The Nakba was not a genocide. The original definition is the defeat of the Arab armies by Jews during the Palestinian Civil War and the following Arab-Israeli War. Decades later, the term morphed into the departure, forced and otherwise, of the majority of Arabs from the areas that became Israel, mainly into other areas of British Mandate Palestine. As for the inclusion of “intent” in the Genocide Convention,” they blame the Soviet Union and the US as they did not want to be charged for the atrocities they committed. However, the UN defined genocide as an intentional crime in Resolution 96(i) of 1946 (2 years before the Convention). Additionally, Lemkin, the coiner of the word, defined the word Genocide as having “the aim to destroy the group.” That is intention. The Israeli government does not have that aim as a policy.

While Goldberg and Blatman state what is happening in Gaza is not a ‘Holocaust,” they go down that road, comparing Israel’s temporary ceasefires for humanitarian reasons to Heinrich Himmler’s temporary halt in the extermination of the Jews for diplomatic reasons and that the Israeli government does not have a policy of wholesale extermination of the Palestinian Arabs to the issue that there is no proof that Hitler signed an order authorizing the extermination of the Jews. As seen, their use of comparative historical case studies to justify the genocide label is weak, mainly when one goes into the devilish details that belie their claim of a “meticulous comparative examination of events” in asserting that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. In fact, there are no case studies comparable to what Israel faces: warfare conducted by a conventional army against a highly organized terrorist organization entrenched among a civilian population.

At the outset, it should be stressed that our line of argument is limited only to the claim of genocide against Israel, which is what concerns Goldberg and Blatman. Whether or not Israeli actions in Gaza constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, or ethnic cleansing are beyond our self-imposed remit here. A further caveat of sorts lies in our observation that Israel is objectively involved in a war in Gaza. Warfare in any form involving the use of force causes injury, death, damage, destruction, and human misery.

As much self-proclaimed ‘enlightened’ thinking would advocate a sort of post-heroic type of warfare where not only would one’s army not incur the loss of life, but neither would civilians on the opposing side lose theirs, such an ideological perspective is wishful utopian thinking at best and cynical self-berating academic disconnectedness at worst. It is a sobering fact of real life, if not in academia, that in warfare throughout history, combatants get killed, and sadly, so do civilians, often in great numbers.

Goldberg and Blatman continue by making comparisons of Israel’s actions to recognized genocides (Rwanda and Turkey) and others not so labeled but are awfully close (the French in Algeria, the US in Vietnam, and the Serbs in Bosnia). Of course, the comparisons fail. Next, they go down the settler-colonial path as inherently genocidal, and labeling Israel as such also fails as Israel is a settler-refugee state, purchasing the land they settled on from the Arab owners.

Employing a somewhat tautological argument, Blatman and Goldberg advance the idea that all perpetrators of genocide contend that they are acting in self-defense, and Israel, in their opinion, is no exception. However, it should be noted that they do acknowledge the Hamas atrocities, which can undoubtedly be labeled genocidal as the civilian deaths were neither as human shields nor collateral damage but were admitted deliberate targets of October 7th.

Whatever the verdict on Israel, and even if its response to the Hamas atrocities is considered disproportionate, it stretches any objective imagination to argue that Israeli actions in Gaza were not undertaken to protect its southern border with the Gaza Strip to protect the Israeli communities there and to prevent a repeat of the carnage visited on those communities by Hamas.

Blatman and Goldberg belong to a school of genocide scholarship that casts the genocide net as wide as possible to cover almost any form of violence if the victim group represents those deemed in some way or another to be oppressed. The Palestinians, for these two authors, are just such a victim group. However, labeling almost all forms of warfare genocidal, providing that the perpetrator has the politically correct group identification, runs a double risk. On the one hand, it turns the genocide label into a generic fit, whatever you want it to label, which will ultimately see the demise of the field of genocide scholarship itself, as everything becomes genocidal. On the other hand, were accusations of genocide against Israel to succeed legally, as Blatman and Goldberg advocate, then the entire future of warfare conducted by countries with liberal democratic forms of government, of which Israel is despite many objective criticisms of it, will lead to a weakened Western civilization forced into conducting benign warfare and prevented from targeting an armed enemy who deliberately places itself among civilian populations precisely because such attacks on it will bring about accusations of genocide and crimes against humanity against conventional armies attacking it.

Dr. Ian Jaffe is an Israeli attorney who holds a Ph.D. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Dr. Jack Sigman is a retired submariner who holds a Ph.D. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
They met as members of the third cohort in the program at Gratz College in 2019 and now collaborate as research fellows in Genocide Studies.