Introduction
Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian population of Gaza began immediately after Hamas’ attack in which almost 1,200 Israelis, the majority of them civilians, were killed on October 7, 2023. In response, on the pretext of destroying Hamas, Israel’s leaders openly proclaimed their intention to generally destroy the Palestinians in the territory, in numerous statements which would be cited by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) when it responded to South Africa’s genocide case against the Jewish state in January 2024. The ICJ, which may take several years to finally rule on this case, ruled at that point that there was a “plausible risk” of genocide, instructing Israel not to carry it out. Yet some genocide scholars, including the present writer, had already concluded that Israel was committing genocide, and almost all would embrace this conclusion over the following a two years, as would major human rights organizations like Amnesty International, as well as an independent UN commission.
Recognition of Genocide
Israel’s genocide in Gaza was not the first genocide of the 21st century, but like all major cases, it had many distinctive features. Gaza was a small, almost entirely urban territory with a highly concentrated population, over which Israel soon established more or less complete control. Indeed, Israel had been the occupier of the territory, according to international law, since 1967; after it withdrew its forces in 2005, it exercised control through a tight blockade that collectively punished the population for having elected Hamas to run Gaza. Not only had this punishment already identified the whole population as an enemy; Israel’s successive short wars against Hamas from 2008 onwards had seen it massacre hundreds or even thousands of Palestinian civilians and destroy whole neighborhoods. Therefore, Gaza was already a sharp expression of the larger pattern of gradual Zionist and Israeli destruction of Palestinian society over the previous century, including the mass expulsions of 1947-1948 and 1967 and what has been called the “slow-motion genocide” of displacement and dispossession in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967, which was also accelerating before 2023.1
