Genocide happens when Israelis believe they're above the law, Holocaust scholar says

Middle East Eye

12-06-2025

When Swedish activist Greta Thunberg arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris on Tuesday after being deported by Israeli authorities, a reporter asked her why governments around the world weren't mobilising to break the three-month siege on Gaza, as Thunberg had just attempted.
"Because of racism, that's the simple answer," she said, making several references to Israel committing "genocide".
After 20 months of Israel's war on Gaza, more than 55,000 have been identified as dead - a number presumed to be an undercount, according to the medical journal The Lancet - and an air, land, and sea blockade is preventing food aid from entering the strip.
What is happening to the people of Gaza has not been officially assessed as genocide by the very governments that drew up the post-World War II international order. But several countries, as well as many international rights groups and experts, now qualify Israel's actions as an act of genocide.
The legal definition of genocide is the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The operative word being "intent".
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That definition was written in a different era, and with different dynamics in mind.
'War between civilised nations'
Raz Segal, an Israeli associate professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, told Middle East Eye that labelling the war on Gaza a genocide is critical because he sees the issue as beyond the stipulations of international law.
"Israeli Jews are imagining that they're fighting a colonial war against barbarians," he said. "[They] are completely thinking they are outside the law."
"[This] goes back to the origins of international law, which emerged in order to regulate wars between civilised nations - that is, between Europeans. It was never supposed to apply to what we might call today 'counterinsurgency' or 'colonial warfare'."
Speaking at the Arab Center Washington DC's annual conference on Palestine on Wednesday, Segal said the "dehumanisation of Palestinians in Israeli Jewish society is very deep" and that only a change in political structures can create a shift in attitudes.
'This kind of social and political atmosphere doesn't change quickly at all. It's an intergenerational process,' he said.
'Israeli Jews are imagining that they're fighting a colonial war against barbarians'
- Raz Segal, Israeli historian
"In 1945 Nazi Germany is defeated, right? Does that mean that millions and millions and millions of Nazis in Germany change their mind?"
There had been warnings about impending genocide in Gaza since 2009, after Israel's alleged use of white phosphorus in its attacks on the enclave.
In 2023, just weeks after the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel, the United Nations warned that without a ceasefire, there could be a genocide in Gaza.
In January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found it "plausible" that Israel has committed acts that violate the Genocide Convention.
New satellite imagery analysis by Dr He Yin of Kent State University, cited by The Washington Post, shows that up to 98 percent of all vegetation across Gaza has been destroyed, meaning the basic conditions to sustain life are no longer there.
But Segal told MEE not to "get too caught up on the category of genocide, especially when we think about the broader framework - the ongoing Nakba".
The Nakba, the catastrophe in Arabic, is the name given to the expulsion of more than 750,000 people from their homes and land in the lead up to the establishment of Israel in 1948.
"We can definitely say that it's about elimination, destruction, forced displacement, removal, about creating a greater Israel with maximum territory and minimum or no Palestinians."
Two things at once
In the keynote address at the conference delivered by Amnesty International secretary general Agnes Callamard, she insisted that Israel's stated position - that it is only doing what it must in Gaza to defeat Hamas - does not rule out a genocide taking place.
"There is absolutely no doubt that there is a genocidal intention," she said. "And genocidal intention can be happening in a non-conflict. It can be happening alongside military objectives. It's really important to highlight this."
"What is unfolding in Gaza is not the result of logistical or security challenges, as Israel wants to pretend, and it is not the result of recklessness, either. It is intentionally engineered," Callamard added.
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She urged governments and civil society to "erect barricades, legal barricades, constitutional barricades, any kind of barricades" to protect the International Criminal Court (ICC) as it comes under attack from the Trump administration for its outstanding arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
Three other warrants issued for Hamas leaders are effectively void, after Israel killed them all.
"The entire international legal system now is basically under threat," Segal told MEE.
Referring to ICC prosecutor Karim Khan's announcement about the warrants one year ago, Segal noted Khan's insistence on a key message: "International law applies equally, and if it won't apply equally, the whole system will come down."
"International law is flawed, and international law has discarded millions and millions of people around the world and discarded Palestinians well before [7 October 2023], he added.
Israel 'cannot be a Jewish state'
But the principle of having international law that defines acts of violence and protects the vulnerable is necessary and worth saving, Segal told MEE.
To that effect, a "long-term vision" for an Israel that can rejoin the community of nations and abide by international law is that it "cannot be a Jewish state", Segal told the audience at the Arab Center Washington DC.
'We must be very loud about the fact that people must fear, they must fear their complicity in the genocide'
- Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International
'It needs to be a state where everyone there, Jews, Palestinians and others have equal rights. Their dignity is treated equally. Their belonging to the place is treated equally. That's the change of the political structure.'
Assessing the statements of Israeli leaders across the political spectrum over the past 20 months "doesn't require a degree in comparative literature", he said.
"Notice the clear conflation of Hamas and all Palestinians in Gaza. Notice the clear conflation of military rationale and the intentional targeting of civilians. This is all in front of our eyes... the only way to deal with [Palestinians] is to destroy them."
For Callamard, it is political will that holds back the international community from taking punitive measures against Israeli officials.
"We must be very loud about the fact that people must fear, they must fear their complicity in the genocide," Callamard told the conference.
The alternative, Segal said, sets a dangerous precedent.
"Israel's attack on Gaza is becoming a model for the very small and murderous minority of people around the world."