I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.
By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah, a feat mostly accomplished by August.
At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a 'huge price' for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas was operating, 'into rubble,' and he called on 'the residents of Gaza' to 'leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere.'
Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember 'what Amalek did to you,' a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to 'kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings' of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting 'human animals' and, later, called for 'total annihilation.' Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on X that Israel's task must be 'erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.' Israel's actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.
My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.
This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
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CBS News
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The event Wednesday coincided with the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test, in which the first nuclear bomb was detonated in the New Mexico desert under observation of scientists from the Manhattan Project — the secretive World War II program to develop the first nuclear weapons. Enrico Fermi, who had led the team that developed the first self-sustaining chain reaction at the University of Chicago in 1942, was among the Manhattan Project scientists present for the Trinity test on July 16, 1945 — along with Los Alamos Laboratory director J. Robert Oppenheimer, test director Kenneth Bainbridge, and several others. Dr. Robert Floyd, executive secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, emphasized that a ban on nuclear testing is crucial to averting the risk of nuclear war in the future. As recounted by the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center, the test took place at a site in the Alamogordo Bombing Range, 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico. 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But the experts speaking Wednesday identified far more risks besides a resumption of nuclear testing. Gross said the threat of mutually assured destruction that has long stood as a deterrent to nuclear weapon use since cannot be depended upon in perpetuity. "While the only way to truly eliminate the risks of nuclear war is to eliminate nuclear weapons, there are important, timely steps that can support the longer-term effort to achieve nuclear disarmament," the laureates and experts at the assembly wrote in their latest declaration issued Wednesday. With that in mind, the Nobel Laureates and experts issued a series of "pragmatic actions." Alexandra Bell, president and chief executive officer of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, noted that the U.S. and Russia together possess about 90% of all nuclear weapons — and next year, the current strategic arms reduction treaty between the countries is set to expire. The assembly called upon the U.S. and Russia to "immediately enter into negotiations on a successor to the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, remain committed to the treaty's central limits in the meantime, and expand dialogue to address their full nuclear arsenals." Bell also noted that China is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal. The assembly also called on China to "immediately enter into substantive and sustained discussions" about its nuclear weapons, and called on all nuclear-armed states to hold dialogues about their arsenals "without preconceived notions of outcomes." Bell also said the placement of nuclear weapons in space is a major danger. With that in mind, the assembly called on all nations to reaffirm the obligations of the Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits any objects carrying nuclear weapons from being placed in the earth's orbit, placed on celestial bodies, or otherwise stationed in outer space. 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