General Discussion

Those engaged in the worldwide culture of commemoration and remembrance built around the Holocaust will have to confront a moral reckoning. The wider community of genocide scholars — those engaged in the study of comparative genocide or of any one of the many other genocides that have marred human history — is now edging ever closer toward a consensus over describing events in Gaza as a genocide.

In November, a little more than a year into the war, the Israeli genocide scholar Shmuel Lederman joined the growing chorus of opinion that Israel was engaged in genocidal actions. The Canadian international lawyer William Schabas came to the same conclusion last year and has recently described Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as “absolutely” a genocide.

Other genocide experts, such as Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the British specialist Martin Shaw (who has also said that the Hamas attack was genocidal), have reached the same conclusion, while the Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses of the City University of New York described these events in the Dutch publication NRC as a “mix of genocidal and military logic.” In the same article, Uğur Ümit Üngör, a professor at the Amsterdam-based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said there are probably scholars who still do not think it’s genocide, but “I don’t know them.”

To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust — and no institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating it — have issued warnings that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This silence has made a mockery of the slogan “Never again,” transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one’s own past victimhood.

This is another of the many incalculable costs of the current catastrophe. As Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza and is exercising increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the moral and historical credit that the Jewish state has drawn on until now is running out.